Rewrite Devlog #17 and Playtest Announcement

Summer heat is here and with it the June's devlog, showing off some of the new features in the so called "rewrite" - a new proper version of Alien Horizon that's getting close to release, planned by the end of summer (no promises, though).

Today, we'll take a look at new UI features and the UI in general.

General

Steam post imageHere's what the game's main UI looks now. I hope it's an improvement over the alpha, but the truth will come out once more people play it. Let's look at each individual part.

Navigation

The lower left corner is the main navigation. Here you can access all the windows for managing your colony, like the build menu, exploration, objectives, research, laws or newly also the stasis window as was mentioned in one of the previous dev logs. Whenever no other window is selected, the colony resources window is shown instead (although if you feel it's taking up too much space, it can be minimized). There is no longer any distinction between colony and cargo ships resources as the transferring is now fully automatic.

The build menu has received a massive overhaul. First of all, instead of having 16 categories, the structures have been divided into 4 easy to understand super categories (civic, industry, infrastructure and other), each with up to 6 subcategories. This should make it much easier to find where the structure you're looking for is. Planning mode, construction priority and also demolition mode have been integrated into the menu.

The most visible change is that structures now have visible previews so the player can orient themself by the structure's visuals and not just a name. This also teaches them what the structure looks like, so that it's easier to identify in the colony. These previews are generated automatically, so if you ever add a modded structure, it's going to have this nice picture as well.

The structure overview window on the right now shows much more information about the structure, for example showing all the recipes a factory can produce, the number of apartments a house has, or what services a service building provides. Information whether the structure connects power and life support is also much more prominent.

Time and Pins

The upper left part of the screen contains the time controls just like in preview alpha. They work exactly the same, except the window doesn't show current temperature anymore.

Directly under them is the new position of pins - information boxes you can pin to the screen to remind you of what you're trying to achieve, like objectives or technologies. They can be expanded or collapsed by a click to save space, and dragged to reorder. Pins no longer have colored text as that caused poor accessibility (red text is hard to read), so completion of prerequisites is now indicated by an icon.

Status Bar

I often thought about what kind of information should be shown in the status bar at the top. I never arrived at a definitive answer, so I decided to leave it up to the player - the status bar is fully customizable. You have up to four lines to play with and you can put a lot of different information there, including tracking of any resource. New information elements will be added as players demand them (I already have some suggestions). Of course the order of the elements is also entirely up to you.

If you feel like you need different status bar layouts for different phases of the colony's development, you can save and load layouts as presets. Each one is saved in a separate file, so they're easy to share with other players.

Weather

The weather window in the upper right corner is completely new. Temperature moved here, but it also shows a quick summary of current weather using a picture, along with bars for different specific aspects of the weather.

The first column shows the amount of sunlight, cloud cover and wind speed. These affect how well your solar arrays and wind turbines work.

The second column shows precipitation, dust and radiation. Don't get too excited about the latter two as those are not coming in the initial version of the rewrite, they're more of a future proofing, which is why they're grayed out.

More about weather in the next dev log.

Notifications

The right side of the screen is reserved for notifications. There are two types:

The rectangular at the top are long-term problems in the colony that may require your attention - things like understaffed buildings, factories missing resources or lack of schools. They stay visible until the problem is resolved.

The circular at the bottom are one-time notifications informing you about events. This is where completed surveys and constructions, achieved objectives or colonist deaths appear. After appearing, they automatically slide to the right, only showing an icon to save space. They roll out again when you mouse over them, showing additional information in the tooltip.

Conclusion

Finally, the lower right corner contains toggles for map overlays. They work exactly the same as in alpha.

And that concludes June's devlog. As you can see, the game is getting pretty close to being playable. There's soon going to be a playtest, so that people other than me can play the game and provide some feedback before the game goes live. At this rate, the playtest is likely going to start sometime in late July and everyone who is capable of dealing with a very buggy game and wants to help write feedback and/or bug reports is invited. To make organization and communication easy on myself (after all, I'm just a single developer), all information will be available only on the Discord server and the relatively new Stoat server. If you're not on either of those platforms, I'm very sorry, but my resources are limited. Once the playtest starts, there will be another announcement.

I hope to see you there and you can look forward to another devlog in July.