Devlog 7 – Discord and 1st Steam Devlog

Well we’re finally here… our game is on the Steam Store page!
If you haven’t already add Buoyancy to your Steam wishlist.

Most of the scheduled features we had in our release plans are in game.
The only one that will be delayed is Tech Tree.
Now comes a ton of extremely fun things like QA, testing, polish, and bug fixing.

On other exciting news our Discord is finally ready for people to join:

JOIN THE DISCORD

https://discord.gg/xVxQP3h

Anyway here’s what we’ve been up to this February.


Factions

If you haven’t read the earlier post about Factions check it out here:
Factions of Buoyancy.

And here is a more in-depth lore summary of the Factions.


Harpoon Cannon

Elliott

This past month I worked on the Harpoon cannon. The cannon will use the same base tower as gun emplacements ex: junk cannon.

To help distinguish this cannon like the others, green canisters are used to change the color scheme the other cannon uses, on top of using a more lengthy silhouette.


Balancing

Shawn

Buoyancy has gone through many changes recently; one of the biggest is the balancing of resources and other variables. While the game ran great at expos and cons, due the short amount of time that players could spend at the table, it was not really a design choice that we wanted to keep. Moving forward we are looking to gear the game towards slower resource gathering and production, a reliance on exploring to take advantage of the resources in the world, and proper resource management with a focus on planning for the future of your city rather than the immediate.

To accomplish this goal, we changed the values of resources gathered and produced. We increased the construction cost of every building to better balance resource values (we also increased the amount of resources gathered and produced to compensate, so don’t worry about that). It made sense to have low costs (such as 4 or 5) when villagers were only able to carry one set of resources at a time. But now that villagers are carrying boxes with larger amounts of resources we are able to increase the costs of construction and production. This is giving us greater control of these values: a building with a construction cost of 4 can only be tweaked by whole integers, causing any change to be a 25%/point buff or nerf. While with the new values, that same building could cost 20 and any changes would be reduced to a 5%/point buff or nerf. While these values are mere examples, you can see it’s allowing us to make more precise changes.

Hunger, nourishment, and happiness drains and gains have been addressed as well. Obviously with slower gathering and production of food, there’s less available for the village to consume all at once and the old drains would be too great of an obstacle to overcome. We aim for food to be consumed consistently rather than in bursts as before.

Reproduction and death have seen quite the change, as well. Deaths will appear more frequently but in smaller amounts (versus the near apocalyptic bursts that once happened). This is the same for reproduction, players will no longer see huge influxes of population growth and will notice instead a slower rise in their population.

And finally, world resources have seen a buff in their value and gathering rate bonuses. With the reduction in gathering and production rates and quantities of buildings, the resources out in the world will become even more valuable to find. With the rower system in place, this makes the prioritization of construction, production, and movement a more difficult choice for the player to make.

These are just the start of the balance changes and there’s many more on the way as we introduce new planned features. We hope that these changes will bring more enjoyment and challenges to the players when we launch early access where we will be looking forward to everyone’s feedback to make Buoyancy even better.


City Wars

Zomawia

City Wars is (mostly) feature complete. It still needs a ton of polishing, testing and bugfixing.

Expect some cool gifs and videos later on.


Ranger Barracks concept

Zomawia

We’ve been using the Guardhouse as a placeholder asset for the Ranger Barracks building. I made a 3D concept that will eventually replace that placeholder.

I tried making it like a shooting range mixed with a small barracks. And the tire portholes for the nautical theme extra coolness.


Under Construction Pieces

Elliott

Construction phases for all buildings have been finished and are ready to be implemented in-game.

These phases will change the look of how building construction is currently presented.

The objective is to provide players imitate feedback on the completion time of buildings being created in their city, while not trying to appear as finished.

Construction progress of Scavenger

Kobey

Elliot’s Construction Pieces Assets have been imported into the game. Buildings will go through stages of construction showing different versions of the buildings while it is being built.

Every City Builder needs cool construction progress!


Building Placement Preview Mesh

Kobey

I don’t know why we didn’t add this before, but you can now see the mesh of the building when you are trying to place it.


Polish and Bug Fixes

Kobey

Since we are nearly approaching our Early Access there is little to be done in the form of new mechanics. So mostly I’ve been working on polishing existing mechanics in the game with the new balancing changes and lot’s of bug fixing. Some of the bigger polishing I’ve done is:

AI Navigation

I re-worked our AI’s navigation to avoid walking through buildings and other obstacles. Buoyancy requires an constantly changing Navigational Mesh since the City it always changing.

Input buildings properly closing

This was less of a bug and more of something we overlooked. Due to the new balancing changes resources are more scarce and stockpiling/rationing is very important to survival. Before Input buildings would still ask for their input need to be met even when they were closed. This would mean your Smelter is still sucking up all of our Wood if you planned on closing it to ration your Wood to other buildings.

Now when you close an Input Building villagers will no longer try to bring resources to that building, unless they were already in transit on their way there.

Event Manager

I created an Event Manager to make sure certain events don’t overlap with each other. It can be pretty destructive when you are attacked by pirates. Which causes your city to not being able to move and then a storm comes in and you can can’t get away. So certain events will prevent other events from happening at the same time. We do have plans to convert this more into an AI Director in the future, but that is not confirmed at the moment.

Bug Fixes

  • Many Improvements on Input buildings requesting resources correctly
  • Fixing Delayed Rowers/Incorrect Rower amounts
  • Villager Status not displaying properly
  • Production speed not working properly on first tick of a resource node
  • Refinery Major Status displaying when crude oil requirements is met, but not Blubber

Villager props

Keenan

  • Finished Butcher props
  • Finished Fisher props
  • Finished Smelter props
  • Finished Deepdiver props
  • Finished Junktower LOD
  • Finished Junktower gun LOD
  • Working on Solder Props
  • Working on Solder Upgrade Props
  • Working on Baker Props
  • Working on Trader Props
  • Working on Forager Props

Other Updates

  • Improved Color lerp for Nourishment, Happiness icons
  • Additional idle animations for villagers
  • Redone villager animations: Fishing, Reeling, Working, Idle
  • Additional combat idles for military
  • Walls prototyping

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