Quick update. This week I spent most of my time on two new features:
The first is a new weapon that will be available to both aliens and the player. It took longer to implement than I planned and still isn’t quite ready to show off but it’s close.
The second is a hybrid procedural generation system. Up until now, the universe has been mostly designed by hand. If you’ve played the game, you can understand why: there are a lot of elements in the game that need to be in certain places (or explicitly NOT in certain places). The new system allows for the “bespoke” content to be hand placed in particular locations, while other content can be placed semi-randomly according to procedural rules. This means that subsequent playthroughs won’t always have the same anomalies and planets in the same star systems.
This is a pretty experimental system and I still have quite a bit of work to do on it. All for now, back to work.