Mutators, colored vessels Thread - Sky Alchemist

As an idea for the next version, what would you think of letting the player pick from a list of mutators that would increase difficulty and payoff ?

Some possible ideas:

- limited time and/or amount of input materials (forces you to make use of everything if you have lots of vessels)
- cannot raise/lower walls or move tools while elements are on the board (prevents you to use manual airlocks)
- limited amount of crates (incites to throw away less valuable materials)
- power of heaters/coolers is increased by a ridiculous amount (forces you to rely on threshold temperatures)
- all heaters/coolers threshold temperature to maximum (forces you to rely on specific heat)
- drastically limited steam (forces you to manually split the process in stages)

That's about all I can think of for now.

On an unrelated topic, it would be great to have the color of the dust/liquid in the crates/dewars match (and purity may influence saturation as an added bonus but that's icing on the cake). It would be nice both for suspension of disbelief (that crystal clear liquid in my dewar is burning molten gold, really ?) and for figuring out at a glance, out of my 30 crates laid out on the board, how much is titanium and how much is sulphur

And, thanks for reading this board and listening to us ! you are awesome.

Edited by: b00fh

Both of these sound like good ideas, but I'm not sure about how exactly the mutators would fit in world-wise. I can see how the limited input materials, and limited steam would make sense though, I think it would be wonderful if we could look and see what is in our vessels though.

Hi, sorry for not having answered so long. I was quite sick for more than a week now.
I find the mutators another great approach to resolve what another player called "missing carrot problem" : keeping the gameplay from getting too repetitive once you own a lot of expensive tools.
I can imagine storylines where the mistress gives you tasks that are especially difficult, but perhaps more rewarding.

Matching the colour of the filling animation to the actual content is a nice idea; depending on how the 3d object of the vessel is set up it could be a relative low hanging fruit. I will check that out.

Concerning the forum: I have got so many really cool ideas for the further development of this game from this forum and from direct feedback of players. This is really valuable. The problem is rather now to organize all the input, pick from the ideas and align with our plans for the next releases.
Oh, and thanks for the "awesome". I actually think that players are awesome who give a game that definitively still has its flaws so much thought.

Hi,

Well, sorry to hear that, hope you're going well now !

Indeed I wish you good luck to sort all these suggestions out Apologies in advance for your backlog, but I can't resist sharing a few more ideas. I'll just dump everything here instead of making several posts.

Radical changes:

- Are there any plans to let the player get a bigger ship ? perhaps after the ship being repaid ? or the opportunity to expand it, maybe adding floors ? and then either let the player lie trapdoors/pits/chimneys, or put fixed pipes on the sides, going to other levels, or just use ejectors and normal pipes to go to other levels. Right now I only have 2 tier V steam engines, and I run out of space long before running out of steam.

- It seems that elements at different temperatures can flow together without their temperature averaging. Having their temperatures average over time would be more realistic (then it would also call the constant-per-unit power of heaters/coolers into question, but that is another issue.) Would it break gameplay to add that feature ? There is only one setting where this bothered me: capturing liquid-commercial-phase elements for which there is no reliable (read: timing-independant) way to bring them to liquid phase. A condensation chamber with the slowest cooler, a sponge right on the cooler, and an input of mercury vapor, will eventually accumulate solid cruft that should probably melt when surrounded in vapor.

- Make the amount of free steam influence the input rate of minerals, or extend maximum mission time or maximum amount of harvest if these caps get implemented. That could make it a viable option to favor simpler designs even when steam is abundant ?

- Dynamic market prices for minerals ? prices would fluctuate randomly, but also drop a lot after you sell it in large amounts ? (Or maybe that should be left for another game, Sky Mineral Moguless

Improvements:

- When placing several tools of the same kind on the board, could they be placed with the same orientation as the last one ? That would be most useful for vessel banks.
- Can we have a "swap" button to full vessels on the board, that would move it to the conveyor belt and replace it with an empty one, maintaining connections (or would that make things *too* easy ?)

Minor bug reports:

- When the game is paused and the view is rotated, the temperature bars rotate with the view, it is a funny sight.
- It is not legal to put vessels on the side edge of the map with the connector towards the wall (that is normal), but also when the connector is facing away the wall. Is that intended ?

Cheers,

Edited by: b00fh

The backlog is really growing and growing...

Additional Floors:
This is actually something we considered from the very beginning to do in further releases. It is definitively in the backlog.
The other suggestions under "Radical Changes" I will put in our backlog for further consideration.

Improvements:
Place tool in the same orientation as the last one.
Since some of the most severe criticisms of this game are concerned with UI issues (dragging, rotating, etc) I am willing to work on anything that might placing stuff easier for the player. We do not want to annoy or fatigue the player with clumsy UI stuff. So, doing automatic orientation could be a good thing. I assume what you mean is a logic like "if a tool is placed in the direct neighbourhood of another tool of the same kind, use the orientation of the tool already placed".

Swap Button: Gameplaywise I would say it also would take away some of the tedious work for the player. As with all improvements: The way I would like to go is to reduce tedious/boring tasks and add difficulties of a more strategic kind. Programmatically absolutely possible, the only thing is that the UI would get more complex (another cryptic symbol you need to find out what it is about).

Bug reports:

- Temperature bars when game is paused: need to look into it.
- Place Tools at wall: This is intended, but rather for programming reasons. It makes stuff like deciding if you actually can rotate a tool simpler.
I will put it on the list - we did some iterations on moving and rotating, so it might be sort of deprecated now. But I need to look into it.
I agree that it is quite a limitation to your workspace.