Minions!
I'm making good progress on the final major game engine features: Creature behavior and creature economy. In this version update (v0.2.6.0) I'm extending how abilities are used to control your minion behavior.
There are 9 new abilities which range from mining ore, lumbering wood to transporting and building objects. Now, the player can control what orders a worker will perform and which one he will ignore. The following gif animation shows how you can simply turn on and off certain abilities.
You ask what is the benefit for that and why should I care??? A lot of feedback I've received asked me to allow the player control over what minions do. The engine used to assign orders to your workers on a first come first serve basis. So if you had 10 activities pending to lumber wood, whenever a minion would become free to perform this job, he would take on the job and carry it out.
With the new system, you can designate which minions lumber wood, which mine, dig dirt, collect water, etc. This way, you could limit how many of your workers lumber wood, while others stay back to mine fore ore. By default a minion will carry out all of these abilities, but you can choose to turn them off when you want. In future game updates, workers will be able to learn new abilities. But that's not part of this release yet. :)
Cant wait for new creatures!