DevLog #5 - Tutorial, Priority system, Socialising and more

Hello and welcome to our fifth devlog for Red Dust Colony!

Normally, I try to write at least one of these per month, but this one took a bit longer. We traveled for a wedding out of the country, and with 2 dogs, this tends to not be as straightforward. While we were there, we also took the time to just go out and visit some places and acquaintances. Another thing is that a lot of what we've been doing was bugfixing and polishing. Things like colonists not picking up some items to transport to storage or adding some indicators to signal a building is awaiting deconstruction. While there are certainly plenty of tiny things to talk about, I'd rather not expose every bit of detail about the game.

Guiding system and Tutorial

It's important for people to understand how to play the game. We're hoping for fans of the genre to pick it up naturally with little to no guidance, but at the same time, we'd like to also make it a welcoming experience for people who aren't as familiar with other similar games. In order to achieve this, we've added a guiding system that, based on what's currently happening in the game, offers the player hints, warnings, and tutorials.

For example, once the need for a restroom exceeds a certain value and no toilet is available, a hint will appear, letting you know that you should build one. At the same time, if the tutorial hasn't been turned off, another guide entry will show up with more details about the restroom system. If this is further ignored past a threshold, the hint will turn into a warning.

Naturally, the tutorial system can be turned off, so it doesn't bother more experienced players, and all hints and warnings can be dismissed.

Priority system

The priority system in our game has two complementary ways of control. First, each colonist has customizable priorities for all work types, as long as traits allow, as some of them may be incapable of certain work such as construction or mining.

Secondly, all units of work have a customizable priority value, between 1 and 9. This way, it's easy to prioritize the work on a mining site, or construction of a specific part of the base. Another great use for this is to have some background tasks for colonists to do when they would otherwise be idle. This has been working for a good while now, but it's never been exposed to the UI and has always been used from code through tests. I'm glad to say this has finally been implemented.

Social colonists and emotes

Colonists now have a need to socialize. Based on their traits, this may or may not be so important, but for the average colonist, keeping this need fulfilled will have a useful impact.

We've also added a system for colonists to emote their needs. If they need to use the restroom and one isn't available, they'll let you know before finally "solving" the problem themselves. The same goes for sleeping, being hungry, and we're looking to expand this in other ways too.

Moving tables to Unity

In one of the past devlogs, I touched on how I've created a way to sync data between Unity and Google spreadsheets. This worked well for a while until I started wishing for the functionality of Unity in Sheets. Editing data in Unity has the advantage that I can write code for the interface itself and customize it almost 100%. At some point, I thought, why not have a tool in Unity that displays the data in the form of tables with the added advantage of being able to customize how every piece of data is supposed to look? I timeboxed 2 hours to see how something like this would work, and to my surprise, in less than an hour, I had very good results. This is mostly because of a Unity plugin called Odin, which I highly recommend.

What's next

Before moving on to implement new features, we'd like to focus on delivering a private demo. This is something that will be available for our Discord server members. We'd like to get some feedback and see if there's things we can do to improve. After working on it for such a long time, it's easy to get tunnel vision and not notice things that for others might be obvious. As such, the next (hopefully) few weeks will be focused soley on bug fixing and polishing. Even if it's an early build, we'd like the game to be as stable as possible. If you'd like to give this a try, join our Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/3wj5RAyprc