Rewrite Devlog #15

This is the last Friday of April, isn't it? I guess I should write the devlog then. What devlog? The one about progress on the upcoming proper version of Alien Horizon, which I call the rewrite. Time to show how laws and housing have changed.

Laws

Steam post imageThis is the new laws screen. I have to admit I'm not entirely happy with how it looks, so it may get a facelift in the future, but it's adequate for now. Unlike the alpha, only enacted laws are visible at first and you can switch mode to see laws that you can enact, which should make the screen much less cluttered, especially since a lot more laws are planned.

What's much more important is that each law gets its own screen with options to select from and information about effects on different colonist groups.

Steam post imageLaws don't always need to have distinct options now - some can scale linearly.

Steam post imageBut the biggest change is the introduction of rationing, which was already mentioned in one of the older devlogs. Colonists receive vouchers they use to get food and consumer goods. You can decide what level of comfort they should be entitled to, with instant feedback on how much resources it's going to cost every season. But there's more - the level of rationing can be determined based on group the colonist belongs to, so, for example, you can set rations much lower for unemployed colonist, which can motivate employed colonists to work harder in order to not end up broke.

And I'm not saying this as some kind of theoretical role-playing thing - it really does have this effect. Of course, if the benefits are too low and unemployed colonists are miserable all the time, it may affect their chances of actually getting a job, keeping them in a perpetual state of misery and unemployment...

You may have noticed some changes to the consumer goods roster - textiles are no longer a good, instead being a purely intermediate resource, replaced by household products, which contain textiles among other things. Kitchenware is necessary for colonists to cook at home and toys are only needed by children and significantly improve their well-being.

The last item on the list is housing credits. Let me explain.

Housing

Here's a Longhouse - a new housing building that is available very early on and can house up to 18 families of 6. It replaces the family mode of bunkhouses, which is no longer available. Five families have already moved in. You can see that instead of housing quality, houses have a rating of comfort and privacy, which directly affect those stats of their residents. Higher quality houses provide more comfort, more individual detached houses provide more privacy.

You can also see that you can set rent for each house (or set it for all houses of the same type with one button). This acts as minimum limit for how many housing credits residents need to be able to have together in order to live here. This longhouse has a rent of 2 and as we saw in the previous screenshot, every working colonist gets 1 housing credit, which means only pairs of working colonists can afford living here. If we set the rent to 3 and also ensure children get 1 housing credit in child benefits, we will limit this house only to families of 3. This replaces the alpha's laws regarding minimum occupancy of houses.

Also, unlike the alpha, households don't necessarily have to be nuclear families - friends can decide to get together in order to afford better housing or just because they like each other. There can also be friends of families living with the family, two families living together, a parent can leave their family for a lover, single adult siblings can move in together, parents can move in with their adult children if times are tough, or children can move back to their parents. The living arrangements of humans are often complex and I wanted to simulate this in the game too.

And that concludes today's devlog. Mark your calendars for another one in May, or hop on the official Discord server to see extra teasers. I hope you've enjoyed this devlog and see you in a month.