Project Update 2/16/17 Bursts of Inspiration

With a month and a half to go I have reached goals and have set better and more realistic goals for the remainder of the project.

A current demo of "Free Play" can be found here:

https://youtu.be/afzGFyJ7Rlk

I have completed a short demo for free play, with the bulk of the behind the scenes work either done or laid out.

The basic concept of free play goes like this: you sit in this space station module and do your best to advert disaster. There are four other crew member and 4 resources/hazards. The Crew members are Shepard, Ride, Bluford, and Onizuka. The four resources/hazards are Fire, Pressure, Toxicity, and Oxygen. Right now events pop up that raise hazards and lower resources. Pressure and oxygen start at ten and a fail state is triggered when they hit 0. The hazards are fire and toxicity, a fail state is triggered when they hit 10, they start at 0. Each crew member is on a timer. They each take a certain amount of time to complete tasks and they each have different strengths when it comes to tending to hazards and resources. For example, Shepard, who is featured in the demo, has a fire skill of 2, pressure skill of 3, a toxicity skill of 3, and oxygen skill of 2. He is very balanced, every crew member's skill total ten. Shepard's time to perform maintenance was 3 seconds in the demo but should be closer to 30.

The other crew members will have the follow features.

Ride - strong vs toxicity, less effective against the others, medium cool down

Bluford - decent vs fire and pretty good with increasing pressure, weak with the other two, medium cool down

Onizuka - greatly increases oxygen, but very weak in all other areas, long cool down

There will be a mechanic where there is a chance of crew members dying each time they perform a task. It will start around 5-10% and increase with each task they perform. On a death, it is a 50/50 double or nothing RNG roll to decide their final act. Their final action either has twice the usual effectiveness, or none at all.

In these upcoming weeks I will also be finishing a story mode that will be composed of just 3 missions and the end credits. The chapters will be "Wake Up", "Disaster", and "Futility." Chapter one is what I featured in a first demo some weeks ago, a version of that at least. Chapter to "Disaster" will be a shortened version of free play mode with out characters dying. The final chapter will be a daring repair attempt from the player that almost saves their lives.

I cannot wait to make more progress and share it here.

Until next time.