Hello Erwin,
Thank you for the question! The studio is currently resolving some internal issues that are apparently blocking the release of the product and having nothing to do with the game itself.
In the meantime, I have not stopped active development since there is always more to improve! I'm personally committed to seeing this project to launch.
I'll give you two examples as a personal update on my work:
Personal Log
(done-ish)
I added a personal log, where characters now record various thoughts (reasons for in-game behavior) which you can read.
Some background on this feature is that whenever the character has a morale event, a piece of text gets written which explains the reason for the morale change. This has been implemented since the beginning, but it's never been visualized -- there was nowhere this text was actually displayed. So you would play the game, and see characters' morale stat go up and down, but have no idea when or why it was happening.
So, I first changed all the text to be written in the first person using the procedural textgen, and then packaged the feature to be a "personal log" from the character's perspective where you can see all the morale events and reasons. Allowing you to actually identify and fix the problem the character is having. Morale events (and corresponding personal log update) are triggered both on the station and off the station (on a mission, on the ship, etc).
This is done-ish, because it ended up exposing some bugs which weren't detected until the morale events were actually viewable. I'm still playtesting it.
Personality-Job Interaction
(in progress)
Personality always affected job performance, and how this worked was never visualized either. In short, characters use a fibonacci based points system on their skill level + personality modifier vs task size to come up with how long it takes to do the task. If you work in an office environment that does any sort of Agile/Scrum/Lean development, then this should sound extremely familiar. Gameplay wise the fibonacci scale means a level 1 skill character takes forever to do a task that a level 5 skill can do in a short amount of time, with personality modifying the skill from -2 to +2 depending on the job fit.
There are three TODOs here:
- Minor change to how the personality modifier is generated (just for consistency) -- done and in testing
- When a positive or negative personality number is generated (meaning the character loves or hates his job due to personality fit) it triggers a morale event and the character writes it to his personal log. So with this improvement, you can actually see that the task will be faster or slower than normal and also what aspect of the character's personality causes this. -- in progress
- Update to task tracker UI to show the task chart and expose the logic behind task times -- in design
Hope you are satisfied with this update, and I very much appreciate your patience.
Kind regards,
David