State Vector January 24

So, it’s a new year, one in which I hope to get this little project quite a bit further. It’s not really one of my new year resolutions, though. New year resolutions are for things that you think would be nice to do, but quite likely won’t work out. “I finally want to be able to do a roundhouse kick to the head” is a new years resolution. “I want to get this prototype into an enjoyable state” is not. I consider that mandatory if I want to see this project going anywhere, and mandatory things don’t really require resolutions. What they require is resolve.

Finally, spacewalks!

We finally have functional spacewalks. Those, too, require resolve. And grit. Looots of grit. So I redistributed the character attributes a bit. With the attributes from before, EVAs really wouldn’t have been a good idea. The whole thing made me kind of want to implement a quick character creation screen, but it’s still a little too early for that. I am kind of happy that it’s one step closer to making sense, though.

In any case, there’s now a new job type that lets you accept a maintenance contract for some random satellite somewhere. Once you get there, you have to capture it, get out of your spacecraft, spacewalk over to the satellite, do the job, and then get back. It sounds easy enough. And it is if you play your dice right, and can devolve into disaster and, for the first time in the game, even death if you don’t. The twist here are the very tight time limits. On the one hand you get payed a lot more if you take as little time as possible, on the other hand that means taking risks. And then there’s the fact that your spacesuit doesn’t have unlimited endurance, and you might need get back to your spacecraft (which currently still has unlimited endurance) to replenish, losing even more time.

Ok, maybe it’s better you just download the thing and give it a go, I think that’ll give you a better picture than me telling you about it. And if you give me some feedback on it, that would give me a better picture as well, and wouldn’t that be a grand thing? To get one of the new jobs, you can go job-hunting and select “maintenance jobs”. Though you’re only guaranteed to actually get what you’re looking for on a green result.

Breaking news: Progress slower than anticipated!

I won’t deny that the whole infrastructure necessary for supporting multiple job types and EVAs took quite a bit more effort than I expected. You should think that after nearly 10 years of software development, I should have seen that coming (hence the sarcastic heading). But sometimes wishful thinking still gets the better of me, especially if there’s no team with other opinions around. Probably the hardest part of doing software solo is that a single brain is just nowhere near as good at spotting potential problems and opportunities as two, or even three.

I find this especially true when trying to make a game, which I learned the hard way is not just a piece of working software. You have your ideas, you have your expectations, and from that you design a spec, and then you implement that spec. And if the code performs what the spec demands, then it’s all good, job well done, right? Well, not if the spec was crap in the first place. Which is of course a thing that happens everywhere in software, but if it’s a technical spec, you can at least tell beforehand. If you’re a developer, that is. A lot of managers unfortunately seem to lack that particular skill perk, though I can’t complain about that too much in my day job. At least I’m being listened to. But for a game, it’s really hard to tell whether those mechanics you designed on paper will actually produce the desired fun once encoded.

Swerving between lanes

So I had some time to think about further steps during vacation. Vacation is a great time to think about those, because my brain’s nowhere near as much in the details as it is when I’m working on it. With multiple job types now pretty well supported by the core, it would make sense to go on and add a couple more. And while that is certainly planned, I don’t think it’s what I should be doing right now, not for the next update.

On the one hand, because I need a break from them, and I need to keep this whole process reasonably enjoyable for myself. It’s still just a hobby at this point, after all. On the other hand, because I really feel that I’m missing a couple ingredients to make what’s there now really work in its own right. Orbital Margins intends to become a game about luck, choice and consequence, and right now there’s just not enough consequence to go around. I have hinted at this in the last state vector from december, but I kind of assumed I would start tackling that a month or two later at that point.

But now I feel like I really need to get going on that, because it’ll require yet another set of core features. Such as more stats with more impact, and status effects that can persist for some period of time. I had assumed I could get most of that done in one month. With my experiences over the past two, I’m not so sure of that anymore. Also, any job type that I do before that I will have to touch again afterwards to connect it all together. I’ll be retouching all the job types multiple times in the future anyways, so that’s not a show-stopper per se, but considering I would be doing these features immediately afterwards, it seems a good way to gain back some time in my half-year plan.

I’ll check back again next month. Not sure if I’ll have anything more ready to show by then, but possibly I’ll have more to talk about. Until then, I hope to hear from the one or other person what they think about how those EVA jobs play. It’s not a drastic departure or improvement from what is there right now, but it would still be great to have some feedback on it.

And with that, I wish everybody a happy 2024. Or at least, as happy as you can make it.