This few days have been pretty chaotic in terms of gamedev, but there are visible results nonetheless.

The usual

 1* c8234bb Display drone stats in printer ui
 2* 66e84d6 Add Radar upgrade
 3* 703c2c0 New Strand model
 4* 8e9bbc9 icanthandlethisanymore
 5* 7adddc2 A helllallot of things..
 6* 196daec Popups for interactions
 7* fd89820 gravel
 8* 471f45c Automatically look at printer screen, add rock pile
 9* 3a98330 Improve Strand buying
10* adb4e5c Show if player cant afford an upgrade
11* d018813 Battery bar changing colors
12* c31be83 Adjust Thundere parameters
13* 53397f5 Fix transitions to same drone
14* 002066b Thundere
15* 9c97162 Fix strand placing
16* 342fc2c Buying strands, strands being consumed
17* a23cb54 Popups for Printer
18* d11cd95 Popups
19* 9b66485 Placing Strands

I’ll quickly go over new things, because there’s a lot.

Now, you can buy and place Strands! Those are the antennas that extend the range of you signal - a key tool for exploring. And also, they got a new model, which looks much better.

I added a lightnings effect and it looks really nice. It adds much needed dynamics to the scene.

There were also UI updates, with things like popups and better layouts. Here’s how the “fabricator” screen looks now:

A massive improvement in readability.

After some in-house playtesting, I added a “radar” component, which shows nearby ores. It was needed, because with the crappy resolution you have in the beginning, you can’t really tell what’s what. It will tell you that there’s something cool nearby, but you still have to use the camera to actually pick it up. The design of the UI was inspired by Destiny’s radar (I hope I don’t get sued lol).

The map/terrain got changed as well, now it’s a (dried out) riverbed. This should help me with scope, by limiting the area, and with progression, by giving some linearity, at least in the beginning.

I also had some… issues… with git. That’s where commit 8e9bbc9 comes in. You see, I, early on, added git-lfs to my repository, because it seemed to make sense. The initial setup was easy, but it was a trap. A few weeks ago, I (accidentally) committed and pushed a 500MB file, which was replaced with 3MB in the next commit. However, the file was already being stored on the remote. And it was fine for those past few weeks, but I finally ran out of my free 1GB limit on GitHub, so I had to do something.

I’ll add that I consider myself a pretty advanced git wizard. Rarely I get into situations in which I have to google something. But when I do…

First I had to find that file, which involved running some cursed magical spells bash commands from stack overflow. But before that, I needed to export from lfs to non-lfs, because reasons. Then I tried to squash the commits, but lo and behold, some crlf->lf issues. On almost every commit. For a good few hours I was running various commands in various combinations to no avail.

I mean, finally something worked, but I don’t even remember what. Anyway, now git-lfs is gone and my sanity with it too. Should be smooth sailing from here on out.

UPDATE: It was not smooth sailing. I tried to checkout an older commit, but it was causing Godot to crash. I switched back to current commit, but it kept crashing. It turns out a large portion of my files got corrupted, without me noticing and they even got pushed to remote, so even good old “delete and clone again” didn’t help either. Luckily I had a copy of the whole project, so I managed to salvage pretty much everything, except for some minor changes.

Definitely the lowest point so far…

But now everything should be fine, all traces of git-lfs are gone and I have many backups (:

I have some polishing to do, mainly in terms of UI. Which I’m not really looking forward to. At least it will be something to show, right?