- Objects spawned by god powers should no longer improperly block movement to them
A Game of Humans
Bugfix 0.5.2.16
Development Update
First off, the company, Scion Studios, was about to run out of cash before the summer. That had to be solved, and it has. Part time contracting work has put us in a much healthier position. If the company folds there will be no game.
Secondly, the cash issue led to another issue; A mad dash to profitability, code quality be damned. Over time this built up and made the code... less than ideal to work with.
Over the past month a truly massive amount of work has been spent on paying off all the technical debt the project had accrued. We're talking in the tens of thousands of changes.
From a technical point of view, the project is in a great state now.
Third and perhaps most importantly, I don't know about you guys but I was always somewhat disappointed by how poorly the game came together. The mechanics feel like they are somewhat fighting each other instead of elevating each other. This last point has been the one causing me the most both heartache and headache. I realized I was out of my depth and that I need help. A few months of daring to venture outside the development-basement I have now made a few new friends, two of which happen to be world class game designers. Over the coming weeks I am going to be putting together the grand master plan for how to finally achieve greatness.
The starting point for the grand master plan is this;
A Game of Humans is fundamentally about humans. There is a deep simulation going on and things happening, yet it matters little to the actual running of the city/game except for productivity.
I am moving the game towards something where the goal is to expand and attract more people, but more people will only come if the existing ones are happy. To make the existing people happy you have to deal with the drama they generate (new mechanic), applying faith powers and sometimes choosing the lesser of two evils. It is likely that the way feelings work will change, into a much more interactive mechanic.
What do you think would make this game better?
(and sorry about the news hiatus, in-between pushing myself too hard and running out of cash, it turns out I managed to burn myself out. It's been a life lesson)
Minipatch 0.5.2.10a
Options
- Added support for vertical sync
Bug
- Characters can no longer get stuck with a full work desire
Minipatch 0.5.2.7a
- Fixed a GUI issue with feelings that could cause a crash
- Fixed a GUI issue with character inventories that could cause a crash
Patch 0.5, the Pathfinding path, available now!
Patch 0.5
General
- New pathfinding system (faster, better and more flexible)
- Added prompts, characters now ask for permission when buying work plots
- Increased max zoom distance
- Improved behavior when camera pans to a character
- Added new thoughts
God Powers
- Changed Sense of Urgency into an over time effect
- Added Chatterbox god power, similar to Sense of Urgency but for social
Visuals
- Updated terrain edit visuals (block markers when building/removing terrain)
- Now shows people beliefs if the god power panel is open
- Added floating text for sleep & nature needs
- Procedures (e.g. oven when baking bread) now always display their progress
GUI
- Added Feelings to the Status bar, you can now see min/max/avg/median happiness/mood
- The workplaces tooltip in the status bar now shows employees, in addition to jobs
- Stats and record GUIs are now easier to read
Performance
- Increased performance for character behavior in large towns
Audio
- Added a bunch of character sound effects
- Added some world & GUI sound effects
Bugs
- Fixed an issue where sometimes a tile in the river would falsely be marked as flat ground
- Fixed a rare issue where one character would sneak in an interaction with another character in the middle of doing something
- Fixed a number of small, rare issues that could cause a crash (animals mating at the exact same time a plot is deleted etc)
- People can no longer get stuck midair
Minipatch 0.4.8.29a
- Fixed an issue where animals could get stuck in their feeding trays
- Fixed an issue where characters would refuse to get a new job after losing their old job
- Fixed an issue where characters could end up stuck in the air after digging away the block they were standing on
- Fixed a rare issue where the game would incorrectly assume an item was still alive, treating a new item as the old item
- Added a few new maps, including a flat map called Flatlands
Minipatch 0.4.8.27a
- Increased performance of pathfinding calculations, especially when modifying the terrain
- Treasury earnings now count towards city income
- Fixed an issue where characters would be unable to remove a terrain block
- Increased cooldown of no stockpiles gamelog messages
Minipatch 0.4.8.26a
- Fixed Treasury not reporting finances properly after saving and reloading
- Fixed characters some times unable to interact with Feeding Trays
- Fixed an issue where characters could get stuck in an interaction
- Increased prioritization of characters doing something that requires the item they are already holding
E.g. farmers will now finish cutting all their crops before hauling off the harvest
Minipatch 0.4.8.23
- Fixed a crash that occured when the tax collector plot was deleted just as someone was about to accept a job from it
- Fixed a crash related to sounds effects on certain system configurations
- Fixed a rare issue with characters interacting, causing one to remain frozen
- Characters now greater prioritize demolishing objects on top of terrain edits
- It should no longer be possible for a bucket of water to end up in a stockpile (if the bucket isnt used, its now deleted)
Hotfix 0.4.8.20
- Fixed a crash that could occur when animals were socializing as one of them was slaughtered
- Fixed a crash that could occur when characters searched for item in a plot that no longer exists