Another Unstable Build, a new employee - we keep growing in all dimensions. Besides these big news, many things we’ve been working on for a while got finished this week. Exciting times!

Community

We published the second Unstable Build for the upcoming Community Module today. It introduces remnants of the world as well as monuments that your followers can build. You can read all about the new features here. We got a new producer on Monday! Say hi to Marcus and hear about his first week here:
I have mostly spent the week getting to know the people and the project in order to effectively do the awesome work of planning pretty much everything we do here. So far it's been really fun and welcoming and I aim to do great things with the team going forward, though probably not too much that actually shows up in the game. Hopefully I'll have some more interesting things to say next week beyond hello!

Art

Martin I've been focusing on working with the new website for our studio, it's coming along and hopefully will be up in a few weeks! I've also done a mockup for the new loading screen, fancy isn't it?
Emma I've had a full week of just UI stuff, both general UI fixes and new UI for the so very secret feature you've been hearing about. There's been a need for some small UI changes with the additions of renaming, expertise buildings and monuments. Below is four different versions of a new UI, next to the current version.

Code

Johannes Apart from some bug fixes for the unstable build, I've worked on the new loading screen, which is just about done, but unfortunately won't make it to the unstable build. Jens Unfortunately I can't give any big details about my work this week either since the feature is still not revealed. Though I can tell you it has been an exiting week with a lot of progress. Next week I'll be back to working on the things that are left with the expertise buildings. It is mostly going to be about polishing and fixing the UI since the ground work already has been laid. Johannes W This week I've been working on three different things: chronicler end-screen, camera movement, and GUI for the secret feature. The end-screen is starting to take shape but there is still some design stuff that is needed before continuing with the code. The work with camera movement has mostly been about polishing things. Most of my time this week has involved working with GUI. As a programmer, I've always been curious of learning new programming techniques. The GUI for the secret feature had a lot of visual animations that was created using closures. In short, a closure in C# can encapsulate variables storing state within delegates/lambdas (C#). These closures can then be passed around in the program like any normal type of data. This made it possible to create objects with complex behaviors, like having time varying values, without the need to define new classes that do few specific things or having many adhoc variables scattered around in one class whose only purpose is to keep state. In this case, state where kept in closures instead. If any C# programmer read this, I highly recommend learning about closures! This technique helped me a lot to program behaviors very efficiently.

Design

Emelie I have continued my work on the story builder, finishing up sentences for a couple of edge cases. I have also focused on the conditions and triggers of the sentences, all that is left now is to see it implemented and watching it work. Of course there will be some finetuning but I'll do that when we get to it. Finally, I have started the work on the dreaded tutorial, we will see how it pans out. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!