Hello everyone!
Stefano here with the 23th update of this Project! I'm very happy with this week work since I kept working through the "Actual game" state with objectives and things to do, and not only a sandbox thing with mechanics to play around.
So here you have this week's timelapses and changelog:
Level's Objectives
Until now the game didn't have any goals or progress counting, making it very "useless" as a game. Now each level has its own objectives to complete. The main progress system that I want inside the game is that the player has its own main base where he can do anything he want, where he should build everything needed to construct the other levels, and then there will be various levels with specifics objectives that need to be completed to unlock the next levels.
These objectives will be something like:
- Be profitable = stay X months earning more than Y in profit
- Produce = produce X things of type Y
- Create employment = hire more than X guys and stay profitable for Y months
- Luxury = Have a total worth of more than X and return all the investment
Sometimes with some sub-goals like:
- Spending less than X1
- Having less than X1 of Y1
And something like that.
The goals will be very generic at the start of the game, to let the player has freedom on his creativity in the designing process, and later on will be more complex to really give the player some hard task and really think well the design of the building.
To make this easy to maintain and to work with I created a struct capable of holding all the different variables that could be needed to create the objectives:
Then, I can simply create structs, assign the right variables and the right type code, and later iterate the list of objectives checking their code first and then checking the right variables based on their code.
Profits counter with Buy and Sell Records
Since many objectives will be based on being profitable, I needed to create some sort of profit counter in each level. To do that I had to create records to store the detailed information of each object bought and each object sold, so the player can review all the income and the outcome he made in that specific building.
All these things can be checked inside the newly added "Stats Menu" (probably will be renamed) where it will be displayed both the selling and the buying records, but also the profit counter taking into account the guys income and later in the development I'll add electrics bills and minor stuff like that.
Since the profit counter is based on the single building, I had to fix the problem where the object could be transported inside levels. The player could easily buy resources in the main base, construct the final product in the main base, transport it to the level, and sell it from there and make pure profit with all the expenses in the main base.
To fix this problem I made all the transported items unsellable and uncraftable, so transported items will be useful only to build the building in the creation phase, like it should be.
Keep in touch
If you are curious to see how things will go feel free click any of these links to join our community:
Discord Server: Discord.gg
YouTube channel for Timelapses: Youtube.com
Twitter: Twitter.com
Changelog: Docs.google.com
