Lots of progress. Scent gen­er­a­tors do their jobs (when set on a timer), there’s a lot more infor­ma­tion in the inter­face, the sound sys­tem is almost work­ing (at the moment you can only hear explo­sions), holo­grams are almost work­ing, mon­ster info is dis­played in a crude man­ner, and for the mem­ory sys­tem to work I just have to hide the bits that are unknown. Mes­sages and other big wodges of text behave nicely, there’s a speed sys­tem, both player and mon­sters can run, sub­ject to the con­straints of sta­mina (and run­ning speed decreases as sta­mina is depleted). Screen­shot and sec­ond pre­re­lease will appear sometime-​​ish.

Still need:

• remote con­trols
• brain slices
• work­ing holograms
• gra­dated sen­si­tiv­ity to scent for monsters
• cor­rect sound sen­si­tiv­ity (explo­sions make you deaf for too long, foot­steps are inaudible)
• crit­i­cal hit system
• option to pick up/​put down/​hide/​activate/​configure items (at the moment only throw­ing works)

Win­ning is now a bit too easy, because high explo­sives kill things very reli­ably. I’ll crank up the mon­ster spawn rate when all the player’s nice toys are implemented.

This is what hap­pens if you hang around too long.

https://​github​.com/​d​o​w​n​l​o​a​d​s​/​e​s​s​a​r​r​d​e​e​/​m​u​t​a​n​t​a​l​i​e​n​s​/​m​u​t​a​n​t​a​l​i​e​n​s​-​p​r​e​r​e​l​e​a​s​e​.​zip

https://​github​.com/​e​s​s​a​r​r​d​e​e​/​m​u​t​a​n​t​a​l​i​ens

It’s playable, it’s winnable, it’s los­able. There are invis­i­ble explo­sions. There are also lots and lots of miss­ing fea­tures. But any bug reports or com­plaints or rec­om­men­da­tions would be appre­ci­ated! I’m par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in how fast you move when you hold a key down, because scent maps take a lot of pro­cess­ing and some of the intended fea­tures will require more scent maps.

Known issues:

• Long mes­sages and descrip­tive text don’t behave nicely
• On my mon­i­tor, blue on black is really dif­fi­cult to read (any sug­ges­tions for alter­na­tive colour schemes?
• Mem­ory is not bounded by num­ber of mon­sters and items that exist, but by num­ber of mon­sters and items that have existed in that run. I die or win before this becomes a prob­lem, and the num­ber of corpses you can make is bounded by your finite ammunition.
• It is not fun to have to inspect a mon­ster by tar­get­ing it and press­ing ‘i’ to find out how dan­ger­ous it is.

Urgh. There were some issues with a drill and some anaes­thetic and I spent yes­ter­day evening unable to con­cen­trate on cod­ing. So, lit­tle progress again. Things can be thrown, set to acti­vate on a timer, and reg­is­tered to the remote con­trol but not acti­vated using it. Hope­fully today will be more pro­duc­tive, since I have an excuse to sit around all day. Hamstertastic.

No real changes in game­play, but devices can be thrown, and they’re well on the way to being con­fig­urable to acti­vate on a timer or remote con­trol. Once that’s done, I can code up the effects, holo­gram pro­jec­tors, etc. Then the fun starts >:3

Con­fuses or fright­ens crea­tures with a psy­chic sense. Like that guy from the info­tain­ment datalinks.