As the week and sprint 30 come to an end, we looked at a number of decals and concept art for the Thorcon Power Plant and the surrounding areas. As the social hub of the game, we discussed at length what survivors of The Great Fracture would have done to the area, and how they would have taken advantage of existing features like parking lots, onsite apartments, and the building itself. We looked at a number of possible living quarters, defensive measures, and quality of life improvements that survivors could have made in the years after the cataclysm. With all those things in mind, the Thorcon will get a lot of attention in the near future. We’ve also completed the planned zipline from the Communications Tower to the Thorcon, making travel a little quicker and safer.
We’ve made a number of player improvements as well. We did some work on inventory persistence including: Inventory ordering, loading in with persistent items equipped, and automatically setting items to equipped in persistence at pickup time when applicable. We made a few campfire improvements ensuring that you can enjoy your post apocalyptic smores, and we completed the game’s starting harvesting tool/weapon, a shark toothed pan. A tongue-in-cheek homage to the shark toothed (leiomano) weapons in the game, the pan isn’t the best weapon or tool, but is better than nothing in a pinch and is properly seasoned and non-stick.
One of our goals while working on the game is to use the actual geographic features of Lahaina as a guide, including the roads. We take a few liberties in some areas where we’ve changed the land, and to keep players flowing across the map, but for the most part, the trails and paths in the game are where roads really are on the island. They say “getting there is half the fun”, but creating a transportation network for players can be daunting task. So, we’ve been working on a tool to help quickly build these roads, and easily show the toll of time and weather. Below you can see a few examples of that work, making main roads that still hint to what existed before, and those that have disintegrated into nothing but dirt paths.
