This is a design document explaining After the Collapse‘s game flow. As we’re still way before the alpha stage, not everything is set in stones and is still subject to changes. That being said, while details may vary, it will still give you an idea of how the game is going to play. It will also put the devlogs into context. Comments are welcome, of course.
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Hey !
This devlog is a bit late, last time I promised that this update would be about the procedural map and that’s kinda why. I, as usual, got sidetracked into other things which delayed this post by a few days.
Anyway, there’s a lot to look at beside the procedural map generation, which is still in its infancy (but don’t worry I’ll talk about it too). I added the ability to choose the equipment for ships built at player shipyards, made multiple changes to the game’s pacing, added several tools and functions to the game editors, and finally I did most of the optimization pass with very good results.
Hi !
It’s taking me more time to find an proper title than to write the article itself, as we are nearing 1.0, the updates are becoming less and less thematic. 🙂
Many of the changes this week are trade related with the new colony imports and exports, and the new dock scanner allowing you to know what you can trade at any revealed dock, no matter the distance. Modding has also been improved, with the addition of a mod manager, damage resistances for shields, dodge chances for ships. And of course there’s plenty of improvement both to the UI and gameplay.
(also I want to publicly thank the person who sent 60$ for the deluxe edition a few weeks ago, you made my day !)
Let’s get to it 🙂
My apologies for the delayed devlog, it has been a busy month for me, but don’t worry the development is still going as it’s used to. Beta 4 is even going to be released later this week barring any last minute major problem.
Back on topic, the last two weeks were spent putting the finishing touches on the general user interface, fixing a bazillion small issues, improving things left and right, and more importantly finalizing the trading system.
Let’s get to it 🙂
Hey there,
Sorry for the delay. As this week has been mostly about testing and balancing, it’s going to be a fairly unusual devlog format (I also apologize in advance for the mostly unrelated screenshots alongside the article). The seemingly small change of assigning sector ownership to whoever hold the most factories in the area, or to the first one to drop a military base, had extremely large repercussions in many, many parts of the game. As there’s really no accurate way to “speed up” the game to test said feature, I basically had to let the game run itself days and nights while occasionally monitoring and tuning the effects. Let’s see what happened.
Hey,
I toyed around with the giant space beasts called The Swarm. But before that, I need to explain first another improvement I made this week: ownership of a sector depends on who has the most buildings there, except if there’s a military base or shipyard, in that case it’s whoever own the building. Works for every faction (except the pirates), so you can now have sectors controlled by hey, the swarm or other ‘minor’ factions.
I made it so factions now do try to expand and claim solar systems. When two factions have common borders they may plant buildings in each other territory. Also, factions need to build a dock to claim a new sector, the territorial expansion is slower and makes more sense as there’s no claimed but empty systems. It’s possible to peacefully take over sectors, you can even use pirates to help remove a foreign military base in a sector you want. It has other implications I will explain further down.
Let’s get back to the Swarm for now.