All posts tagged with "you can do anything you want in a carpentry workshop as long as it is make planks"

Quick, Put More Logistics In It!

As part of the workshop->upgrade->Snoot->cover the world in progress cycle, we have an exciting series of new economics problems: how to make upgraded modules actually useful, and how to make workshops not terrible. The solution that we have elected to try, and which Daniel bullied me into writing (which took a week, and then I quite like the results so it’s not so bad) is to have workshop jobs assigned per-module, rather than per-building.

"Progress!"

“Progress!”

For Revision 50D, we let you explicitly assign a task to a given module (“Make Planks”, “Make Cot”, etc.) The # of workshop modules indicates the # of tasks. A worker will do the task assigned to the first module in a row. If the first module is busy, they will move to the second module; and so on, and so forth. Modules are organized in the workshop in terms of priority, and can be moved up and down (i.e. if your power saw is first in the queue, if it is empty people will try to use it first.) So if you have:

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May Technical Status Update: More from the Testing Front

David is on vacation this week, soaking up a little sun and visiting relativesĀ in California before the last push out the door, so we’re working on a bunch of minor testing-motivated updates, which has mainly involved re-configuring internal stuff. Also, some UI work, which is always good.

First, we have added five new testers this week. Naturally, none of them can figure out the game! This is good, because it reveals all the hidden assumptions that you have been making, as well as the hidden assumptions that the other testers have now internalized. Then, you can fix those assumptions and get on with the next bit. Dredmor underwent a very similar process: if you go all the way back here in time, you can see early versions of the crafting system which we didn’t figure out was just totally awful until after we released the game. (There are some people, of course, who would argue that Dredmor’s crafting system is still awful, but oh well.) Getting a good game means fixing these issues.

For what it’s worth, player feedback has overwhelmingly been of the form “This is really good/promising/cool/great; here are fifty bug reports.” This is in line with our expectations, because Game Development.

Mr. Triolo has also been playing the game for the past half hour as I write this blog post in order to test some very special new animations for drinking in a chair. He has taken about seventeen screenshots of various things that are bothering him. This is also progress.

So what’s new on the code side?

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