Dwelvers Journal - 2014.06.07 - What's next (After 0.7c release)

[Rasmus]

I feel like this release have got rid of most of the serious bugs, there are probably some still there, but I don't think they will make the game unplayable.

I really want to thank you all for the help of tracking down these bugs, you have been a big help to me and I really enjoyed working against a list, it made things a lot more easier..

Before I can say that the 0.7 version is up to my own expectations I need to start working on giving the player a lot more feedback when it comes to the room linking system, the dark mother feeding and creature production. Everything also need to be balanced a lot better.

But what I am working on now is to make the room linking more obvious, and the player should get messages when it failes in one way or the other, or when a room need more workers to meet the demands.

Also, the building info is not enough, the buildings need a lot more info than just a status icon. By hovering them the player should know what they are producing, what they need to produce, their activity and why it is failing more specifically.

Take the baking table for example, this baking table needs water, flour and wood. It is pretty easy for me to find out (time-wise) which of these items are delivered slowly comparing to the other items. I just need to find a good spot to list this information without it being to distracting for the player.

[Excess]

I recently had to juggle the linking of my cookery room between the dark mother and my storage room, because every time my bread/beer production stopped it was because the room which was linked too had run out of ingredients, as they where being stored on the other.

It took me a while to realise this; it wasn't very intuitive and it was painful trying to solve it, as we don't have (yet) any say on where which resources are stored on.

Nonetheless, once I understood what was happening, I finally managed to shut the dark mother up about problems in my chain of production

The only thing that I kept running low was water. It's like the imps have a really low priority with water. They grab some when they don't have anything else to do.

I would love having a third flag to put down: The priority flag. A flag that would raise the priority of the resource/construction plan/object that I put it on.

[Rasmus]

I suspect the issue was that the storage room and the dark mother room wasn't linked together and they were getting separate ingredients for the baking table?
About the water, all buildings outside the rooms are handled by the same imps that do the path claiming and the digging and so on. So if they are busy doing something else I can understand why the water wasn't being produced.

Maybe we can handle it in another way than a flag, I imagine the player wanting to put down more than one flag and ones there are to many flags out there the issue will come back. I am thinking about a way to prioritise a production of a certain item, or the transportation of other items.

[Mello Tonin]

Maybe we can handle it in another way than a flag, I imagine the player wanting to put down more than one flag and ones there are to many flags out there the issue will come back. I am thinking about a way to prioritise a production of a certain item, or the transportation of other items.

I think having something like this which could pop up when selecting a store room would make the whole storage and what goes where problem go away completely.

We have an image of the store room to know that is what we have selected, where the bottom part of the window shows who is assigned there. In the main section in the middle, we see a quantity of what is stored in that room, and directly underneath it are controls on MIN and MAX items to store. You can select the resource from the list and then hit + or - or type numeric value in the MIN and MAX items stored. Adding a option to select between different tiers of importance could help make sure items are stored in a particular store room closet to its gather or refinement source.