This week, we've focused on developing the underlying systems that will support multi-block machines and connecting various machine blocks together through the use of pipe blocks.
Player-Designed Machines Our vision for the game is to enable as much player creativity as possible, by allowing players to construct and configure huge networks of machines, to do everything from:
Build production lines for manufacturing other machines automatically.
Create heating/cooling networks for their buildings.
Use water to cool nuclear power plants.
Use signal wires to control machines like elevators or doors.
Sort or move inventory from place to place.
The possibilities are endless.
Excusing the 'programmer art', here we can see an example of a payload moving through connected pipes. This payload could represent heat, or materials moving through the network. Different types of payloads can use different routing protocols and speeds, so these payloads can represent a lot of different types of objects the player may want to route around.
In this case, the signal communicates to the blocks that they are connected to a pump, which allows them to move items through the pipe blocks in a forward direction, where it might be consumed by another machine block.
Story Corner: The universe of Lamplight Station
For this week’s update, I thought it would be nice to talk a bit about the world that Lamplight Station takes place in. We’re aiming to have the game firmly rooted in an interesting narrative, so filling out the details and rules of the universe are an important step.
The Universe
Lamplight Station takes place in our universe, in the far future. Mankind has long since left earth and populated large portions of the milky way galaxy. Earth itself, our cradle of civilization, is of little importance to the vast majority of humanity, save for historians.
Economy
Like the age of earth exploration, trade and industry are huge drivers. Corporations and trade conglomerates are powerful entities. While governments exist and exert high levels of control across limited areas of colonized space, the day to day realities of much of humanity are affected far more by the machinations of corporate entities than that of governments. Companies own and operate ships, cities, space stations and even whole planets where hundreds of thousands, or millions of people live out their lives.
Starting life as a terraforming company, Typhon Geometrics is now a massive industrial conglomerate employing millions. At this size, it is merely an average sized corporation in the pan-galactic trade zone.
Some corps are industrial, much like the mining towns of the old American west, others area akin to massive housing developments which provide desired location and amenities in exchange for what amounts to a rental, or work agreement.
Travel
Travel at above light speed is apparently not something that humanity has unlocked the secrets of. Trips can take month, or years. Cryosleep, VR immersion, and cloning are all strategies employed to make these trips bearable, or even possible.
Because of the effects of relativity, travel at these speeds has consequences: you may return after a years long journey to find your friends and family have aged years more than you. To your perspective you’ve traveled into the future. For this reason, it is not uncommon for family and friends to plan travels together, either on the same vessel or separately, to keep their time frames in sync.
Devblog #2 Holiday Cheer Edition
This week, in addition to making some new UI bits n' bobs (official term) we started work on some of the machine blocks you'll be able to craft.
Improvised Furnace
One of the first problems the player will face is, surviving the harsh elements that the stations' failing life support systems create. To that end, the first craftable machine to make it into the game is an improvised furnace.
Furnaces are useful for a few things: 1. They can help keep you warm when you stand next to them (who'd have thunk it?) and 2. You'll be able to refine additional materials in them through burning or smelting.
Downright Cozy!
Multiblock Machines
The real 'heart' of the crafting system we envision is allowing the player to build multi-block systems by placing different machine blocks down in different configurations to suit their own needs.
For instance, the standard furnace doesn't do a great job of heating a large area, but adding a fan block and some pipes, you can spread the heat where you need it, so you don't have to huddle around the fire for warmth.
If you use a fan to blow air in to the furnace on the other hand, you can increase the heat dramatically, and use the furnace to smelt higher temperature materials.
-Trev
Devblog #1
Even though the game has been in development for quite a while, this is our first 'official' steam devblog so we'll call it NUMERO UNO!
Development Updates
Character Movement This week, we focused a lot on player traversal mechanics. The player map in Lamplight Station is very vertical, and navigating it can be a challenge so we want to find ways to make moving through the space fun and rewarding.
Wall running can bridge short gaps, or let you avoid obsticles on the floor
The first mechanic we implemented and tested is a short 'wall run' ability. This allows the player to traverse across small gaps by moving along a wall.
Here you can see the ledge-grabbing ability, and how you can string this together with wall running.
The second traversal feature is ledge climbing. If a ledge is too tall to jump up on, but low enough to reasonably be able to grab hold of, the player can pull themselves up to the ledge. Ledging also affords a last ditch chance to make a jump that is slightly too long, by grabbing the edge as you fall. This feature will take a few more iterations to tune up, but I can already tell it's going to be fun.
Sound The other big news for the week is that we've officially started working with an audio guy. Audio has a huge impact on the immersiveness of gameplay, and we are excited to see what kind of awesomness he comes up with, and share our progress on that front soon. The Unreal 4 Engine, which the game is built on has received a large rewrite of the audio system, so we plan on leveraging those systems pretty heavily as we move forward.
Crafting Emergent complexity and player choice are two big components of the crafting system in Lamplight Station. This requires some careful though in terms of user interface design to keep things understandable and not overwelming.
To that end, we iterated on the crafting interface a couple times this week, and feel that we are starting to get much closer to something we are happy with, and we can start thinking about the visual presentation a bit more in the coming weeks.
