Welcome to the first dev-log of 2024, which casually comes on my birthday. I am happy to celebrate it with the biggest update in terms of new features since I started working on this project! As I mentioned in my previous update I was expecting this month to be productive, but for once reality exceeded my expectations. Without further ado, let's dive into all the new features and changes.

Mission accomplished!

I am proud to start this dev-log announcing that one of the main missing features is fully implemented... at last it's possible to complete a mission! At the moment there are 3 different mission types and more will be added in the future.
The mission completed dialog will be expanded and improved in the future, for now I just wanted to implement a minimal version to get done with this important feature. The results of your conquest are also reflecting on the planet map of course and when you complete a mission that territory will be assigned to your faction and new missions will be unlocked.

Abandoned temple

The second main task planned for this month was a special structure that can be considered as an advanced loot box: an abandoned temple. You will find abandoned temples while exploring maps with your units.
When you make your unit interact with one using the action button you will get a dialog that asks you to allocate some resources. Those resources influence exploration time and success rate and obviously the more you spend the better conditions you'll get.
Then you can start the exploration or you can leave. If you decide to proceed you will see a new dialog when the exploration is completed. This dialog will present you three possible outcomes:

• Exploration failed, but nothing happens
• Exploration failed and you have to choose between 2 penalties
• Exploration succeeded and you can choose between 2 rewards (see next screenshot)

When your exploration is successful the temple will also be conquered and it can be linked to your base to expand your influence area.
At the moment rewards and penalties are all affecting your resources and their production, but also the existing resources on the map. More and different ones will be added in future updates.

A medic joined us

I introduced a new unit: a medic. Not surprisingly, it is specialized in healing other units.
Healing is a new unit action implemented this month and it's something all units can do, but medics do it better of course.

AI will shoot you

This month I also spent some time working on the AI, which now is able to attack your units when in range.
Another very important new feature is the possibility to interrupt a task when a higher priority one comes up (like for example attacking an enemy).

Planet screen redesign

I worked on a partial redesign of the planet screen. This is how the screen looked before:
And this is how it looks now:
It's important to keep in mind that this is not the final design, just a new iteration and that things will change again in the future as I work on new features and add more content.

Map dragging

Even if it was already possible to navigate a map by edge scrolling and the WASD keys I decided to implement mouse dragging as it feels more natural for quick/short movements of the camera. This feature also comes with 2 options in the settings dialog to control the speed of each drag and to disable entirely the dragging as you can see in the following screenshot:

Minor updates

- Many fixes and improvements in the game code and in SGL, the game library which is the tech core of Virtueror. - Updated code of the open source repository on GitHub to the latest changes. The latest commit that made it into this update is number 1700 (Virtueror + SGL combined, as usual), which means a very respectable +108 commits from the previous month. That is more than double the commits I put together during the month of December... not bad! The secret of so many commits is that I worked on Virtueror 28 out of 31 days this month and as you can see from my commits heat-map the difference with the previous months is pretty clear:
Now my goal is to do at least as well during the month of February.

What's next

This time I won't anticipate anything because I am planning something special for next month. I can only disclose that next update will be a true milestone for the project and, if all goes well, it will bring a new minor version as well. In case you wanted some anticipation, you can follow the development as it happens and the best way to do it is joining the official Discord server of Virtueror.

Support this game, wishlist and follow!

If you enjoyed this update and if you want to support Virtueror make sure to wishlist and to follow it. Thanks and see you in a month with a new update! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1607580/Virtueror_The_Virtual_Conqueror/