"There's no discrimination in this little utopia"

I'm sorry Twitter, I hope you can forgive me, but I ended up ignoring your decision!

This week has been a weird one: between my son getting braces and Waitangi Day here in New Zealand, it's been a bit chopped up.  I got the mess left over from making shipping lanes all tidied up then started thinking about the Happiness Mechanic from the twitter poll last weekend and just hit a wall.  I think there were several reasons for it:

  • What I actually want is to allow the players to build taverns, meeting places, churches and make different types of food and drink with different effects.  The mechanic behind it was what I wanted to work on, but it started to not feel quite right - it needs more thought and design before I jump into it.  
  • Ultimately the point of the poll was to pick something to work on while the artist caught up, but the whole point of this mechanic, in the end, is to add more buildings, so that's pretty silly  
  • I'm submitting to The Pavs next week (Wish me luck!), so now is not the time to be adding whole new features.

So instead I added the ground work for a whole new features - the campaign mode.  It's just a screen where you choose between one of several planets at the moment, but it's a place to start.

I also added the ability to have different size planets, fixed up Elevators so that the workers actually go up and down now (so cute!), did a bunch of playtesting and fixed a heap of bugs, so I've pushed a new build out to the testers where you can actually play right through a level without anything major breaking, which is pretty cool.

Oh, and the artist sent me a preview of the finished worker models, and they're just the cutest thing ever so I just have to show them off!

Little peg-like people with bowler hats, mustaches and/or steampunk goggles

The mustaches! And the goggles! Don't worry, female workers are coming too, and there's no discrimination in this little utopia :)