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Vacuum is an open-ended sandbox game focused on placing you in the commanders shoes of a space station in the not too distant future. Manage a crew of hundreds as you journey throughout the stars. Drawing inspiration from dozens of games, notably Startopia, FTL, Black & White, and even the Battlestar Galatica television series. Vacuum is my attempt to create a realistic space station crew-management and combat simulator.

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Hunger, Zoning, Station Unlocks, and energy fields!

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As promised, there's been a lot happening with Vacuum. I've decided to list what I've knocked out in the past day below.
*Full fledged hunger system.-Individual crew members now get hungry. When there hunger hits a certain threshold, but before it hits zero and they start to lose health, they'll go in search of food on your ship. I still have to program this to have pathfinding, as they'll run into walls right now, but the basic logic is there and adding pathfinding is as simple as a quick tweak of my movement code for combat.*Unlock parts of the station. Anyone familiar with Startopia will remember the ability to unlock additional "sections" of the space station. I'm implementing something similar with Vacuum. When you have enough money, or some other resource, haven't decided yet, you can unlock additional spaces on your station.
*Zoning - Ever play SimCity? I'm implementing a similar zoning system into Vacuum. Select the type of structure you'd like to build and your engineers will begin to build that zoned structure inside your space station. I'm really excited for this, as it'll allow for dynamic space stations. Zone a small area for a hangar and you'll be limited to the number of ships that can come in (and the size of space pirate boarding parties).
*Hangar energy fields - Since anything exposed to the vacuum of space in the game will be sucked out into space I needed to come up with some way to make hangars that allow ships to come into and out of the space station. I decided on energy fields that let objects pass through them but don't lose atmosphere. This serves a dual purpose by allowing engineers to apply smaller versions of these energy fields if a hole gets blasted into the hull of the station and people are being sucked out.
I hope this slew of updates and work makes up for my lack of updates over the past few weeks. Until next time!

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