Hello Genome Devlog Readers,
Given thanksgiving, we’ve been a little slow on development these past four weeks, but we’ve gotten some stuff done and are proud to show it off!

Sound Pass
The first sound pass has been implemented. Many sfx have been included but we’re just going to go into the few that stand out to me. Added in is a low base-drum hit chiming when the player looks at different buildings outside, meant to feel like the stakes of absorbing these pollutants into the player’s inventory really have an effect. Another is a seeping gas sound effect playing when a prayer appears on the player’s screen to be read, giving the feeling of ending cryogenesis when the prayer is being read. 

Models
There haven’t been too many 3D art updates but here are a few things we’ve changed since last devlog.
The brain interface screens are now more built into the ship, and are no longer just floating solo by themselves under the brain. They're a bit smaller and lower to the ground which makes them a lot easier to read.
The digestive system and respiratory system have had pipes added to them to make them look more integrated into the ship.

Prayers
The way that the player gains information about both the world of Genome and what they’re supposed to be pushed towards to do in Genome is through receiving Prayers from Genome’s citizens. The Prayers give the player the macguffin– to find 9 bodily changes in all of Carmel’s citizens, along with giving the player smaller goals like “get this population to 200” or “increase the amount of substance in this population.”
Currently the player can only accept prayers, not reject them, but after we had a discussion with our mentor, we think we want the player to get the option to reject some prayers as well, as some prayers ask for things that may be harmful to the player’s game state. For example: asking the player to increase a body system’s value by five biological chaos when the system’s previous biological chaos is at 95 (thus bringing the chaos to 100, losing the game for the player). Instead of us building out procedurally generated prayers that never bring the player harm, we’re just going to bring more agency to the player by allowing them to accept or reject prayers. 
We’ve tentatively determined that there are going to be, after the tutorial, around twenty prayers in total over the span of 200 in-game years, so there’s a new prayer about every 10 years. Previously, we’d wanted it to span over 400 years, but this timeline feels more realistic. 

Game Design Choices
The “key words” of Genome are constantly being updated to better suit what the game is trying to represent. We’ve changed the stat name “instability” to “biological chaos”, which tracks how likely a citizen is going to go through an “anomaly” (used to be “bodily change”, and before that “mutation”), so that the player has to jump through fewer hoops to understand what this stat means, aka it’s easier to increase biological chaos than increase instability in my brain at least. We’ve also, as shown above, changed “bodily change” to “anomaly” to better fit genome’s verbal aesthetics.
Finally, we’ve changed “resource” to “pollutant,” which works better in terms of verbal aesthetics but may be weaker on the science side, since not all the substances the player collects to put into the game’s body systems are necessarily pollutants, but are known as toxins. Hey, maybe “toxin” is the word to go with!

Playtesting
We've been continuing to playtest the game often. Right now we're focusing mainly on the tutorial section at the beginning of the game. In playtesting we've found that many players are overwhelmed by all the information and different systems they're confronted with in Genome, and we want the tutorial to gradually introduce some of the systems to avoid frustrating new players.
Playtesting has also helped us find places where the UI is inconsistent or unclear, plus plenty of minor bugs, and we're working to clean those up. The resource collection UI is particularly unintuitive for a lot of people so we've been thinking of ways to make that interaction more natural.
We’re slowly getting into testing the “meat” of the game, the tutorial plus the first few prayers after. Soon we’re going to start long-term testing for the game in its entirety, after getting some design feedback from our mentor.

Code Updates

• Lots and lots of bug fixing
• Making the resource deposit UI smoother and more consistent
• Some modifications to the 'health chart' on the citizen display to make it more readable
• Fixing the implementation of 'biological chaos' - adding and removing resources from body systems now has an impact on the 'biological chaos' value that shows up on the health chart. If it gets too high or too low, citizens die.
• Adding new possibilities and flexibility to prayer requirements, so that the designed prayers can easily be implemented in the game.
• The cursor is now the reticle and moves with the cursor when the cursor becomes unlocked