Weekly news

Hi everybody!

I've been quiet the last few weeks due to flu season and my whole family catching it one after another, with nights getting shorter with frequent awakenings. But the worst is now behind and I've been focusing back on Glassix 2.

For next version, I've been trying to focus on attributes and skills UI to make it more game like and understandable. So square icons are attributes and diamond icons are skills. Skills have two values: the level of the skill which is the value which will be tested against during events and is displayed with a golden vertical bar on the left part of the skill, from 0 to 100. Then on the right side, we have a white vertical bar showing the current experience accumulated for the skill which is required to level it up.

Skills maximum level depends on the character attributes and I've tried to displayed it in a simple manner, <current character attribute value>/<required skill value for a 100 score>. So if it shows 8/8 intelligence, it means this character has enough intelligence to reach level 100. Skills might require several attributes and all of them  obviously need to reach level 100. Otherwise, you'll simply be limited to a lower max level which could still be enough in some situation. I'll add in game help menu to explain all that again of course.

You gain skill experience by doing actions related to the skill so for sneaking, simply go sneak into NPCs room at night and so on, similar to Skyrim. Of course, there will be spells to speed up XP gain and since the game is moddable, it could even be possible to add new spells to even directly increase the level of skills or even raise the max level of a skill.

Skills will be required during some events but also for job promotions which is another part I'll work on for next version.

The idea is to display the full information of a business in a game like manner too. So each job will be display in its own block with relative information such as monthly salary, skill requirements and related actions in an order which reflect the promotion ladder. Something like Junior Professor > Senior Professor > Head Professor.

Getting promoted will require enough skills, work efficiency, seniority and some good relation with the person in charge of promoting (or blackmail?). Work efficiency will be calculated each month by saving how much time the player has worked and compare it with the maximum amount of time you could have worked (Based on the schedule of your job), that gives a percentage and the promotion will require a certain percentage. This way should give enough liberty for players to fool around some days and be serious most of the others. In the long run, I'd also like to add a yearly job calendar with some vacation weeks to make it more like real life and add unique festive events matching different culture or religion so that we can reproduce most real life celebration in game.

Each job will have different actions. Work will be the usual one but you could also have additional actions, such as promoting rights which would allow you to promote NPCs yourself. And when owning businesses will be added, you'll also be able to hire NPCs or fire useless ones. Kinda similar to Lab Rats 2. Some other jobs could also come with specific unique actions, like policemen having an arrest action allowing you to imprison any citizens you want (at the cost of you reputation or something like that) but you can see there's a lot of fun to expect with this action system, just need to code it.

On another aspect, I've also tried to advertise the game a little more on the F95 forums (since patrons don't give that much feedback unfortunately, but I guess I'll take money over feedbacks, shame on me :D). Anyway, I got some interesting feedbacks and the most urgent I got was to fix the indoor lighting which really affects the quality of the game. So that's another part I'd like to fix before next version. 

I'll try to implement all this asap and I'm expecting either 1 or 2 weeks of dev for this.

As for Glassix 1, we're getting closer to the end, CarpeNoctem expects one or two more updates on his side before reaching v1 for his part, and I'll have a few things to fix on my own which I'll try to squeeze with his updates. There should be one by the end of the month.

That's about it for this post. Thanks again for your support!