I’m in COVID-19 self-isolation but continuing to work on Beyond the Chiron Gate. (I’m lucky enough to be able to stay home, and I’m an antisocial introvert so “social distancing” was basically already my lifestyle, but still, it’s hard to concentrate on making art during a pandemic. Stay safe, everyone.)
What I’ve added to Chiron Gate since the last blog:
Discovery system
Each discoverable planet trait now has a data type and a value associated with it. You get the trait’s full value the first time you discover it in a game, and a lesser amount each subsequent time. (By default, the values are 10 and 1.) The idea is that you’re encouraged to explore lots of kinds of planets in order to find traits you haven’t found before.
The Data view now lists the discoveries you’ve made. (Right now it’s an unformatted HTML table–I’ll make it look better at some point.)
Civilisations
Once you’ve explored some of the marks left by a civilisation on a planet (e.g. explored “possible structures” and found that they’re cities or ruined cities), the planet’s civilisation appears as an explorable trait in the planet description.
Exploring that trait reveals the full information about the civilisation. In the case of extinct civilisations, this includes the reason it went extinct.
In the case of non-extinct civilisations, if you have a Xenologist on your crew you can make contact with them, which can lead to a variety of random events.
I’m going to add more content to do with extinct civilisations, but at the moment I am not in the mood.
Other changes
As you can see from the screenshots above, events and traits you explore now have titles that appear in the header next to the planet name, so you can see at a glance what’s going on.
Planet hazards (such as someone falling into a crevasse or whatever) now trigger after you explore a trait, not before. When playtesting I was finding it annoying that the hazards events would interrupt what was happening, and by the time the explorers actually got to the trait I was trying to explore I had sometimes forgotten what they were meant to be exploring.
In under-the-hood changes I’ve also further refined the code to do with which planet traits spawn on universe generation and which events happen on exploration, so that they can have more finely-tuned weights based on more complex conditions.
Thank you once again for your continued support. I’m going to continue to try to put out dev blogs monthly until the game is done.