Next Fest Demo Patch the third - June 13th (version 0.3.6)

[p]We come to the weekend of this fine Next Fest on the most sinister of all Fridays. Hopefully none of you have been visited by... entities overnight.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We just pushed another update to the demo of Generation Exile! This patch was primarily focused on improving clarity and system feedback around a key component of a game like ours- placing structures on the map! After some excellent feedback from players, we realized that one aspect of building placement was not as self-presenting as we intended. Or at least one system was contributing to this friction more than the rest.[/p][p]The design intent is that most key "people-oriented" structures initially need to be built near the central Hub structure and then the by expanding the "power grid" with certain structures, (heh, to be a touch reductionist, it's pylons from Starcraft, basically) And then separately from the radius of the power grid, there is an actual enumerated amount of power available, with certain structures drawing more power than others, etc.[/p][p]While there are other city-builder/management that have a notion of power grid increasing its area of effect as well as separately modelling the actual power production vs. draw on the grid, given our theming and presentation we realized that conflating those two separate systems ("what is the area of power grid" vs. "what is my power generation vs. consumption") was not actually providing much. That specific intertwining of mechanics was something of a hold-over from previous iteration and exploration around this aspect of the game's design. So to make things clearer, we have adjusting the presentation of the "power grid radius" system to be "Signal" instead. We have updated the iconography and explanatory text.[/p][p]It's fully possible we'll continue to iterate on the theming of that system as we move toward Early Access, but this feels like a marked improvement to the game's intelligibility without losing anything, so we wanted to prioritize getting this update into our demo before Next Fest concludes. We also continue to get as many low risk, high reward optimization improvements into the demo as well.[/p][p]\And if you got a enjoyed the Generation Exile demo but haven't had a chance to leave a review yet, taking a moment to do so really helps us out and helps surface the demo to other players who might not have seen it in Next Fest yet!\[/p][p]As always, thanks to everyone who have provided great feedback on the demo that helps us make informed, ideally high impact changes like this. We hope you can find some other great demos to check out during Next Fest and if there's anything especially catching your eye, let us know in the discussion under this post.[/p][p][/p][p]Full patch notes follow:[/p][p][/p][h3]Patch notes (demo version 0.3.6)[/h3]

• [p]Revised existing "power grid" system to be called "Signal" instead to better convey its intended purpose and behaviour[/p]
  • [p]Updated UI and icons to support Signal presentation[/p]
  • [p]Revised name/description of a few structures to support Signal presentation[/p]
  • [p]Revised onboarding text to support revised terminology[/p]

• [p]Updated build mode ("ghost" structure attached to cursor) feedback to better convey reasons why a structure cannot be build on a given tile[/p]
• [p]Fixed bug with a few structures where there minimum or maximum capacity was not set correctly[/p]
• [p]Fixed bug with some narrative events where memories on some characters in the event were not being set correctly[/p]
• [p]Adjusted sizing and presentation of some UI panels[/p]
• [p]Ongoing performance optimizations[/p]
• [p]Other various small fixes (text colour highlighting, typo fixes, etc)[/p]