Recent Mini Development Highlights

[ScottFarRoad]

Hi all,

I thought I'd start this thread as an experiment. In addition to the monthly dev blogs I'm also going to try making a very short update each week in this thread showing some of what we've been doing on Atomic Society in the past 7 days. Some of what I post here will get duplicated in the dev blogs of course but this will show what's happening the meantime and it lets players give comments on stuff before it's totally finished.

What I post here is only a small slice of what happens in the game each week of course, the things I think are coolest. 

So without further ado...

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This Week's Development Highlights: 

New construction + AI revamp going well (it's quite a change) and looks much better. I'll have more to show about it soon.

2nd new mountain map for 0.0.8 started (decided to finish all the remaining maps this version).

Salvage tooltips added on mouse-over (optional) so you can get a sense of what's in a ruin before you go and rummage around inside it!


New Mountain Map



Salvage Tooltips: 



I'll report in again in 7 days! 

[ScottFarRoad]

This Week's Development Highlights:

(Almost) finished making it so the Town Leader can now repair structures if you tell them to. Useful if you have an emergency and no repair workers around.

Added new skies and improved lighting to all maps.

More work on the 2 new maps.

Finer details being added to the character models. Citizens now have ears and fingers! 




(Town Leader repairing manually)

[ScottFarRoad]

This Week's Development Highlights:

- Nick's massive revamp of the entire AI navigation system, all the animations, and control of the Town Leader is now entering the final stages. I haven't even seen it in action myself properly, only quick glimpses, but what I have seen of the new animations look brilliant. Citizens now react properly to the terrain, they have muscle and weight and move a lot more realistically than they did, which should help with immersion. Nick's huge undertaking here is the main thing that needs to be finished before we can release 0.0.8.

- Aside from that, a new ruined ski lodge is coming along very nicely for the new snow map. Nani has made the ruined version and now needs to make a version of it for after the citizens have repaired it.

- Adam has added a new random map choosing button now all maps are in the game, for those who can't decide where to build, and we have a new interface options panel for those who want to customise some of how the game plays. For example, he's putting in a new option to automatically leave town leader mode (for all those who forget to press space!)

As for when 0.0.8 will be out, it's looking unlikely that it will be in October sadly as there's only 2.5 weeks left! But we'll do all we can. I'll be posting the full patch notes in the not too distant future and next week is probably dev blog time where I'll be going into more detail on all of this.