Rewrite Devlog #8

Welcome to August's devlog for the rewrite, showing off new features and improvements of the new proper version of Alien Horizon, that's being worked on. Currently, it's scheduled to be released in January, but don't take it as a promise.

Just like last time, there isn't as much to show visually, but huge improvements are done under the hood. As promised, we'll take a look at how workplaces and employment work in the rewrite and there's also a little bonus at the end.

Structure selection

The one UI you're probably going to interact with the most is the structure selection window, so a lot of thought went into making it work well and look good:

Here's a the section for managing the workplace. The UI should be mostly familiar to you if you've played preview alpha, but let's go over the whole thing. At the top, you can see power and life support status and power consumption. And just like with the colonists, a big title showing you what is selected and a more obvious rename button.

The next section contains the structure's efficiency (60% here) and controls for disabling and suspending it. On the left is navigation between different sections/functionalities of the structure. In this case, top to bottom, it's a construction office, a workplace, a storage and a constructed structure. This is very similar to the way sections worked in preview alpha, except a bit more granular - each functional component gets its own section, so structures such as a mining drill, which is a mine, a battery, a life support provider and a mobile structure don't get such tall and confusing UI.

Workplace

The rest of the UI is management of the workplace. Just like in preview alpha, you can see individual shifts here, but this time, shifts don't always have to start at 8, 14 or 22 hours and last for 8 hours - they are completely customizable. You can force your workers to work 12-hour shifts to save on workforce or go easy on them with 6-hour shifts, really, anything from 4 to 16 hours. Keep in mind that length of shift affects their productivity, though.

Each shift has its work slots that colonists can occupy. They are represented by the icons of various shapes - the outer shape is the required skill of the colonist - in this case a red hexagon being engineer, orange circle educated and grey square uneducated. The shape that fills them depends on the colonist working there. As you can see in the first shift from 6 to 14, the first two engineering slots are filled by matching engineers, but the educated slots are filled by various over-qualified colonists, such as medical workers (white cross) or chemists (cyan crescent). This is mostly a problem at the start of the game, where all colonists from stasis are highly educated.

The last shift in this example is a half-shift. The productivity slider is gone now and there are other ways to affect productivity. Some structures allow half-shifts like this or different shift compositions, for example replacing one expert worker with two less educated ones, which is useful when you have a shortage of experts. Shift configurations can be freely mixed in one workplace, so you can, for example, have one half-shift and two full shifts like here.

Shift configurations can be copied to other workplaces or to all other structures of the same type.

Workplace focus

A completely new feature in the rewrite is workplace focus, visible as sliders at the bottom of the UI. These represent a sort of a workplace culture or priorities, affect workers working there and give various bonuses. They also replace the productivity slider from preview alpha.

In this case, you can see there's extra focus on teamwork and safety and lessened focus on creativity. Every point added to a workplace focus lowers productivity by 10%, while every point taken away increases it by 10%. This can go all the way to 200%, so if you, for example skim on safety and make the workplace culture unpleasant enough, you can significantly improve productivity... that is, in theory, it will bite you back in other ways.

The first four focuses are each tied to two of colonist's individual needs. Whenever the focus is increased, workers get these needs partially fulfilled when they arrive at work. If the focus is decreased, these needs get a penalty instead. These focuses also attract workers that care about those tied needs, which is especially important, because if enough colonists that care about them are present at a workplace, a bonus is activated. Let's go through each of the focuses:

Teamwork - Tied to friendship and community. The activated bonus stabilizes workplace productivity by disregarding lowest productivity workers during the calculation. For example, if there are 5 workers, 4 of which have 100% productivity and one has 0%, it averages at 80%. But if teamwork bonus is activated, the one 0% worker is disregarded and productivity is 100%.

Self-improvement - Tied to self-esteem and growth. The activated bonus increases professional experience gain for all workers. Also, uneducated workers have a chance of becoming educated and, if there are experts on site, educated workers have a chance of learning expertise from them.

Playfulness - Tied to recreation and enjoyment. The activated bonus increases workers' comfort and, most importantly, outlook, which makes fulfilling other needs easier, as we talked about in the last devlog.

Creativity - Tied to agency and expression. The activated bonus generates research points based on workers' expertise. Educated workers generate less, but of any field, uneducated don't. Keep in mind that this source of research points is not just a trickle, but a major source that can, if enough workplaces have this bonus, even overshadow your labs.

Safety - Affects chance of injury and malfunction. Increasing focus on safety can make sure your structure never malfunctions. On the other hand, if lowered, it can be and easy source of extra productivity. While all other focuses can be lowered by only 2 points, giving 20%, safety has 4 points, allowing extra 40%.

As I'm not a big fan of micromanagement, in the future, I'd like to add ways to automate workplace management. This is going to be tied to politics.

Colonists entering buildings

As a small bonus and something fun to show you, colonists in the rewrite no longer phase through walls when entering a building and aim for the entrance instead.

Next time will be all about construction and maintenance. Surprising changes there. Make sure to visit the official Discord server to see any sneak peeks. I hope you've enjoyed this devlog and see you in September!