Devlog #002

Hello capitalists!

Welcome to a new devlog. Topic this time are changes to energy game mechanics. So let's get right to it!

First off, I'll explain how the energy network connectivity used to work.
Whenever you placed an energy network node (a building or a pole for example) the energy networks looked up all possible connections and selected the best ones based on maximizing connectivity and minimizing connection distance.
So, whenever you've placed a building it was auto-connected to all networks in reach without control and requirement for the player to interact.

This behavior introduced a variety of issues, most notably though the lack of control.
It was just completely impossible to separate energy networks, which is what should be an importance of designing the energy infrastructure.
There are different voltage networks currently available and they have different network capacities. The idea is to use a large, costly, high-voltage network to carry energy long distances.
While for short-distances like inside a city, an industrial production park you build or other areas you can put down a transformer that will transform high to low voltage and make it actually usable for the buildings.

With the previous design this has been pretty hard and annoying to deal with since the auto-connect often did connect networks which you intended to be seperate.
There were a few other, smaller reasons like aesthetics for changing this behavior, but the lack of control was my main motivation to go for changing this now.

The goal of the new design was to give the player the ability to control how the game will connect different energy nodes.
But at the same time I wanted to avoid making building energy infrastructure become an annoying thing where you need to manually click to create each connection.
So I've designed it this way:

• 1. When building a new energy node, by default no connections are placed at all
• 2. While building energy nodes, you can press the left control and alt key to get back the original behavior of automatic-connection building
• 3. While building energy nodes, you can press the left control key to connect the building to the previously built one

These rules allow for fine-grained control when needed and keep the comfort of the previous solution and for now they seem to work quite well.
So, this design issue is solved \o/
See the following video for the new placement mechanics in action:

Along with the connectivity mechanics change I've completely reworked the (previously minimalistic) energy network user interface.
It now contains statistics which can be used to track energy consumption and storage. Here are a few screenshots showing the new interface:

You can see the energy storage interface here, showing charging state of a battery farm.

Here you can see network stats of a network that has solar panels charging a battery farm at changing weather conditions.
As usual nothing here is final and it will most likely change again before release. But this seems good enough to me for now.

I've been a bit busy with work lately and have not accomplished as much work since the previous devlog as I wanted, but there is steady progress, and I've fixed / improved several other small things.
Most of them have been bug fixes, but I do have another small change I can show. 😁
Cities now have nameplates which can be clicked to open their interface:

Unfortunately there isn't much more to show right now, but I keep working on the to-do items which are left for the first playtesting phase. Most notably: UI polishing, scenarios and the tutorial.

Thanks for reading,
Have a nice day!