Hello!
Most of this week was spent by switching between playtesting and fixing bugs/issues found when doing so. We get a little bit further in the technology tree every day as we play our multiplayer playtest game, it always uncovers few bugs or desyncs which we fix immediately so we can continue playing.
We also tweak some inconvenient things. For example, once we are able to build rails fast with the rail builder, it was annoying to mine these when you misaligned them, so we just halved the mining time of rails. The inventory space was running out in the later game, so we made the armor give the character an inventory size bonuses (up to 30).
We felt that the evolution factor growth doesn't slow down enough towards the higher value. In our specific game, it probably grew faster than usually as Scott was more than eager to test the new fire mechanics by setting every forest he found on fire. So we couldn't know what affected the evolution factor the most. We changed the formula of the evolution factor growth and added command /evolution. The game now tracks which factors contributed to the evolution, so you can get something like this:
Evolution factor 0.8702 (Time 9%)(Pollution 57%)(Spawner kills 32%)
It is great for balancing, but the players can use it as well, so they have a better clue of what is going on.
At this stage it is still faster to fix bugs internally rather than going through the bug section on the forums, that is why we didn't release so far, but it is starting to be quite playable these days, so there is a good chance for release next week :)
Once we decided that everything will be circuit connectable, Robert and Albert agreed that the wire can't just end in the middle of the entity, that it needs something more. So there is a small circuit box sprite attached when the entity is connected. I have to say that it adds a nice touch to it.
As always, let us know what you think on our forums
