Swarmdustry will participate in Steam's Next Fest!

Hi everyone,

As Steam Next Fest is approaching fast, over the past 2 weeks I've been focusing on mostly bug fixes and preparing the demo to be in the best state it can be in. As of now, we'll be in a code freeze and no more features will be added to it until after the event is over. I don't want to risk 'fixing' something that might break other things.

Now that the demo is as polished as it gets, it is time to shift focus on the full game. It's been maybe half a year since I last played the full game. So last week I spent 3 whole evenings building a small base. This is what it looks like:

I'm afraid snatchers might be a bit too OP. The fact that they eliminate the need for energy infrastructure for defense, mining outposts and smelting arrays may be a bit too much. Then again, I also spent thousands of hours on this game and know the best strats (and also used cheats :)), so maybe it's best to gather player feedback during early access on this one.

Anyway... I've discovered quite a few issues but nothing game breaking at least. Just a lot of tiny little bugs that add up just enough to make the experience frustrating. For example, building that whole outer acid pod layer of defense with copy paste and drones was very annoying because when you have let's say 6 turrets in your blueprint, then their green attack range circle stacks and renders over the turrets which are also... green. So it was very hard to see what the heck I was doing.

Another thing was drones. Drones are not part of the demo, and tbh when I was playing last week I kinda forgot how they work. And this turned out to be a very good thing because it put me in the shoes of a new player, not the usual shoes of a dev who knows the ins and outs of every mechanic. Which means I have to add some indicators to make it clearer how they function. For example, I set up drones to be on standby to repair buildings if they're damaged. But for some reason, instead of picking repair kits from the closest supply chest, they went to the other side of the base to pick them up. I may or may not have implemented a sort of 'logistics network' like in Factorio and that could be the reason. I vaguely remember writing a piece of code that if the covered area of 2 construction bays touch, then they share supply chests. But I didn't write any UI indicator to show that those 2 bays are linked.

Yet another thing is enemy scaling. In this game enemies are supposed to evolve from 1 to 100 on some arbitrary scale. At certain thresholds they get upgraded weapons, towers, waves get bigger etc. But after playing 6 hours on default settings, they only reached a scale of about 2... So my defense layer was kinda overkill for the poor little Small Brutes that tries to break through. So add another balancing issue to the list.

So anyway, all this to say that the meat of the full game is there. It just needs to cook more. Right now it's a bit raw, but once it gets to rare or medium rare, I'll open up a private playtest with some of our Discord users. In the meantime, hope you guys have fun during the Next Fest!

That's all for today! Next blog I'll probably talk about Steam Next Fest results and a UI modernization because let's face it, the current UI makes the game look very amateurish.