Friday Blog 207 - Functional Traps!

Image from Wikipedia

In our last blog, we suggested traps as the solution to a myriad of problems. The general response was enthusiastic, so we’ve been working on implementing it. Zun worked on the technical side of things, and things went very well there.

I had to work on integrating the new jobs and recipes properly in the 0.9.0 tech tree. And I struggled quite a bit with that. It felt like the keystone that completes an arch. We stacked up features on the left, we stacked up features on the right, and traps were the last feature needed to complete the system. And that last step is the most difficult one, because it has to make sure everything is properly ‘balanced’. An issue comparable to this one, 140 blogs ago. It took a while, but we’ve figured it out and things are moving forward again!

In the meanwhile, Zun tested prototype-traps. Here’s an image of such a trap defeating monsters!

Loaded traps are temporarily using the stove mesh, empty traps use the writer's desk mesh

We ran into a new technical problem that had some interesting visualizations. Blocks like crates and jobblocks have “access points”. These are places right next to the crate where colonists can stand to use these blocks. In 0.8.0, that’s only right next to the block.

...crates like here are visualized as… ....green = crate, red = “access point”

This is problematic for certain new traps. Some traps can only be aimed upwards, others can only be aimed downwards. It makes sense to reload these traps when standing on top of them, or below them. It also makes sense to integrate traps in walls at the height of the torso instead of on the floor - these should also be able to be reloaded by colonists standing next to them. So Zun improved the “access points system” to be able to deal with these new situations.



So we’ve now got an internal dev build with functional prototype traps, and a detailed path on how to integrate them in the tech tree. We expect to have pretty functional 0.9.0 gameplay, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, by this time next week!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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