Orbit2D

Category: Changelog

  • Changelog — title screen, crew camera, thirty levels, talents

    Changelog — title screen, crew camera, thirty levels, talents

    Four rounds of work on the tap-to-command prototype since the last changelog, all live now at
    orbit2d.co. Two of them are about the game finally introducing itself,
    and two are about giving a long session somewhere to go.

    The title screen surveys the actual world you are about to play.
    The title screen surveys the actual world you are about to play.

    A title screen that tells the truth

    Opening the prototype used to drop you straight onto a frozen crash site with no idea what you were
    looking at. There is now a proper loading screen: the title, the tagline, and a strip of the
    real minimap — not artwork, but the world that has just been generated for you, so no two
    loads show quite the same ridge line. The load line is honest too: it counts the tiles actually
    surveyed and the milliseconds it actually took.

    Underneath it, the details you would want before spending an hour in something: build number and
    date, the engine, the size of the world, the systems that exist, that it plays with one finger, and
    that it saves in your browser and uploads nothing. If you have played before it reads your save and
    tells you where you left off — “Base found — Fungal Basin, 12 m down · 34
    pieces placed · level 9”     — and offers Continue or a new
    expedition.

    The camera now goes where you are looking

    A small thing that was quietly ruining the game. Switching between the two crew members moved the
    selection but not the view, so half of every swap was spent hunting for whoever you had just picked.
    Selecting anyone now brings the camera to them: a roughly one-second glide if they are nearby, an
    instant cut if they are across the map, because a slow pan over 300 tiles is worse than a jump. They
    get a one-second halo so your eye finds them, and a line telling you where they are —
    “Vale — Crystal Fault, 31 m down”.

    Thirty levels, earned by working

    Rank, experience bar, and the pieces still locked behind it.
    Rank, experience bar, and the pieces still locked behind it.

    Experience comes from doing the two things the game is about: digging and building. A tile of
    regolith is worth 1, basalt 2, slate and ferrite 3, crystal 5, alloy 6. A wall or a ladder pays 5, a
    lamp or a heater 8, a bench or a beacon 12, a machine 15. Fitting an upgrade pays 60, and finding one
    of the landmarks out in the world pays 120.

    Two rules keep it honest. Salvaging something you built pays nothing back, and any given tile pays
    its build experience only once ever — so building and unbuilding the same wall in a corner is
    worth exactly zero. The curve runs from 45 experience for level 2 to about 10,000 for level 30,
    roughly 57,500 for the whole climb.

    Ranks are what hand you the game a piece at a time. You start with walls, packed earth and a
    ladder; the heater and hatch arrive at 2, a window at 3, lamps at 4, the craft bench at 5, the beacon
    at 7, the generator at 9, the planter at 11 and the galley at 12, with the seven upgrades threaded
    between them. Locked rows stay visible in the build palette with the level they need, because a
    prototype should show you what it is saving for you.

    Talents: a choice every fifth level

    Rank 5: dig faster, or build faster. The choice is permanent.
    Rank 5: dig faster, or build faster. The choice is permanent.

    Every fifth rank now hands over a talent point and two ways to spend it, and the choice sticks.

    • Rank 5 — Steady drill (dig 12% faster) or Practised hands (build 15% faster)
    • Rank 10 — Rich seams (one dug tile in four yields a second unit) or Long legs (crew moves 12% faster)
    • Rank 15 — Cold discipline (cold drains 15% slower) or Bright optics (headlamps reach two tiles further)
    • Rank 20 — Deep cut (another 15% dig) or Site foreman (another 18% build)
    • Rank 25 — Fuel sense (generators burn 30% slower) or Green thumb (planters grow 30% faster)
    • Rank 30 — Warm blood (cold 25% slower, and sealed rooms hold a little more heat) or Expedition certified (10% faster at everything)

    The pairs are deliberately not six flavours of the same bonus: miner against builder, loot against
    mobility, survival against sight, power against food, and at the top a specialist capstone against a
    generalist one. Two players at level 20 should be able to describe their run differently.

    The picker lifts about a second after the level-up banner, dimming the world so it reads as a
    moment rather than a notification. Dismiss it with Later and the point stays owed — the
    rank badge keeps a pulsing star until you spend it, and tapping the badge any time shows the whole
    tree with your picks marked.

    Where to find it

    The prototype is at orbit2d.co. The earlier keyboard build is
    still at orbit2d.co/build, and the first tap prototype at
    orbit2d.co/lab/tap. Next on the list: threats, and something
    to defend against them.

  • Changelog — tap-to-command: world, building, shelter, power, food

    Everything below is live on the production domain and was built and verified over the last few days. This is the changelog for the tap-to-command prototype: the mobile-first, indirect-control branch of Orbit2D. The keyboard platformer build still sits at orbit2d.co/build/, untouched. The prototype now lives at the root: orbit2d.co, with the same file mirrored at /lab/env/ and the first tap-to-command sketch preserved at /lab/tap/.

    1. The world

    • 420 × 168 tile world, 15 materials, strata down to slate at roughly 44 m.
    • Five regions with their own palettes, ores, flora, weather and base temperature: Rime Shelf, Ash Flats, Fungal Basin, Crystal Fault, Signal Ridge.
    • Five landmarks to find: the Crash Pod, the Rime Geyser, the Spore Grove, the Derelict Hauler and the Signal Monolith.
    • Brine and magma pools that run when you cut into them, cave worms tunnelling the deep layers, a 200-second day, weather that actually bites, and a flood-filled light field with bloom, glowing ores and crew headlamps.
    • Survey minimap, and automatic access-shaft planning: tap buried rock and the crew tunnels to it rather than shrugging.

    2. Placement

    Twelve pieces the crew can place, paid for out of the same hold that mining fills. Costs are reserved the moment a build is queued, so the queue can never overdraw, and salvaging a piece refunds it.

    • Stone wall (2 basalt) · Packed earth (2 regolith) · Ladder (1 basalt + 1 ferrite, climbable) · Pane (2 crystal, solid but passes daylight) · Lumen lamp (2 lumen + 1 ferrite) · Beacon (2 alloy + 2 crystal, shows on the survey map).
    • Heater (2 ferrite + 2 sulfur) · Craft bench (3 ferrite + 2 basalt + 1 alloy) · Hatch (2 ferrite + 1 basalt).
    • Generator (3 ferrite + 2 alloy + 1 basalt) · Planter (2 fungal + 2 crystal + 1 ferrite) · Galley (2 ferrite + 2 basalt + 1 alloy).

    Build mode is a toolbar toggle with a palette, ghost previews and drag-to-place. Pieces must attach to ground, rock or another piece — including pieces still queued, so you can plan a whole structure in one sweep. Pathing understands ladders and hatches.

    3. Shelter and warmth

    A hole in the ground is not a home. A room only shelters the crew if it is sealed: a flood fill from inside must never reach open sky, and must stay under 220 cells, so an open trench or a cathedral-sized cavern shelters nobody. Sealed rock does most of the insulating; heaters and lamps finish the job. In the Rime Shelf that is the difference between −63°C outside and a few degrees above zero inside.

    The suit has a warmth meter. Cold costs it speed and dig rate, and at zero it stops taking orders, keeps its queue, walks itself to the nearest heated room or back to the crash pod, warms up and resumes exactly where it left off. If nothing warm can be reached it huddles in place at a reduced drain until the drone digs or builds it out. There is no freezing death.

    4. Crafting

    The craft bench fits crew-wide permanent upgrades as a normal queued task: Drill bit II and III (28% and 55% faster digging), Insulated liner (cold drains 45% slower), Lamp cell (longer headlamp reach), Servo legs (22% faster movement), Fuel governor (generators burn 40% slower) and Grow spectrum (planters grow 35% faster). Materials are reserved on queue and refunded on cancel, exactly like building.

    5. Power and food

    This is the part that turns a shelter into a base you have to keep alive.

    • A generator burns sulfur — one unit is 30 seconds of full output, drawn from the hold automatically. It powers four machines within 16 tiles, nearest first.
    • Lamps, heaters, planters and the galley all need that power. Without it they are drawn dark and cold, emit no light and add nothing to a room’s insulation. Cut the fuel in a Rime shelter and the inside falls from +2.5°C back to −32°C. Beacons and the bench run on their own.
    • A planter grows produce every 50 seconds, but only powered, sealed and above −6°C — and it tells you which of those it is missing.
    • A galley cooks 2 produce into 1 ration. The crew gets hungry over about seven minutes, works worse when it is, and walks off to eat without being asked. No galley, no rations? It warns, works slowly, and carries on. As with cold, hunger does not kill.

    What it plays like now

    One finger, no keyboard. Tap ground to send, tap rock to dig, sweep to drag out a seam, Build to place, Craft to fit upgrades. Then seal a room, power it with sulfur, and grow and cook to stay fed. Every number above was measured in an automated run rather than eyeballed — including one unattended session that dug a pocket in the shelf, built the hatch, ladders, lamp, heater, generator, planter and galley, and had the crew living in it at +2.5°C against −52.6°C outside.

    Next on the list: threats that make walls defensive, and porting these systems into the main build.