Since the last dev log, we’ve been implementing UI and running playtests, trying to make Genome as comprehensible to the player as possible while figuring out which mechanics to whittle down to facilitate Genome’s core play experience.

UI Updates

The first of the two major things to get a UI update is the “looking outside” mechanic. The player looks at buildings outside to collect the associated buildings’ environmentally unfriendly emissions.

The UI for collecting resources from buildings used to look like the left screenshot, and now it looks like the right screenshot.

The bar next to the selection is supposed to show the player how much of that resource is in the building. For example, in this power plant, there is no dioxin available, and some polychlorinated biphenyls are available. We’ve been playtesting this feature a lot and some ideas to help it be stronger have come to mind. Such as each building only having one emission available or having the player click to obtain resources instead of just looking at the building.

The second of the two major things to get a UI update is the “body system interaction” mechanic, where the player puts the emissions they’ve collected into their current district’s associated body systems to destabilize the district and its inhabitants’ likelihood of getting sick.

The UI that activated when the player interacted with a body system used to look like the left screenshot below, but now it looks like the right screenshot below.

This has been relatively complex to implement and a lot of iteration is still going into it. Still, with the new UI it’s definitely more accessible than the weird number list we had before. Currently the exocrine system and digestive system use this new UI, but we are going to be updating it so that it works also with the respiratory system in our next milestone.

Time Controls

Time controls now only affect the outside world and don’t impact inside the ship. Accordingly, the skybox is set to have one day/night cycle be a month in Genome time.

The time controls are now accessible in the 3D space, as shown below, and work with the previous keyboard time controls as well.

The big clock is now set to work in months and days as the hour and minute hands respectively, as shown in the screenshot below.

3D Models 

The stomach model is updated to be more stomach-y and intuitive for the player. To process resources in the stomach, the player drops them into the top half and watches them dissolve in the bottom half. Before, this minigame happened with a bunch of unity primitive squares. Now it works with the actual model for the stomach, which is shown below.

    The buildings that the players get resources from have been updated from unity primitive cubes to little monopoly-like meeple houses, for easier recognition of their status as “building,” as shown below.

Prayers

The prayer system is now functional in all the ways we want. We have started rewriting and implementing some of the prayers from previous iterations of Genome. These will serve as both major and minor “quests” that provide direction and choices to the player and help them become familiar with the systems of Genome.

Cutscene

    There is a new cutscene added at the beginning of Genome that gives the player context for the world they are in. As text appears on the screen, the camera moves left and right or up and down, depending on the moment of dialogue the player is reading. Shown below is a brief screenshot from the cutscene.

And that’s about it for this dev log! Thanks for reading.