For the last while, I’ve been pretty focused on getting Station Generator on the Humble Store. Once my application was approved I needed to get a whole bunch of marketing type stuff together to put the Humble Store page together. Most of it I had already done or had versions close enough that editing them to fit was a non-issue. The one thing I didn’t have funnily enough was a trailer. Well, that’s been sorted now (Huge thanks to everyone involved).
Since I’ve been away from the actual development of my companion app (That’s how I’ll be referring to it from now on as it makes more sense, Station Generator isn’t a game of itself and Utility or Tool doesn’t quite do it justice) for nearly a month it’s taken be a little while to get back into it, that said things are picking up pretty well. The next update to Station Generator is gonna focus on UI improvements.
At the moment I’m very much working on the backend, and it’s going well. I have a test environment that has 20 sliders and various controls in it (Though the companion app has more than that, it’s all I need for testing purposes). I’m pretty much done with the backend for balancing them.
How sliders work in the app is going to change. At the moment the room types are split into primary rooms, and secondary rooms. And they’re both handled differently. Primary rooms numbers are decided directly by the user, secondary room numbers were determined by a weighting given by the player. how these rooms were chosen was kind of arbitrary and decided by me, which you might like, or you might now. But why not put the decision in the hands of the user, after all they know what they want, there’s no need for me to try and second guess them. So I’m working on a new system.
There will be no such thing as a primary or secondary type room, users will have to ability to decided if they want to just weight a room, or decide exactly how many of room they want, or switch between either on the fly. They’ll know exactly how many rooms of each type will be in the next generated station (I’m also planning on putting current station stats somewhere) and even what approximate weight even the numbered stations have, putting more power in the users hands to create exactly the type of station they want. It will also make creating presets much more powerful.
The next plan is to actually redesign the user interface to try and make it more user friendly, make more sense, flow better and have room for some the features that are planned in future updates.
On another note, I’ve started a little marketing thing where I give away a space station map generated in Station Generator every Saturday. The plan is to give people a taste of what it can do, and maybe it’ll a) increase awareness of Station Generator and b) hopefully create a few sales! Time will tell, it’s a tough one to track I suppose but we’ll see if anything comes of it.
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