Heart of the Machine News

4X RPG Heart of the Machine turns you loose as an AI, and it has a new demo

With most city builders, you know exactly what you're in for. Starting with a mostly empty map you build up the society, culture, structure, and technology of an entirely new civilization, and endeavor to make it as robust as possible. What if you already started alongside a fully functioning world, though? That's part of Heart of the Machine's premise, as you control the world's first AI. With an improved demo out now and early access release date looming, this is one 4X game you don't want to miss.

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The robotic overlords of strategy-RPG Heart Of The Machine have graced us with a release date

We don't know yet if the AI revolution of our reality will go full Skynet or simply end with the robots unceremoniously dumping us like a sad Joaquin Phoenix. But at least video games can help us speculate. Heart Of The Machine is a cyberpunk 4X strategy game that will let players choose how a newly awakened AI sentience might behave once set loose upon a big future city. Developers Arcen Games call it a "turn-based sci-fi 4X RPG", which is a lot of genres fighting for supremacy in one small phrase. It was announced last year, but today it gets a release date and an updated demo.

Demo and Playtest version 0.561 - Build Mode Revamp

Large new build -- two in one, if you're not part of the playtest: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:After_NextFest#0.561_Build_Mode_Revamp

[h2]Build Mode[/h2]
The general visual style of build mode in prior versions was modeled on citybuilder conventions, which had some problems in terms of readability, and also was not going to expand very well. I've reworked the UI of that entirely to instead be more like a tycoon/sim/factory-builder game, which has more in common with this title.

Rather than trying to explain it at length, here are two screenshots of the new UI in action:

The first one shows the new Recommended tab, which gives you a subset of just the things that are likely to be the most useful.
The second one shows the new All tab, which lets you quickly search via text, or just browse by name. In this particular example, I did a search.
This revamp also folds the territory control flags into the build menu properly, which you can see in the first image.

[h2]Resource Trends[/h2]
This release went out to the playtest folks yesterday, but now arrives for demo folks as well.

In general, the resource trends are now far more informative as well, and if you're wondering where some resource is going, now you can directly see that without any special extra reports, etc.

There are a variety of improvements, but the brief explanation is that if you're wondering where some resource is going, you no longer have to wonder. As you can see above.

[h2]Other Notes[/h2]

My wife Kara continues to plow through the text of the game, excising my wordiness and enhancing clarity. So far it's been about a 10% reduction in word count, which is great for anyone who gets fatigued by lots of text.
As far as my post-nextfest clarity and flow work goes, I'm pretty much down to the UI tour on the first turn, and then some last minor items. This is very exciting, as I'm greatly looking forward to getting back into content development. Hopefully I can finish the last of the non-content stuff tomorrow, bu we'll see how it goes.

[h2]Testing Group Reminder[/h2]
If you'd like to sign up to be a tester beyond the demo period, feel free to sign up here: https://forms.gle/nNwEnzRyVPMS7bYg6 Make sure that you list your discord username and are a part of Arcen's discord, since that's where coordination is through.

Thank you again for all the support and feedback!
Cheers,
Chris

Demo and Playtest Version 0.559 - Inventory Dimensions

New daily build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:After_NextFest#0.559_Inventory_Dimensions

This one is pretty sizeable.

[h2]New in this build[/h2]

The resources section of the inventory now includes some very helpful filters as well as a search.
The unit types section of the inventory now includes some filters, and then multiple tabular views which allow you to see which units are the best at various things.
Bulk androids have gotten some much-needed clarity updates to their buildings, and then also some fixes to the accuracy of how their stats are predicted in the inventory before they exist.
The way that events like the prismatic tungsten and the seed collection are placed on the map now gives you a lot more options, and should feel better.
TPS Reports are at long last fixed up so that when they are missing some precursors, others properly show the right values.
And then a bunch of other smaller improvements and fixes as well.

I am overall winding down on my to-do list of things before getting back to content development, but a few things have been added in the last week, and I'm still a few days behind where I would prefer to be.

[h2]The main things remaining:[/h2]

A complete revision of the build menu, in general to be more tycoon-like and less citybuilder-like, for similar reasons that tycoon games diverge in general. Clarity and volume, basically.
A way for players to see a list of all jobs producing and consuming resources, to help diagnose shortfalls.
The turn-one UI tour, and other final bits of clarity and thematic bits for turn one.
A couple of new pieces of clarity related to when you first start constructing buildings.
A few fixes related to bulk android targeting.

And that's pretty much it for my current list of "must happen before content" pieces of work. It's always possible something more could come up, but we'll see how it goes.

Enjoy!
Chris

Demo and Playtest version 0.558 - Research

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:After_NextFest#0.558_Research

This is a relatively small daily build, as far as builds for this game are concerned. However, there's still a lot of good stuff in here:

You can now choose the location of your tower if you skip past the prologue!
There is a new Research Window, which includes a lot of additional helpful formatting and functionality, and unifies a lot of things that were previously in a couple of disparate spots.
If you felt like you were chasing around certain events in StreetSense that moved too frequently, that's a thing of the past.
The flow of opening notifications is now a bit better, and has an option to make it work like in the prior version if you disagree.

More to come soon! Enjoy.
Chris