Engineer Alpha
Engineer Alpha's Log #84: But what is in 0.8?
The plan for 0.8 is to add in both electricity and oil. Electricity will function much like you would expect for a game like Engineer Alpha. You will have both generators and consumers and they will be connected together in a network. The current plan is that there will be several sizes of power poles each with their own properties. Poles will have both a connection distance as well as a distribution distance. The connection distance will dictate the distance that can be reached to another power pole while distribution will limit the reach distance to end points (generators, motors, etc.). There will likely be numerical limitations on both of these for connection numbers but more on than once things are looking a little more final. There will also be an assortment of electricity producing/consuming machines like generators to turn rotational power into electrical and motors to turn electrical into rotational. There will of course also be buildings that are powered directly off electricity when it makes sense (the higher tiers of quarry will likely run off electricity and some other crafters too).
Oil is going to be the primary mid game energy source. You will need to go outside the starting area a good distance for it, but it will be surface visible and in large quantities grouped together. Oil will be a fluid of course just like water, but it will not propagate and therefor is finite. Pumping it will be similar to water but with an oil well instead of a water well. Oil will be a heavier and thicker fluid than most any other in Engineer Alpha and will thus be harder to move around in pipes without pressure loss (the fluid system was constructed to account for fluid density, viscosity and even gravity). Oil will be processed in a special building for oil refining that will take fluid inputs and give refined petroleum products including fuel for combustion engines and plastics.
I am sure there will be other updates and changes that get made along the way but what they will be I do not know yet. Please be aware that development on this has only just started so it will likely be a few months at least before 0.8 comes out.
As for 0.9 and beyond; the current plan is that 0.9 will focus on improving the 'RPG' aspects of the game including but not limited to: leveling, experience, weapons, armor, enemies, stats & damage. But for now, that is still far off. As for 0.10 I am not 100% sure but it will likely involve nuclear reactors and bigger cranes but of course if there is something you want added to Engineer Alpha feel free to comment and I will consider adding it in the future\.
Engineer Alpha's Log #83: Making Things Unlocked Earlier
Conveyors have been causing me a fair bit of lag in my personal playing of Engineer Alpha. Of course buildings/objects that are inefficient are always going to be looked at to be improved. When it comes to conveyors their current implementation is not very good and leaves a lot of room for improvement. For those of you who know a bit of code each conveyor uses a for loop every update for all the items on it i.e. very slow to update. I have started working on an update for conveyors that will hopefully make them much faster but in doing so I realized that I was taking the wrong approach to the problem.
Conveyors are great and serve a very specific purpose in the game best; move a single type of item from A to B. The problem is that from the moment you build your first quarry you have to deal with "dirty" belts that contain several different items that all need to go different places to be processed. Belts are terrible at dealing with this situation you need to make a main line that has splits for each item to be sent off of it then when you saturate that main belt you need to build another one all over again. This is not what I want you to have to deal with when playing Engineer Alpha. To that end I changed Magnetubes to be in the copper tier researchable just after struct pack 1. The goal is that conveyors and Magnetubes will exist alongside each other, and both serve a purpose in the factory. Magnetubes will be the "main bus" to transport large quantities of items medium to short distances as well as sorting items while conveyors will move items short distances like one machine to the next in a crafting chain. It will likely take a bit of balancing until the costs and everything work out for both conveyors and tubes but hopefully things will work out. The rewrite for conveyors is likely going to have to wait a while but Magnetubes are much more efficent in their updating as they have no item collision to worry about and they use path caching when an item wants to go along a path that has already been calculated for the network given the start and end points it can just grab it out of a hash table.
Cranes were moved to be in the middle of iron tier because I felt like if they stayed in steel they would be too late to the party as it were. By the time you would unlock the first tier of crane they would be basically useless and you would just say "I wish a had this hours ago because that when I needed it" which is never a good feeling. I am also considering a change to the way that cranes operate, the decoupling of the movement of the hook with the building of objects. The concern is that because the game is 3D and therefor cubic the number of blocks you can need to build something can skyrocket very quickly; in order for cranes to build in a reasonable timeframe they will need to build rather fast. The current working plan is that builds will be on a timer say 2-10 per second or whatever feels right and the crane will only need to move within a few blocks or so to be able to perform the build action and it will likely have a faster movement speed to match. All this is because the current speed makes you want to pull your hair out as you say "I could do it faster by hand" which is not the intended goal. Sure you can do something else while it is going but the manual aspect should still be faster so you don't feel like you are constantly waiting for the crane to catch up with you.
If there is anything else that you find that you feel like once you get it no longer has a purpose please let me know and I will consider changing it because making a fun gameplay experience with cool and useful unlock is one of my top priorities.
Engineer Alpha's Log #82: Those Mining Drills, They SUCK!
The small and large mining drill that you unlock in the copper or iron tier respectively are intended to be a good source of resources throughout the early game. While they where never intended to completely replace hand mining at their point in the game they should make it start to feel like you need to do less and less of it. They were not really doing that for a couple of reasons. First they did not mine very many block 400 for the small or 1800 for the large and second they had to be moved way too often.
Woth the idea in mind that I wanted the player to get more resources from their machines I came up with a few options.
1. Make resource finding easier. While it would certainly help you gather more of a specific material if you knew for sure that there was a big copper deposit somewhere there would be nothing stopping you from just mining it by hand. There will certainly be more ways to find out what is below the surface in the future but it doesn't really solve this problem so it will be shelved for a little while.
2. Make resources only drills can mine. Because the Voxel world is of finite height and each block has a reasonable limit of how much resource it can contain and still be balanced it can be difficult to have enough resources to mine in any column of the world for the massive amount required for an automated factory. To that end I could add special objects in the world that could contain any amount of a type of ore. While this would certainly help that is what I tried to do with the latest update to the world generator just in Voxels and I want to keep as much in the voxel world as I can and not just spawn in game objects because it's easier.
3. Mine More Blocks. What is wrong with strip mining the entire planet? It's a video game. If you can mine more blocks easily with the automated mining systems available to you you get more stuff to work with. It adds no complicated extra game mechanics and you get to feel like you have a bigger impact on the world.
So the player needs to be able to mine more blocks and the old 2x2 and 3x3 mining drills were not going to do it. Quarrys are in for both copper tier and iron tier. The copper quarry can mine a 7x7 100 deep over 12 times the number of blocks as the small mining drill. The iron quarry can mine 11x11 200 blocks deep over 13 times as many blocks as the large mining drill. Both the copper and iron quarries have a rotation input for power and take a similar amount of power as their respective drills did. The steel quarry still exists in nearly the same form just with a rotational power input to match the other two. Quarries will be unlocked in exactly the same place as the old mining drills and have the same cost.
I hope this helps you harvest as much resources as you need and will be coming in the version hopefully next week.
Engineer Alpha's Log #81: Updated Demo & Hand Mining Drill
In other news I have started working on a handheld mining drill for the mass removal of blocks. Manual tools like pickaxes and shovels were always intended to be the more precise way to remove blocks from the world and if you wanted something faster and a bit less precise that would be an option. The Hand Mining Drill (Name Not Final) is an item you will first research somewhere around mid Iron tier. It will never be consumed so you should only need to craft 1 (unless you lose it) but it will have an energy requirement tied to using it such as burning coal. The hand Mining Drill mines fast, up to 20 blocks every second if the blocks you are mining are weak enough. The Drill has a ramp up time when you start using it before it reaches max speed where it will not be nearly as effective for several seconds. If you stop using your drill its speed will slowly go down.
The visuals of the Drill are not yet complete but the back end is mostly done if you would like a little preview of the drill check out the video below. The hand mining drill will likely be coming in the next build soon.
Engineer Alpha's Log #80: 0.7 Release and Faster Conveyors
Now to the far more interesting bit I have decided to increase the throughput of conveyors. in my playtesting I found it too difficult to move a significant quantity of items around especially when it came to things like stone that are in high number. When dealing with things like the output of mining drills it was difficult to get everything out on a single belt and making more than one belt line that could sort was a pain.
Currently items on belts have a spacing of 37.5cm or 3/4 of a block. The standard size of an item on a conveyor is 25cm so 1/3 of the space on the conveyor is empty space. In the next build this spacing will be decreasing to 27.5cm so only 10% more than the size of an item. I would consider making it even tighter but things start to look problematic if they get too close. The base speed of conveyors is also increasing from 37.5cm/s to 55cm/s. Now conveyors will move 2, 4, 6 items per second for copper, iron, steel respectively. up from 1, 2, 4. I decided to drop the gains for steel conveyors for now as I have concerns about the visuals of items traveling at the speeds for another doubling. Steel conveyors are largely replaced by tubes for any high throughput situations but they still have their place so it shouldn't be an issue.
Hopefully this makes it easier to move things around in your efforts to harvest the entire planet.
I am also considering a few other quality of life changes that may make it into Tuesdays build so we will have to see.
Engineer Alpha's Log #79: The Fruits of Playtesting
So far I have gotten through about Mech pack 1 in my testing and have made lots of changes along the way, Most of the changes are aimed at making things less cumbersome to the player and streamlining the early game as much as feels reasonable. I have reduced the crafting time of many parts as well as adjusted the speed of several crafters to make sure you can produce parts at a reasonable pace. I am also considering removing a few of the copper parts like beams and frames as I feel they add unnecessary bloat at the point they come in and it would be better served to save those things for Iron but more on that another day.
I will be continuing to test for some time and will release changes as they come. The plan is to release 0.7 on the 22nd but that might need to be delayed a few days for personal reasons.
As always if you find anything that should be changed or fixed please let me know here or on discord and friendly reminder that there will be a nice little AMA on discord the 24th at 3pm Eastern.
Engineer Alpha's Log #78: More Steel!
Version 0.7 is getting close to its release and hopefully will be there in about 2 weeks.
Reminder that there will be an AMA (Ask me anything) in the official discord on the 24th of February at 3pm Eastern if you want to stop by and ask me how many twinkies I am tall or anything else that strikes your fancy.
Also if you enjoy playing Engineer Alpha and want to see its development continue far into the future you can support the game on Patreon and you get access to exclusive content. There was recently a post about Nuclear Reactors and there will be another soon about Electricity.
Engineer Alpha's Log #77: Too Much Science
I have also reduced the science costs for most techs by about half I was a little too aggressive in the rate of increase I believe. With the change in level of packs adding to the cost of things as you go higher as well as number the number of packs does not need to be as high as one might think.
I have also removed the repair pack item as they just were not working how I wanted and I couldn't find a good way to make them work. The ability to repair buildings has been moved to the wrench and it fits in quite nicely as you can't remove damaged buildings anyways. currently it cost 1 wrench durability per 100 HP but this could always change.
All of this and more will be in the next build hopefully coming out Friday or Monday.
Engineer Alpha's Log #76: A New Way to Support and More
I have created an official Patreon page for Engineer Alpha. If you are generous and you want to see Engineer Alpha developed further think about supporting it. It means a lot and will really help keep development going, Making an entire video game is a lot of work and I do need to eat at some point each month. You will also get access to some exclusive content only available to members I am not entirely sure what that will be yet but it will likely include more behind the scenes kind of things and likely some polls to vote on upcoming content.
You can check it out here: https://patreon.com/EngineerAlpha
In addition I will also be doing an AMA for anyone who is interested on February 24, 2024 at 3pm EST in the Engineer Alpha Discord. I will be answering any questions you have regarding; The game, its development, general game development, my favorite ice cream flavor, whatever. I will of course not answer anything hyper-personal or NSFW. I hope you can join me it should be a good time hopefully lasting about 2 hours or so. I will of course make several more reminders for you here and other places incase you forget.
Version 0.7 Development Release
When you find bugs please post them here on Steam or the official discord and I will get around to fixing them as soon as I can.