Hyperspace Harvest is ripening like Painapple in mid-jump photo-activity. Here is an overview for what has been happening:
[h2]Suit Mods[/h2]
Added in modable suit symbionts that modify your player character. Right now this is mostly geared towards the combat portion of the game. Suit symbionts will be your main way to increase health and shields for example.
As you can see there is also a framework for buffs and debuffs now to support certain suit mod mechanics.
I'm also still experimenting with the mod systems, trying to see what sticks. Suit mods don't use a combination of mods to create their item, they just need a single base mod. They also have fewer mod slot types than weapons or crops, but can have multiple slots of the same type. Skin is or health/shields, muscles is for speed, strings is for dodging and blood affects suit energy usage. The base mods for your suit all grant different amounts of these slots, so the different suit symbionts favor specific aspects of your character as a result.
As shown, suit mods won't just affect stats though, they can also augment your moveset in various ways.
[h2]Seasons[/h2]
After that I worked on a lot of additional sprites for the different seasons. In the current design, the (Re-)Birth, Life, Decay, Death cycle of the whales roughly corresponds to a temperate earth-like climate. As you might expect this will affect which crops you can grow and which life forms you can encounter in the wild. It might also affect which areas of the world you can access, right now death season removes low feather shrubs and makes water traversable for example (not shown on on gif).
[h2]Weather[/h2]
To further differentiate the seasons I then added in a weather system that features stuff like causality rain, necrotic particle fall and dust storms. The different weather conditions all come with their own ambiance sound.
Vetai also gives you some athmo data at the start of the day so you can plan ahead.
[h2]Tool Mods[/h2]
Then I went back to finally finish up the baseline for the mod system, with your multi tool becoming the final piece of gear you can modify with bio-code.
Tool base code defines what grade of trees/rocks you can exploit, which will also gate off some parts of the world. So tool base mods will be hard to acquire. On the bright side, they are anomalous in that they do not get used up when creating a tool. This basically makes them permanent upgrades once you get your hands on them. Tools again come with multiple mod slots of the same type, so you can specialist your tool into various directions simultaneously. Submods can affect all kinds of farm activities, irrigation and parasite fishing included.
Options menu, title screen, tree cut rework and tutorial overhaul are up next.
For the title screen I'm considering focusing on save slots that show these kind of sprite stack dioramas.
They would have a couple variants and change depending on what you last did in the game.
The game still has tons of problems and reworking the tutorial and tree cutting is really only just the start. As I see it the game still needs way more content before the core loop can click. Additional crops to fill those seasons, resources to make use of those tool mods, tool mods that interact with farming, parasite variants for different weather/seasons,- there is a lot still to be done. So maybe 2022? Anyways, I'll get back to it...
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