It has been such an intense week. I have recovered from my sprint, albeit my body clock is currently still broken. I spent the past days checking out other peoples' games. I am super grateful to everyone I met and who played Stormbridge, and especially to those who have left me detailed feedback outlining how I can improve the game. (Glumpis Games, cyberden, calsmurf2904/Team Broodrooster, Ssercon, BiggestBoof, etc, and Scott who was one of the first to leave me feedback!)

Thanks to the feedback, I now have the foundations on how to proceed with the game. I have prepared the next update to ship once the jam rating period is over. The following are highlights of v0.6.

Top feedback will be addressed:

• New quest after objectives to guide players to prepare for storm
• Peace duration reduced
• Storm will get longer and peace gets shorter with each storm survived, culminating in permanent storm
• Workshops nerfed and requiring more settlers as it was very strong
• Certain research effects have been fixed and modified
• Reduced lag when constructing new building
• More accurate and informative tooltips on unclear aspects of the game

New content:

• New dash ability to replace janky sprint
• New research
• An upgrade FX and sound effect will be added

However that is not all. As I was catching up on sleep, I actually brainstormed various ideas for this game. I'm not sure why my brain seems excited to work on this, but I think I want to spend some more time pushing this idea to see how it goes. Thus, I wanted to share some exciting developments I will be making to further flesh out the game and concept. I have already begun work on several of these ideas.

Traders & Epic Buildings

Find the mysterious trader that roams the seas. Sell your excess items for metallic coins and purchase blueprints for insanely powerful EPIC buildings, settlement-wide technologies, and pets.

Rare materials such as sand and titanium may be able to be mined, as well as premium foods.

Some of them will be really huge in scale (look at how tiny people are at the bottom of the crane below!)

Electricity

Shields will consume electricity. If you're not careful, you'll run out of power during the storm! New buildings will be unlocked after the first storm as you learn to manage your power grid. This has already been coded but needs balancing.

New buildings to manage electricity.

You start with basic charcoal and move on to burning natural gas only obtainable at high rates from islands.

Boss fight, Storm HP

The storm cloud will have HP, and you must use different buildings like deflectors to stun it and turrets to damage it. Buildings can also be protected to withstand multiple lightning strikes. As the storm receives damage, it gets more aggressive. The HP system has already been coded. I now have a checkbox that I can turn on, and the boss will have HP and no longer one-shot by the Faraday's Device.

You can also use the new Storm Attractor to weaken it prior to the fight, at the tradeoff of making the storm appear earlier. Or use the new Storm Blower to blow it away at the cost of resources.

New Combat buildings

With the introduction of storm HP, you will gain the ability to stun the storm, damage the storm and also affect its aggression level in future. Here are some buildings that will be added to add variation to the combat.

The shatterdome is my new favorite building aside from the shield. It is a defensive structure that can change the path of the lightning strikes and make it attack itself rather than other buildings!

Also, buildings now have a 'health' variable. The shatterdome has 6 HP, which means it can withstand 6 attacks.

The shield will also be changed, getting a 'hit FX' effect when struck, but also terminate after repeated strikes.

 There is synergy that can be created with the shield + shatterdome. But beware...shields will cost a lot of electricity to absorb strikes now. It will also break after too many strikes.

Pets & effects

Create a little zoo and gain unique buffs. Pets stay for all future runs. You can only equip one pet at first, but each run increases your max pets.

• Turtle: +5% chance for a building to withstand two hits
• Giraffe: +5% chance of a farm producing x2 food
• Hippo: +5% Deflector stun duration
• Caique Parrot: +5% happiness to settlers who pass by it (one-time)
• And more

Storage

It is easy to hoard so many resources and trivialize the storm. A storage system will be added to create a more natural civilization growth, as you have to upgrade to hold more items. If the storm destroys your storages, you lose items, so keep them protected.

Settler revamp

• Assign idle settlers to work at certain buildings.
• Certain buildings like fishing and crafting require settlers.
• Epic buildings will require 50 idle settlers each.
• You can also overwork settlers, but they will eat more and get unhappy.

Settlers not assigned to anything are idle. Idle settlers will give generic productivity (current system), so you don't have to actively assign everyone, but this lets you specialize your settlers. In future, there may be different kinds of settlers, such as engineers/doctors, with different needs, that are required by higher-tier buildings.Settlers are pretty boring right now. You just need 100 for the final building. This will motivate you to get as many settlers as possible. And I like the overwork mechanic hehe.

Along with this, a 'deactivate' feature will be necessary to free up idle workers.Injury/Illness

• Storms will cause panic and injure settlers. Build clinics and hospitals.
• Illness can arrive from temperature and weather changes.

Repair Bot

Slowly rebuilds 6 buildings to its left and right if they are destroyed, using 50% material cost.

Planes

Send planes out to discover new islands, with a small chance to get sand and rare Titanium for powerful epic buildings.

Planes can also arrive with rare buffs that boost the settlement temporarily. This was an idea I wanted to add with buff cards, but had no time in the jam.

Warship & Airship?

I just wrote this on the fly. On the topic of planes, send out battleships or even a giant and build a slow blimp that can attack the storm from the air! Okay I think I'm getting crazy, but wouldn't this be pretty sick? I think would be cool if you can upgrade them too - with cannons, anti-lightning penetration armor, rain dissipators.

Specialization Bonuses

To add more variation and allow you to specialize in a playstyle of your preference, you can now choose some buffs as you hit certain points or milestones. These milestones can be accelerated by paying coins and constructing technological buildings.

• Herbalist
  • +10% speed to all farms.
• Industrialist
  • +10% speed to all cranes and smelters
• Strategist
  • +10% turret and reflector damage
• Scientist
  • +10% workshop speed bonus
• Meteorologist
  • +30s peaceful duration
• Electrical Engineer
  • +10% to electricity generated and storage
• Hoarder
  • +100% capacity to all storages
• Treasure Hunter
  • +5% chance of treasure at islands
• Illusionist
  • Remove a random debuff

Storm Debuffs

After every storm encounter, your settlement will be petrified. You have to pick a debuff.

• Settlers will not eat vegetables
• Settlers will not eat fish
• Settlers' hunger rate +20%
• Happiness -10% every 60 seconds.
• Productivity -20%
• Building cost +10%
• Card speed -50%
• Homeless settlers decrease 1.5x happiness
• Cranes cost 1 electricity/s but work at 2x speed.

Debuffs last throughout the run, but can be cleared by paying coins to the trader or by using a specialization bonus that can cancel debuffs.

Achievements

• For beating chaos mode?
• For owning all epic buildings?
• For collecting all the pets?
• For surviving all storms?
• For maxing out the research tree?

Tornadoes

Fight other types of storms like tornadoes, fog and rain. The final superstorm combines all weather elements to test your skills.

Biomes / Temperature

Progress further to the right to reveal the desert and ice biome. You need to build thermal regulators to keep your settlers alright, and produce appropriate clothing. If you can also protect the penguins there, they may join you as companions or serve as wonderful pets or build igloos

Multiplayer?

Question mark. Will be fun to try but I'm not sure if it's the kind of game people play together with friends.

That's all for ideas.

Refactoring

Because a lot of the code written during this jam was hackily put together to create the base prototype, I had begun refactoring to make the code easily extendible. This will make adding features more enjoyable from now on. I have already removed all my hacky static variables from my StormManager, and moved all the NewGame() initialization code to its own script. I removed minor duplicate code and turned duplicated objects into prefabs. I'm beginning to love how clean things look already to set the right foundations for the future.

I have currently already implemented boss HP and the electricity system which should come in v0.7. I'm super excited to showcase more of!

I didn't expect this post to be so long. In a subsequent post I want to talk about my reflections of the jam, my experience and my learning points, as this post is getting way too long for it.