State of the Game - March

It's been a minute since our last update, so in leu of that, I'd like to share what we're currently working on with Runeline.

A lot of work has been going on, as we're currently working on a larger update, which will add a number of systems into the game and rework preexisting ones. We'll be releasing all of this in the upcoming weeks, in what will be our 0.1.0 update. There are two main changes which I'd like to share with y'all:

Item manipulation overhall

In previous versions, not all operations could be used on all items. We've completely changed how items are represented in the game's code however, so all items will be able to have all operations done on them! This has the added bonus of there being greater homogeny around how operations work on items, making everything more intuitive.

There was also no way to visualize the operations in the past, which made it quite difficult to tell if your code was working correctly. Luckily, we're now adding a 3D item viewer, which will allow you to see your products as they're being worked on, making both debugging and conceptualizing far easier.

Addition of quests

Fulfilling shipping requests has been a feature mentioned in the tutorial for a while now, but it hadn't yet been something you've been able to do yourself. However, in the 0.1.0 update, the shipper will finally be added to the game and with it the ability to accept and complete quests.

The way this will work is that you'll be able to take on shipping requests and complete them for rewards. These requests will ask for some amount of items fulfilling some specifications, which you'll feed into the shipper, and finally send off once you've fed all of them in. You will then be rewarded either with rare items (such as materia prima, granting you more power production,) or new items needed for progression.

The new items you get will allow you to create modules previously inaccessible to you, allowing you to create a greater variety of machines and products. Adding this pacer will allow us to include a much larger number of buildings, some already implemented, into the game, as we've been waiting until the right moment to do so.

Some other things

We have a lot more coming in this update too. Now that the shipper is in the game, we've been able to close up the tutorial properly. There has also been a lot of improvements to the magic system- there's no in-game info on how to use this at the moment, but trust that it will be coming soon.

With this update we'll also be starting a public playtest on itch, but rest assured the Steam version will be just as updated as that version.

I should also note that there is a good chance saves will not be transferable from previous versions into this one. We've made a lot of big changes to the underlying structure, causing some of the old serializations to break. We'll be trying to minimize this happening, however, and hopefully we won't need to change how things are saved at all in future versions.