DevLog #4 - Crafting, Processing, Liquids, Decay and Lighting updates

Hello and welcome to our fourth devlog for Red Dust Colony.

A fair number of things happened since I last wrote. Crafting, cooking, and processing have been finalized, the storage system has been expanded to allow liquids and items can now decay over time. Colonists use food trays when eating and prefer to find a place to sit if possible. The build menu has been overhauled and plants now have had the last mechanics implemented. Art is also ready for a few new buildings. These are all just surface-level changes, with a lot of technical improvements underneath. Today, I'll go over these changes and walk you through them.

Crafting, Cooking, Processing

Crafting stations have been one of the few things that were implemented in the game early on. Colonists have been able to turn items into other items since before they even had models and were mere capsules moving around. This however, also means that this particular system has been through a lot of changes over time, with most of the game evolving around it. Because of this, it also broke a lot. Having been implemented before any testing was added, it often took a long time to even notice there was an issue with it. As we're reaching to publish a demo, this needed to be resolved. Everything here has been cleaned up, and comprehensive testing has been added.

Crafting tables can now be configured to craft X amount of a recipe, or just to ensure that X amount of items are available.

Some of them require an initial setup and then they'll run on their own while others need a colonist working at all times.

Storage, liquids and decay

Similarly to crafting, storage has also been around from the start. After all, in order to perform crafting, the required items need to exist somewhere. Even if items are left on the ground, they still need to be available for pickup and that makes them form a temporary "storage". Up until now though, the item storage building would always allow all types of items without any limits. Here, we've added traits to the items to allow filtering. This means that liquids now can only be stored in their own storage container and refrigerators can no longer host solar cells and mechanical parts.

Speaking of refrigerators, their purpose is to slow food spoilage and for this, item decay was implemented. Items decay at individual rates when left outside the base or outside of storage containers, and food containers modify these rates to various degrees.

Eating behavior

When hungry or during the lunch break, colonists will look for some available food, go take it and then if a table and seating is available they'll go eat there. From a gameplay point of view, this has been working for a while, but now the visuals correctly reflect this behavior.

Transport System changes Since items now decay, this also means that items can essentially be removed from the game at any time and the transportation system needs to account for this. This is especially complex because item transportation can involve multiple pickup and drop-off locations in a single transport. For example, a single colonist can pick items up from multiple storage containers and then deliver them to multiple buildings that need them, like crafting tables and oxygen diffusers.

Destroying any storage or canceling any construction project at any time was working fine, but with item decay, individual items can be destroyed, adding an extra level of complexity. I'm glad to say, this is all working fine now, with tests covering a lot of cases in this area.

Lights and plants

Up until now, plants were just growing regardless of the lighting conditions and this is something that I was really keen to get around to resolve. As I've showcased before, the light system has a bit of richness to it, allowing a combination of both directional lights(the sun) and artificial light which spreads around the base using tiles. We also allow artificial lights to be colored and be adjusted as the game runs. This means that when multiple lights of different colors are next to each other, the end result tends to look white/neutral. This actually works and looks pretty good but for plant lights, I wanted them to have that ultraviolet feel. Placing a grow light in a room that was already lit by regular lights didn't have much of an effect visually and while graphics are not that important at the moment, good user experience ranks high. To fix this, a new light layer was added to the system, made specifically for lights with gameplay relevance.

I hope you've enjoyed reading about the development of Red Dust Colony and we'll see you next time.

If you'd like to keep up with the development of our game, we have a Discord server where we share our journey: https://discord.com/invite/3wj5RAyprc