Welcome to the developer log for Friday the 20th of December! This week, the topic is repairs.
During gameplay, the player will often find themselves needing to touch up their vehicles. Mars is what you’d call a classic “hostile work-environment”; even with the most advanced weaponry you’ll probably still need to repair your stuff every so often.
We like the way repairing works right now, but there’s been one glaring hole (no pun intended) in the repair system:
What to do when critters chew off part of your vehicle. It’s been a recurring issue for us, and losing your weapon, or a wheel, or one of many other parts of your vehicle at the wrong time can be catastrophic.
That’s the reason we’ve worked hard on implementing the new repair system.
As you can see in the video above, the new repair system makes it possible to restore missing pieces of your vehicles, so that you have more of a fighting chance against the game’s monsters. This feature is incredibly useful, and just from internal tests seems to make playing the game a lot more fun.
We had our fair share of problems implementing it - at one point, the repair feature worked *almost* perfectly, except for a few blocks in the vehicles that just wouldn’t appear when we tried to restore missing parts.
In addition to the improved repair / replace feature, we have also added a new part to help you: the repair station! Attaching this part to your vehicle can help you keep it in working condition.
Each repair station can hold up to 4 types of resources. This means that you can plan for some contingencies, without being able to just repair everything with a single repair station.
If you’ve played the currently available public build of Mechanic Miner, this might seem like it would make the game a bit too easy for your liking….
Don’t worry!. We’re also going to give the wildlife of Mechanic Miner a bit more of an edge. This is partly to counter the increased repairing capabilities of the player. It’s something we’re going to tell you more about in next week’s developer log; until then, enjoy the prospect of having more of a chance of coming back if The Tunnel Dweller eats part of your vehicle!
