v0.2.0 - Chapter 1 [Major Content Update]

Well, here it is - the first major content update! I really hadn't expected to be making this any time soon, but with how incredible the response has been, you all really inspired me to continue the project sooner than planned.

Assuming interest is still high, I'll be looking at doing one major update every 2 months as a baseline. Most of my time on this update was spent building new features, rather than new content. Hopefully the further through the project I get, the more the features I need will already exist and I can just focus on more content.

I've also enabled donations as a way to (hopefully) show my manager (SO) that this project could make some money eventually. I'm not expecting or asking for much, because I know the game is still in very early stages, but even a few small donations now could go a long way towards showing that a decent number of people might actually pay for it when it's done. Though just to be clear - even if no one donates, I do intend to aim for regular updates. Donations would just give me more leverage to spend more time on it.

Hope you all enjoy!

Note on Saves

I did try to keep the game as backward-compatible as  possible when it came to loading old saves. But, as the game will inform you (assuming you have a save from before the update), I wasn't entirely successful. I did get a selection of saves from v0.1.2 and loaded them on v0.2 so I could iron out the worst of the bugs, so I'm fairly confident nothing will crash. But it's more than likely that if you continue from mid-loop, the balance will be somewhat wonky until you loop. And the game may 'forget' some actions that you you did in the previous version, so you'll have to do them one more time before everything gets back on track.

The safest way is to definitely do a hard reset, but I know that no one wants to keep losing their progress with every update. To some extent, the game is a lot more stable now, and most of my hacky solutions to problems have been replaced with more sensible ones. So it should be far less of a problem in future updates anyway. But just in case, I will be deliberately aiming/checking for 100% compatibility with old saves in future versions rather than the current 70-80%.

Content

• Added the first chapter of story (~5k words of logs), covering the Laurion facility and setup of the big challenge for next chapter.
• Minor additions, changes and balances to the prologue content.

Features & QoL

• Areas can now have their own resources. Players will draw from the area's resources first when possible. Resources may also be non-vital (you don't die if they run out).
• Progress on certain actions can now persist between loops (e.g. if you're exploring somewhere new, you keep your progress because you remember where you've already looked). This is currently indicated by the action being blue instead of grey.
• Actions with limited completions now show their max completions and remaining completions on the action list.
• Right clicking to start/queue an action will cause it to auto-cancel just before it finishes.
• Holding ctrl/shift while starting/queueing and action will add 5/10 attempts to the queue.
• Pressing space will toggle the manual pause.
• Death messages will now be different depending how far you got.
• New actions are now highlighted until you mouse over them, and a 'new actions count' is shown at the top of the action list.
• Added a Loop Now button which appears on your third loop.
• Added Export/Import save to the Options.
• Fullscreen mode now scales everything up (text is bigger in fullscreen).
• Inventory now shows resource items at the top, grouped by resource type and sorted by amount restored.

Bugfixes

• Leaving in the rover now properly locks all previous actions 
• Spamming to queue an action you can't complete no longer passes time (turns out this didn't even grant you XP or progress the action, it literally just wasted time).
• Buttons on the Game Complete screen now work.
• Loading a save where you're half way through repairing the rover now longer wastes your items, potentially leading to a softlock.

Known Issues

These are issues I noticed before I released this update, but chose to push them back to keep my planned release date since they're not game breaking. If I can find a quick/simple way to fix them in a bugfix patch then I will, but they may get left for the next major version.

• There are one or two places where actions which the player is aware of and may have performed before aren't available due to other actions that you have/haven't performed, and it might not be obvious why unless you've read and remember all the story messages.

In the future I'll add a 'Disabled' condition to actions, so they can be visible but red with disabled buttons and extra info on the tooltip when you're aware of the possibility of an action, but don't have the necessary items etc to do it yet.

• If you load a save while certain events are active, the effects of the event will be applied twice (e.g. draining twice as much air per second), and only one stack will be removed when the event ends. Looping will fix this.
• Actions which drain resources don't update the Resource hover tips.