Engineer Alpha
0.4 Release
Engineer Alpha's Log #50: The 2023 Roadmap
There are 4 major releases planned for this year with the first coming out next week.
The plan is to release a version roughly every 4 months, that is what feels like the best development cycle. Longer than that it feels like it drags on too long and I want to move on to the next thing. Shorter and I don’t feel like I have enough time to implement the big features.
The reality of me and how I work is that I need a deadline, so I made some for myself for the entire year. These are planned to be the stable release of the version with the optional development version coming out 2-4 weeks before.
Content and dates subject to change; the goal is of course not to, but there are many things in the universe beyond my control.
Version 0.5 will contain essentially a complete overhaul to how technology is researched. Most of the technologies themselves will not change but how you unlock them will. There will also be many other changes like the updated furnace and mining drill as well as some other stuff.
Version 0.6 will completely redo the world. Changes to spawns for plants and ores. New terrain and biomes. All the stuff you would expect, I hope.
Version 0.7 is the one I am most excited about. The furthering of the tech tree and the addition of more awesome stuff like trains and freight containers.
There will of course be many other things added along the way and I do take requests so as always feel free to put things you want here on Steam or the official Discord.
Engineer Alpha's Log #49: Holidays and the Future
With the mining drills the goal was to move the visuals from down below, that you never see, to up above the surface.
I also wanted it to be clear where items could be extracted from which is why I have added a small "hopper" at the front that will serve as the item extraction point. The auger spins as it drills and looks fantastic.
The furnace is getting an even bigger overhaul.
I am making some back end changes to how inventories take up space in the game world and I have decided that any block can only correspond to a single inventory. I.E. you will have to put your ore and fuel in different places on your furnace. Ore will go in toward the top, ingots will come out the middle and fuel will go in the bottom. If you look closely you can see that yes you need to build the conveyor into the furnace to get fuel to it.There is a lot more to come for 0.5 and beyond in 2023. I will be making a rough road map for the games plans for the coming year in the next log on the fifth on January. There is a lot of cool stuff coming and in the mean time here is one more thing coming because someone asked for it yesterday, Signs.
Engineer Alpha's Log #48: Recipe Randomization
When a recipe has a range of values for a specific product it will be displayed in the format min - max.
Whenever an output is checked to see if the products can be added it will always use the max and the the process will no complete.
Expect this system to be expanded on in the future and added to more recipes especially those in the plant domain. I will try to use randomization minimally in things like parts as it just would end up just being an annoyance I feel.
Also note that ores have had a similar treatment applied to them, so copper ore will now give between 3 and 5 when mined. Yes this is an average increase to 4 but I have comes to the conclusion that too many resources leads to a better gameplay experience that not enough. With the values I would likely want for required crafts to finish the game there just would not be enough resources in any specific portion of the world to make it work without upping the values from a single ore block.
Version 0.4 Development Release
More complete patch notes con be found in game but the highlights include:
- Fluids & Pipes
- Farms
- Steam Engine
- New Crafting Machines
- Improved Plant Growth
- Updated HUD Elements
- And a whole bunch more
Please remember that this is an in-development build and the will certainly be bugs. If you find any the way to get them fixed is to tell me about them, preferably here on Steam or in the official Discord.
You can access this development build in your steam settings by changing app branch.
Engineer Alpha's Log #47: Plants and The Farm
Plants can now be either be small or large. Small plants like the potato or flax take up a 1x1 area on the ground while large like the tree require 3x3.
The farm is one of the new buildings in 0.4 and was actually one of the first things I started working on with this version but got sidetracked by fluids, because a farm without water would be rather strange. The current farm being added is the small farm.
It is unlocked late in the copper tier and has it's own tech to unlock it.When you first place a farm and interact with it you will be given an option to choose what you would like to grow from the available options.
Once you have chosen a crop you will get the standard farm window.
The farm requires three inputs to function seeds, water, and power. Seeds can be added once a crop has been chosen via conveyor belt. Water is added via the pipe input. Power for the small farm is given via a shaft input. If the farm's water runs out or it loses power all plant growth will be halted and will not resume until both are restored.
Plants are planted one at a time every 2 seconds (subject to balance of course). Each plant grows individually and will be harvested and added to the farm inventory when growth is complete. Plant items can be extracted from the farm via conveyor belt.
The small farm has room for 36 small plants or 4 large plants.
The farm is one of the last major features to be added to 0.4 and hopefully I will have a development version available in a couple weeks so you can try things out.
Engineer Alpha's Log #46: Not Much to Say
Engineer Alpha's Log #45: What do YOU want in 0.5?
Naturally, I have been thinking about what comes next. One of the big things that I want to do is a major world overhaul with changes to ore spawning, biomes, etc. The thing is that I am reliant on a third party addon for the generation of the Voxel World and the next version that I would like to use is not development ready yet. They say it will be ready soon so hopefully around the start of the new year or a little after it should be good. This means I have the world overhaul planned for 0.6 and 0.5 is wide open.
I have no definite plans for what will be in 0.5 but here are a few thoughts:
- Conveyor Rewrite (the current implementation is about as bad as it can be and I have devised a way to make them blazing fast it will just take some work to implement)
- Player character Model and Animations
- More sounds (You want to hear all the machines)
- The next tier (Spoiler: It's Steel)
- You're the dev you decide (likely more Parts & Machinery, that's what always happens)
If there is something you want to see from this list or something else entirely please put it here in a comment or on discord. The more specific you are the better and please be realistic, I can't do it all sadly.
Engineer Alpha's Log #44: On the Number of Different Machines
I have been examining the crafting machines within the game lately and I have decided to make some changes. I had always envisioned that there would be a couple crafting machines in the early game (power hammer and forge currently) then in the late game there would be some kind of universal "assembler" that could make basically any item in the game. In my playing of Engineer Alpha (and some others) I have decided this is not the way I want to go.
When looking at machines there needs to be some variety. If there isn't setting up a production line becomes the same as setting up any other production line. When you unlock a new part to craft and are setting it up to be built there need to be some amount of "oh, this is new" and not just "assembler with 2 items in and 1 out, I know how to set that up". So to achieve that I will be adding in more crafting machines and each one will have it's own unique setup of inputs and outputs as well as size and possibly even other requirements. I will not over load you with tons of machines that only can make one recipe as that would just be annoying. But I do want to narrow down on what machines can do and likely add a few new machines in each tier.
With these Ideas in mind I will be making some changes to 0.4.
First comes the forge and it is being cut. I was never happy with how this building was in the game. In my head it was never clear it just "made stuff" the what and how were up in the air as well. I also don't like how it uses solid fuel items for power and in the future there will likely not be any production machines that use solid fuel. I want to keep power production and Item production separate.
To replace the forge there will be a second hammer the "Steam Hammer" that runs on steam made in a boiler (see last weeks log for more). Both hammers will see changes to their recipe list to account for the changes. I have decided to double down on the hammer idea as I think it works quite well for a simple crafting machine and offers a good visual spectacle unlike some alternatives.
There will also be at least one new machine the "Rolling Mill" but more on that on a later day.
Engineer Alpha's Log #41: Tiers and Fast Upgrading
For the vast majority of items in the game there are 6 options for tier:
0 Wood/Stone
1 Copper
2 Iron
3 Steel
4 Titanium
5 Tungsten
This leads to a very large number of items and buildings that the player has access to and is why some time ago I added the tier drop-down the the workbench / assembler as the number of recipes was getting far to long and unwieldy for a single list.
But today I don't want to talk about Items, I want to talk about buildings. Buildings can be a pain to replace with one of the same type from a higher tier. And to make the transition from a low tier to a higher tier feel as good as possible it should be as easy as possible. With 0.4 I am adding the ability to fast replace buildings with one of a higher tier instantly. All you have to do is be aiming where you want the building to be placed and if you aim at a building of similar type that is a lower tier your aim will "snap" to the location of the old building. If you create the building while snapped to an existing one it will remove the old one, add it back to your inventory, and copy any relevant variables (settings, inventories, etc.). I have decided to restrict it to going up in tiers only (for now) as going down can be messy, e.g. going from a big inventory to a small one (things could end up lost/on the ground). This will definitely be coming to many buildings like chests, shaft splitters, mergers, gearboxes, and others likely as well. Connectors like shafts are a bit trickier and hopefully will be implemented but I can't promise that for this version.