Survival Mode

The second survival map is almost ready. Still need some adjustments on balancing and events.

This survival mode is the extension of the classic (tower) defense just like the demo. Everything can stay at the same place, focusing on defense contraption. There is no need to move base. Whereas the main campaign maps in the full game are long and exploratory. They contain several locations which the base can transit to. They can cover more than defense. Though it may still be played as defense with expansionary defense 90% of the time. Once the disc block is introduced, flying structures can be built and pure defense becomes optional.

In the second survival map, the so-called production system works like this. It mostly consists of a pipeline of blocks introduced in earlier missions. This is the content from the help panel:

The duplicator mirrors the bare core of the template block from one side to the other, in this case the cube.

The octahedron block plays a maintenance role in the robotic shapes family. It can attract small objects making them orbiting around. The small object debris can be put back onto the core of blocks by octahedron, regaining their condition as if reversing the fallen shield from any previous damage. These two blocks together will create new blocks with brand new condition from the looks of it. The tube block’s air stream just provides some pushing to make the products more spread around without cluttering up the duplicator.

There are similar creations like this, such as one-way train gate which utilizes the automatic extension of pistons. If train comes and blocks lasers installed with pistons, the pistons will extend, pushing the door up and open. Once lasers unblock, the gate restores with pistons.

Aside from this there are some other nitty-gritty details of improving and fixing. Here are two of them.

Reverse Installation

During extension building, when you cut the extension and build backwards. The physics joint type may not be correctly determined. Then you will find issues like cylinders, tubes or planes unable to rotate.

In the following example the structure on the left side is created up from ground, sideways then down with the cylinder. If I remove the cube as shown in the middle. Confirm the modification and then put it back. The joint type of the cylinder need to correctly detected. Because only one of the two joints on the cap side of the cylinder is the rotatable one with a motor. And the other one does not have any rotation capability.

The example above needs the rotation joint at the top side, different from normal installation order where the rotation is at the bottom side. This can be detected in code and is now fixed. It happens not often as most people don’t build this way. Now this has been fixed.

Unit Hotkey

Often times, micro controlling of units(structures) can be greatly effective and fun. The interface for the unit commands (aggregated commands for the structure) is on the bottom right of the screen. Apparently controlling the selected structure with hotkey is more convenient. Now these keys are added to the pool of other key bindings. So now if you have a ship with extendable parts, it will be easier.

Actually, for smaller changes near release I am also considering supporting Steam Leaderboard. It’s not complicated to integrate. I will find a little time. This is not in high priority now.

I am trying to aim for August release. Months after that will be the busy months, less suitable for release. So I need to get the map finalized and start testing ASAP.