Rocket Bear Games Blog

Has it really been a week since the last Rocket Report?  Unpossible!  Here’s what I’ve been up for the the last (suspiciously short) week.

Tech Stations

The biggest change is that all research is now anchored in buildings.  Remember how you could turn on regeneration and it would magically exist in the ether, healing everything?  Not any more.

The way things work now is that you need to build a special “tech station” that will have the effect you want.  So if you want regeneration, you have to pick a good spot and drop the regeneration tech station there.

There were a couple of reasons why I did this.

• First of all, my playtesters were confused by the ability to turn research off.  It just never occurred to them that you could click the button again to disable the technology and get back the resources.  Now all people need to do is recycle the building.
• A side-benefit (design-wise) is the aliens can now knock out your tech, so you have to be careful about placing your stations.
• There’s also neat interactions among the tech stations – like the engineering tech allows all other tech stations to build themselves.

Support Pods

One of the things that I’ve always wanted since I added the Robot Pod into the game is to have it as a quirky defensive mechanism.  They can’t be as good as turrets or mortars, because they’re so cheap, but I still wanted them to have a place.  I spent a lot of time fiddling with them, but it never came to anything.  I just couldn’t figure out a way to make them useful when towed and less so when detached.

Well, this week I just couldn’t resist and went back to mucking with the robot pods.  They’re slightly nerfed in the offensive power department now.  Specifically, I made it so that there’s a delay when they make a new robot.  The robot aggro range is 25% smaller too.  The plus is that now they can act as a small defensive station if detached, with the robot patrolling around the pod.

By the way if you don’t know how to detach the pod, select the soldier who owns it and right-click the pod. (I should make a button for that)

The fact that there’s a delay in making robots makes the pods a cheap, but fragile solution to defense.  They’ll do their job, but may get overwhelmed and killed.  After I tested the above change, I was happy with their defensive performance, but disappointed with their battle use.  It felt like I just shuffled things around.  What’s the point of paying 3 BP for something that’s worse than a fusion shotgun?

Afterward I got an idea for making them useful for soldiers again.  Robot pods now heal the soldier whom they are attached to.  The healing is about 2.5 times better than regeneration tech.  That way they’re still a great value.  Since they’re not just about robots any more, I renamed them to “Support Pods”

Misc

There were also a couple small, minor changes:

• I made the level editing easier in Inkscape.  I wish that I just wrote a level editor two years ago, but too late to lament about that now
• Small visual stuff, like recycled buildings fading out instead of vanishing

That’s it for this week.  Next week I’m going to revamp the research tutorial to deal with the new tech stations.  I also want to make a new mission.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2013 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Infested Planet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.