This week I began to code the final major element of the game; the news events. These events will serve to present the story arcs of each play-through. every 48 hours a news story will break. Each story will have one of 6 possible endings: failure or one of the five groups succeeds. The conclusion to the story will be presented 24 hrs later and the conclusion selected will be based on the jobs the player completed in that 24 hour period.
For exmple, one story will have an infectious disease break out at a colony. If the player has been completing jobs mainly for the EcoHarmony group, the EcoHarmony ending is selected. In this scenario the colony is saved, but the quaratine imposed prevents any trade with the colony for a random period of time. Had the player failed a number of missions, the story would conclude with the colony surviving, but becoming infecious meaning there is a risk of the player becoming infected if you do trade with the colony for the rest of the game.
The idea is that the news stories permanently change the landscape of the world and the player can influence how the world is changed.
The stories will be a mixture of random events, such as the disease story, and group specific stories, where the player can influence how the story of particular groups plays out. The group stories will follow a particular path each time, but will be interspursed by random stories.
In other news, I finally managed to complete the coding of the particle weapons, which I'm lad to get off my back as it means I'm now able to script all the weapons for the game now.
I also fixed a few minor bugs that were hanging around and adjusted the balance on some of the segments.
Generally I'm making good progress and the majority of the stuff missing now is content. So over the next few months I'll be creating all the little sprites for the unlockable equipment and scripting all the story arcs as well as sketching out some music, which I'm still working on.
Here's a video of the current build in action.