Space Dingus Developer Log #1

You can also see more frequent news posts in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord, and on the site formerly known as Twitter . We've posted a bunch of things over the last few months, especially on that Discord channel.

Let's begin!

Road to Playtest

Currently a lot of what's keeping us busy is getting the Playtest started.

Our goals for the first Playtest:

1. A selection of weapons, showing off a new weapon system we haven't talked about much yet.

2. Functional co-op multiplayer with easy drop-in.

3. Showing off one location, but with a lot of good randomization and variation. Also, as much polish as we can do!

4. Decent placeholder UI. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it should show the basis of a powerful and easy to expand User Interface.

5. Optimizations, so we can fit MORE ZOMBIES onscreen in multiplayer. The group can spread out now, so it means I'd like even more stuff onscreen so everyone can get swarmed.

#1 is something I'll talk about in the next Developer Log. #2 is something that didn't exist in Death Road, but we already have a really solid basis for. #3 and #4 are what's taking most of our time at the moment.

The UI

In Death Road to Canada, we ran into tons of problems in updates due to how simple yet hard to change our User Interface system was. In Space Dingus, I want a UI that is easy for us to add things to, very slick overall, and mouse controlled with lots of options.

Here is our placeholder UI so far, which will be our version of the Swap Meet / Inventory menu:

The first segment is showing off the mouse controls for moving the weapons around. Now you can also quickly drop weapons and items by dragging them to the ground, outside of the inventory window. The second part of the video shows off the new "Stash Section", which is the window on the right. The Stash is a shared inventory for your group, both AI followers and in Multiplayer. The second player shown has someone controlling it, in our tests with online multiplayer on.

Dragging something to the Stash means that anyone in the group can see it and use it. It has 9 slots that everyone shares. This also means that you have a much bigger list of things you can drag out of each mission, instead of having to show up with empty inventories and place things in the Trunk like in Death Road.

We have a lot of things to work on for more of the UI, such as the different tabs, menus, and right mouse button support for extra features. I think what we have is a really good start, though it will likely change a lot in its presentation as we keep developing the game.

Procedural Location Development

Another big thing in Death Road: It was really hard to make new locations. We have an all new map generation system now, and we're focusing on making one good first example location: The Derelict.

Derelict Missions will involve looting an abandoned space station, then getting out before the Monster of that location starts to swarm heavily. There will be a lot of different types of space station. The one we're making right now is more of a general "work, rest, and light research station" type. Aka: GENERIC STATION.

There are a lot of plans for more specific themes. We also have a bunch of different plans for sub-types for the Derelicts for locked doors, and how to open them. Each of these will have both a hard way to open the doors, that doesn't require any special skill. And then various shortcuts for this, involving Hacking skill, Mechanical skill, or other methods.

An example is the LOCKDOWN ALERT mission type. The location has gone on lockdown, You can disable this lockdown by finding a console deep in the location. Steam post image

However, you could also do things like go through the maintenance tunnels and mess with the wiring with Mechanical skill. This will cut the power completely, forcing the ship into low-power mode, making most doors open. Or you could go in there without mechanical skill, and blow up power nodes and generators. The mission info would give you a warning on what the mission type is, and a possible shortcut method. Example: LOCKDOWN mission, with a HACKING skill icon and info mouseover saying you could maybe remote disable the Alert from various computers if you brought a skilled Hacker (because their wi-fi password is just the Captain's dog's name).

Randomization

We want as much meaningful randomization of each location as possible, so that you can be surprised after 1000 hours of play. This was a big goal in Death Road, and we want to expand on that for Space Dingus.

It starts with a simple first step: Have each room have a lot of little variations. The picture above is the same room, but with randomly placed furniture and wall covering.

We've also been working on having the total structure of a Derelict have more randomization. That is, the overall shape of the hallways, and how the rooms are arranged via the hallways. There's also been a lot of experiments on maintenance tunnels: How common should they be, how they should be handled. Current thought is that they're somewhat rare, and a big indicator that there's stuff in there for a Mechanic to mess with.

Each Derelict will also have special rooms that can only show up once. Things like the Head Engineer's Office, Captain's Quarters, Medical Research Lab, Genetics Lab, Anti-Space-Ant Pest Control Room. The mission info may show you the existence of one special room as a preview, but sometimes extra ones can be generated.

As we build on this, we'll add more rare rooms, and super rare rooms, and 1 in 10 thousand ultra rare rooms.

Next Up

That's it for the first Developer Log! This one was a little rushed, as I just got back from a trip. I originally also wanted to do a bigger retrospective of work so far, but I ran into filesize limits for Steam Posts. I'll plan ahead of time for this next Dev Log.

In Developer Log #2, I think I will mostly talk about the new weapon system and control scheme. There will be a lot to cover for that. I will also have a section for how close we are to the Playtest launch at that point. Let me know if you have any more questions or comments, I'll be checking them!