Last week the colonists got a skeleton. That left the drone as the least convincing thing on
the screen — a rectangle with a circle at each end and an orange dot for an eye, hovering next to a
character that now has knees. So this week the drone got the same treatment, and then everything
else got a polish pass, which is the sort of week that produces no new features and makes the game
feel twice as finished.
The drone is a machine now
Chamfered hull with a top plate and vent louvres, two booms out to ducted fans, a curved
antenna with a bobble that lags behind when it turns, a gimballed sensor head on the nose, a work
arm that extends and jitters when it is cutting, and nav lights — teal forward, red aft, blinking
out of phase with each other.
The part that makes it read as a flying machine rather than a drawing of one is a single number:
throttle. It follows the drone’s real speed as a fraction of its top speed, and then everything
hangs off it. Blade blur, the opacity of the downdraft cones under each fan, how far the whole body
tilts into its direction of travel, and — the detail I like — the bob. A drone working hard is
steady; a drone loitering with nothing to do wallows a little. Getting that the right way
round is the difference between “hovering” and “waiting for orders”.
The sensor head is on a gimbal that aims at whatever tile the drone is cutting, using the same
angle that aims the suit’s pick. And the cutting beam is three things drawn on top of each other
now: a wide soft sheath, a bright pulsing core, and an additive glow at the point of impact. It
used to be one flat orange line.
Then the polish list
Small things, all of them the kind of thing you only notice when they are missing:
- Rock fractures as it is cut. The progress ring is still there, but the tile
itself now cracks — one to five fractures radiating from the centre, seeded per tile so they are
stable, spreading as the cut goes in, with a white flash on the exact frame the pick lands. Digging
is the single most repeated action in the game; it should have had feedback in the world, not just
in the HUD. - Selection is four corner brackets instead of a box drawn across the character.
You can see the rig you have just selected now rather than a cage around it, and the pick-up pulse
is an expanding ellipse. - Particles have physics of their own. Each one carries a size, its own gravity,
an alpha and a fade rate, so boot dust is small and round and drifts, breath rises and thins, and
rock chips are chunky and fall hard. They were all identical squares under identical gravity
before. - The contact shadow was being drawn through the middle of the body. A one-tile
off-by-one: the ground helper returns the standable air tile, so the floor is one below
it. Now the shadow is under the boots and never above them. - The crew list speaks English. “moving” was doing a lot of work; it is now
walking, climbing, flying, digging, building, at the bench, eating, tunnelling in, retreating,
huddling, loitering or idle. - The strip under the title reads dig · build · seal · power · feed · rank up, which is
what the game actually is rather than what it was five rounds ago.
Two bits of housekeeping worth admitting to
First, the game now understands ?nointro=1, which lands you straight in. That is
for the test harnesses: since the cinematic went live every automated check had been sitting
through forty-three seconds of descent, or worse, clicking at buttons the cinematic was covering.
Adding the switch surfaced a second thing — one of my check scripts had been quietly broken since
the title screen was added weeks ago, clicking at a button through an overlay and reporting
nothing. Silent test failures are worse than loud ones.
Second, a polish pass is a good moment to check you have not quietly made the thing slower. I
measured before and after: at a device pixel ratio of 2 with both crew mining, the new build runs
about a quarter faster than last week’s, and it is a locked 60 fps on desktop and on a phone
viewport. Cracks, dust and blurred rotor blades cost less than the contact shadow bug was costing
in confusion.
Live now at orbit2d.co as v0.7.3.
Leave a Reply