This’ll be a short post as I didn’t find much time to work on Chiron Gate this month. What time I did find I mostly spent revising or replacing existing events to bring them in line with the game’s final mechanics.
For example: on planets with unstable, rocky surfaces, there’s an event involving an avalanche. Here’s the old version:
The avalanche just happens, with a chance to avoid it based on a somewhat contrived use of a Planetary Scientist’s skill.
Here’s the new version:
Rather than a disaster you must react to, the event is now an opportunity with risk. There are also now two possible approaches based on different character classes. Although the success chance is the same for each, they also have different risks and rewards: the Engineer option yields only a little data but only risks a disposable piece of machinery, whereas the Planetary Scientist option will yield more data but risks a crew member being injured.
(Ignore where it says in orbit, obviously this is happening on the surface, it’s just my new event-testing code doesn’t set it up correctly.)
In general I think risky opportunities make for better events than sudden disasters, although there will still be a few of the latter in the game. I’m also going to try to make sure there are at least two class-based options on all events.
I’ve also continued to add icons for things, including a coffin icon for when a crew member dies (killed here by debug code):
I should hopefully have time to do a normal month’s work on the game in October, so come back in a month for a full-size dev blog!