Mining, Chopping, Hauling
Welcome to a new instalment of our dev blog series, in which the colonists finally get busy! Yes, this post will shine some light on how the good folks trying to make an alien hostile planet their home, have to chop, mine, and haul their way out of their new harsh reality - before automation processes and a whole lot of optimizing will eventually make their life on Aurora more endurable.
As laid out in of our previous posts, at the start of our upcoming demo you'll land on Aurora in a small spacecraft with a handful of colonists and a sparse arsenal of resources and machines. Initially, in order to get your colony rolling in the absence of heavy machinery you'll need to gather resources such as wood and mineral ores by hand. So, to guarantee a smooth division of labour we implemented an order system including this fancy (work-in-progress) UI element that lets players select in which order they want to interact with a given entity.
[h3]Chop, chop[/h3]
By selecting the axe icon you can now mark trees for chopping. Right away pioneers - if their personal schedules allow it - will channel their inner Paul Bunyan and seek out to cut down marked trees. Since we are aware that wood chopping in building games often walks a fine line between being annoying and incredibly satisfying (especially if you nail the chopping sounds) we opted for the following system:
Pioneers will hit a tree (with pieces of wood splintering off) until it falls over and a log is spawned. As soon as this log bounces off the ground it fractures into the actual wood resources which are then hauled to the next stockpile. For players, chopping trees will actually be the first touchpoint with our voxel destruction physics. As of now the trees, as opposed to every other asset in the game, are not made out of voxels but here is a screenshot of our WIP system:
[h3]Mine your own business[/h3]
Both tree cutting and manual mining are powered by a tile-based 2D world space dragging system. Selecting an order in the menu will actually change the mouse cursor into the respective icon. In the case of mining simply drag the pickaxe symbol over the ore deposits you want to deplete and colonists will start digging away.
For now they remove about 15 voxels in depth off the planet's surface - one voxel every 10 seconds. When they have excavated five ores the colonists will stop mining and haul the resources to a stockpile. Eventually, assisted by more powerful tools, they will dig way deeper, with the possibility of transforming the planet into hole-riddled wasteland full of craters. These six pioneers tasked with mining for ores were a little overzealous though:)
[h3]Leave your mark[/h3]
Speaking of impact on Aurora's terrain, in the past week we have also started working on a small, but very cool feature. Wherever a pioneer is walking each of their individual steps will leave traces on the ground. In this 'Desire Path' logic there are various stages to the reduction of the flora. At first the grass, in a radius of 3-4 voxels gets thinner and lighter when pioneers trample over it until the first layer of grass voxels is completely gone and only sand remains. The ground can recover however if the hauling routes are no longer used and the biome supports (re)growth.
Overall, we are trying to design (pretty mundane tbh) activities like tree cutting, mining and hauling stuff not only as means to set up your colony and factories but also to show from the get go how you can interact with the fully destructible voxel world and leave your mark on Aurora's surface. We can't wait for you to set foot on the planet yourself once the demo is out (at first exclusively for our Discord members). Until then, see you next week.
As laid out in of our previous posts, at the start of our upcoming demo you'll land on Aurora in a small spacecraft with a handful of colonists and a sparse arsenal of resources and machines. Initially, in order to get your colony rolling in the absence of heavy machinery you'll need to gather resources such as wood and mineral ores by hand. So, to guarantee a smooth division of labour we implemented an order system including this fancy (work-in-progress) UI element that lets players select in which order they want to interact with a given entity.
[h3]Chop, chop[/h3]
By selecting the axe icon you can now mark trees for chopping. Right away pioneers - if their personal schedules allow it - will channel their inner Paul Bunyan and seek out to cut down marked trees. Since we are aware that wood chopping in building games often walks a fine line between being annoying and incredibly satisfying (especially if you nail the chopping sounds) we opted for the following system:
Pioneers will hit a tree (with pieces of wood splintering off) until it falls over and a log is spawned. As soon as this log bounces off the ground it fractures into the actual wood resources which are then hauled to the next stockpile. For players, chopping trees will actually be the first touchpoint with our voxel destruction physics. As of now the trees, as opposed to every other asset in the game, are not made out of voxels but here is a screenshot of our WIP system:
[h3]Mine your own business[/h3]
Both tree cutting and manual mining are powered by a tile-based 2D world space dragging system. Selecting an order in the menu will actually change the mouse cursor into the respective icon. In the case of mining simply drag the pickaxe symbol over the ore deposits you want to deplete and colonists will start digging away.
For now they remove about 15 voxels in depth off the planet's surface - one voxel every 10 seconds. When they have excavated five ores the colonists will stop mining and haul the resources to a stockpile. Eventually, assisted by more powerful tools, they will dig way deeper, with the possibility of transforming the planet into hole-riddled wasteland full of craters. These six pioneers tasked with mining for ores were a little overzealous though:)
[h3]Leave your mark[/h3]
Speaking of impact on Aurora's terrain, in the past week we have also started working on a small, but very cool feature. Wherever a pioneer is walking each of their individual steps will leave traces on the ground. In this 'Desire Path' logic there are various stages to the reduction of the flora. At first the grass, in a radius of 3-4 voxels gets thinner and lighter when pioneers trample over it until the first layer of grass voxels is completely gone and only sand remains. The ground can recover however if the hauling routes are no longer used and the biome supports (re)growth.
Overall, we are trying to design (pretty mundane tbh) activities like tree cutting, mining and hauling stuff not only as means to set up your colony and factories but also to show from the get go how you can interact with the fully destructible voxel world and leave your mark on Aurora's surface. We can't wait for you to set foot on the planet yourself once the demo is out (at first exclusively for our Discord members). Until then, see you next week.