Happy Holidays!
I’ve made some progress on Beyond the Chiron Gate this month.
Events
I’ve finished the end-game event sequence that I was working on last month. I’m quite pleased with it and I think it’ll be a suitably dramatic ending to the game. I’ve also finished the Out of Fuel event, which now gives you various options to make it back to the wormhole with minimal fuel based on the crew members you have.
Apart from those, I’ve also finished several events that were working with placeholder text, and added several more. I still think the game needs some more events and some more options to existing ones, but not too many.
Interface improvements
I’ve improved how the interface scales down for small screens (e.g. mobile devices). Icons in the system view menu will shrink and rearrange themselves to fit better on a narrow screen, and the icons and text in the top bar will shrink so they always fit. I’ve been testing it out on my phone browser and it’s quite playable.
I’ve also generally improved and fixed the interface, e.g. tooltips no longer overflow the right of the screen, and greyed-out “Add” buttons on the crew select interface are the correct width. I think the interface is now pretty much done.
New end-game requirements
After more playtesting, I’ve changed the upgrades required to get to the end-game sequence. Rather than one expensive update of each data type, it now requires two Xenology upgrades: one to get at interstellar civ home systems, and one to get to the Gatebuilders’ system. I decided that there were too many other things to spend Planetary Science and Biology data on, and deciding whether to buy them or the end-game upgrades wasn’t fun. With the new system, the first upgrade is useful in itself since you get to visit interstellar civ home systems, and when you can afford the second one there’s probably not much else you want to spend that data on.
Other improvements
This has also been the month for making small changes I hadn’t got round to yet:
- Planets you’ve visited are now marked with a tick icon, not the text “(visited)”.
- Only explorers’ full names are mouse-over-able keywords, not their first names.
- Events that cause a crew member to become Inspired (e.g. the first time you find life) will now try to choose a crew member who isn’t already Inspired, since inspiration doesn’t stack. (I also added more of these events, for the first time you find a civ or evidence of an interstellar civ, and the text for some of these events changes depending on the order you find them in.)
- Each system’s Gate now spawns at a random place in the system rather than right at the edge. (This is for consistency with the Chiron Gate, which orbits between Saturn and Uranus.)
- And several more than don’t seem interesting enough to mention here.
I’m still hoping to launch the game early next year. The desktop version will come first, and the mobile versions some time later, because I don’t want to have to deal with three different launch days at once.
Thanks for your continued support, and happy new year!