Welcome to the fourth devlog for the now newly named, Genome:BodySystem. We've decided to add this addendum to the name of the version of Genome we've been working on because there'll be multiple Genome games on Abby's itch page, which will be confusing. So the Genome that's being developed with Sloan's support is now Genome:BodySystem, the name to reflect the mechanical changes that have happened in Genome's design to incorporate the respiratory, digestive, and exocrine body systems.
Below we describe some of the changes we've made since the last Sloan milestone in 2022.

Visuals
Added in pipes to the brain control to add more nuance to the ship. Unsure if the extra nuance adds too much business to that area for the player to look at. With the anomaly lights added into that area we think it brings a good balance of visuals to look at.

We're also trialing some changes to the glass material on the windows of the ship - one common point of feedback is that it's hard to know if there is glass there or nothing at all, and we want to make it clear that the windows are glass, without obstructing vision of the environment outside the ship.

UI/UX
Moved the anomaly lights to be in one group above the prayer log. In some playtesting we got feedback that thought the lights were meant to represent resources gathered physically inside the ship, and the player didn’t really know what was going on with all the lights being in different places.

Post-processing changes now if time is frozen vs if time is moving forward. Along with this, nothing is able to move if time is paused.
Below: on the top, time is frozen, on the bottom, time is moving forward.

The prayer log now has the functionality to open up a current or past prayer to get more details on what the prayer is. This is done by the player clicking on the small-form of the prayer. This is shown in the screenshot below.

The 'resource collection' interaction is one thing people have been confused about in playtesting, and we've been experimenting with ways to make this more intuitive.
We tried adding a visualization effect where resources would rise up from their associated buildings and pop into the player’s inventory. In the screenshot below the player is looking at the glue factory and resource balls are appearing above it.

This got too complicated to implement and make on our end so after experimenting with this we moved onto a different approach, displaying a little "+X" notification when a resource is collected:

Hopefully this helps to convey the fact that resources are being collected while a player looks at a resource building.

Code
Under the hood, we made big changes to the way dates and times are managed, which is easier to use and less susceptible to bugs, and integrates with the player's ability to change the flow of time using the 'time controls' in the ship. We set up a general framework for scheduling in-game events, which we use for scheduling new prayers, citizen birthdays & deaths, and citizen migrations, among other things.

We've also made updates to the logic for when citizens gain 'mutations', which can be good or bad ('survival mutations' or 'maladies'). Citizens gaining survival mutations is the ultimate objective of the game - the player wins after citizens have gained 9 unique survival mutations. This progress is displayed via the 9 lights in the brain area.

Finally, we've continued to fix many minor bugs, slowly making the game feel smoother and more polished overall.

Writing
We’re still just writing a lot of the prayers and seeing if they make sense logically in the game/with what they’re asking the player to do. There’s a lot of testing going on with the space of time between each of the prayers, how long the player has a prayer for before it disappears, etc. We are experimenting with how much we explicitly tell the player vs don’t tell the player via the prayers. 

Other
We added in the credits scene, it’s not too complicated but it gets the job done. The credits scene is accessible from the start screen.
Added in sounds for time changing speeds, little clicking sounds like a camera is being used.