Sinathir
Progress report and important poll
Just a short progress report and an important poll for you.
This month I'm focusing on expanding the science / alchemy skill. This will include many new potions and a electricity system. Potions are self explanatory. Electricity is slightly more complex.
After learning the basic electricity skill, you will be able to upgrade your hideout with electricity. This includes small wind turbine and battery bank. Bank influences your maximum power you can have at one time, wind turbine generates some power every week. You will also be able to make a steam generators. These create power if you feed them with coal.
For now, power is used in crafting only. While crafting anything in your hideout, you will be able to "regenerate" some crafting points with power. Basic ratio is 1 crafting point for 10 units of power. This ratio can be improved by owning electric tools. For example, owning wood saw and basic electric tools will lower the power units required for crafting wooden items by 2.
Before releasing this version, I want to add more uses to electricity. I want to add a fridge, which will directly upgrade your food chest and add some point to pantry quality for every type of food and I want to add a water heater and a shower, which will restore some energy and raise your mood.
And now for the important part.
I've been thinking and decided to ask you if you prefer visible weapons, or if you want more body variety.
Visible weapons are taking a lot of time to implement. Every outfit has a different waist location, so every small weapon needs unique sprite for every outfit for every age stage. This means my weapons folder has about 2300 sprites and I don't even have all of the weapons I want to have finished. I don't really mind, since I enjoy the process of making new weapons, but it means I can't have more body options, since the amount of weapon sprites would skyrocket and I would have to spend months just making those sprites.
I have a few solutions to this.
First is to remove the waist belt sprite and move small weapons to the back. Large weapons have one sprite for all outfits for one year. This would make small weapons still somewhat visible, but reduce the number of sprites needed for one year from about 250 to 1.
Second is to remove small weapons alltogether.
And third is to remove all visible weapons.
Doing any od these would allow me to improve the character sprite in many ways. For example, the main sprite could change every half a year or even month instead of once a year, as it is now. It would also allow me to make your character skinny / fat depending on your diet and activity. I could also improve the muscle system by making muscle mass actualy visible instead of showing just an overlay. More mutations that change your physiology in drastic ways, variable height, variable body proportions,... I could do all of these if I removed visible weapons.
I'm torn on this. On one hand, I want to keep the visible weapons, but I would also like to make the character more varied. That's why I'm asking you guys. Here is the poll:
Poll ended
This will be a long term poll. I will keep it here for several months and then decide depending on the results. You can also say your thoughts down in the comments.
Comments
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I voted for removing the small weapons altogether. Ideally, you'd just move them to the back, but I think body variety is cooler, especially with mutations. I'd even be fine with removing all weapons if necessary, but I think removing the small weapons is a good compromise.
Another option might be to only show certain weapons with certain body types? Like, if all the "normal" human sprites can easily display some weapons, but adapting them to all the possible mutations is a problem, then just show them for the first set of sprites, and remove them from the troublesome sprites.
Removing small weapons vs putting them on the back doesn't speed up my work "that" much. The main problem I have with weapons being on the back belt is the visibility problem with really small weapons.
I did some testing and certain small weapons are either almost invisible, or they look weird when I switch their angle.
The knife on the left image is barely visible and on the right image, it looks like it's just floating instead of being attached to the belt in some way. I could technicaly attach some weapons to the front of the belt, but that wouldn't really solve anything since I would have to make individual graphics for all outfits just like I do now.
It depends on what people want really. Some people might like to have weird or even obscured weapons being there, while some might not care about them at all. I will probably just put all weapons on the back belt in some way. Change the graphics of the belt a bit and put small melee weapons behind the shoulder and pistols on the bottom of the belt. Melee weapons will be more visible and pistols will be atleast a bit visible even with bulkier outfits.
Making weapons invisible on certain "weirder" body types is also an option, however I would like weapon visibility to remain consistent if possible. If I add some monstrous body types in the future, the main character can simply hold the belt with its weapons in one hand or something. If that was the case, I could also restrict some outfits to make them not wearable to make sprite creation easier. There are plenty of ways to do this.
If I were to rank the options (using the images as numbers), I'd go
2 > 3 > 1 > 4
Pics 2 and 3 are the best due to how good the sprite locations are - for #2, the 'center' of the image is very clear, the details all draw attention towards the middle of the character sprite, and you can quickly gauge the equipment with only one glance. Compared to #1, the position of the waist belt slot is so far away from the center of the sprite that your eye needs multiple pass-throughs to get all the info. So, without considering the fact that the first pic would take a ton more work than the second, I prefer the second!
Pic #3 is fine as well - but I am a big fan of games with detailed character progression/equipment visuals and I think your game excels in this field. It would be a shame to drastically change something your game is already really good at. I don't consider smaller weapons to be *that* important, as long as the main weapon stays - which is why I don't like #4. Feels empty without showing the main weapon. Maybe there could be some compromise, where the main weapon sprite could somehow be next to the character? Either way, I prefer when there is a visual of some kind somewhere on the character screen
>For example, the main sprite could change every half a year or even month instead of once a year, as it is now. It would also allow me to make your character skinny / fat depending on your diet and activity.
As long as it's not overdoing it - it makes sense for me to have fewer body changes that are higher quality and very detailed instead of a bunch of smaller ones that change often.
I also see option 2 as the best compromise. There will be problems with small weapons, like pistols or knives since they will be barely visible on certain outfits but still better than not having them be visible at all.
As for the body changes, I didn't think about them that much yet. Someone wanted me to add more height stages, which would be close to impossible with current system. But if I manage to lower the number of weapon sprites to do this, I might as well do a little extra and add weight and stuff like that. I might even be able to allow people to play as a guy (Wanted to do that in the early stages before the sprites bloated everything) and together with mutations and cybernetics, the amount of things I could do is really large. I might also not do any of that and focus on giving main character more poses and expressions in dialogue. Looks like I have a lot to think about.