Week 8: Celebrating Chaos

Remember when I had a perfectly functional spacecraft with working systems? Well, I fixed that! Now my ship gets struck by lightning and punched by asteroids, and it's infinitely more entertaining.

This week was all about environmental hazards, which is a fancy way of saying making ways for everything to break down.

Hazards by the Mile

The core premise of Running Late is that you've diverted your ship through an improbably dangerous part of space by using a gravity whip to get to the wedding on time. It's a chaos generator and you're just trying to hang on long enough to make it before "I do." While I have a number of these hazards planned, I was only able to get in two. But they're pretty cool.

Lightning Strikes

First on the agenda, space storms! As you slingshot through the nebula between you and your destination, you will run into storm clouds that ripple along the skin of the ship, overloading your power systems. Electrical hums, lightning effects, and at some random point during the storm, POP, you blow a fuse. Power cuts out, engines go quiet. Time to feed the fuse box a new energy stick.

Of course, if you're quick on the draw, you can pull the fuses out of the fuse box early, and prevent any damage, but you'll be losing whatever time you're adrift. With limited spares, managing the fuses is important.

Debris Fields

Careening through space means running into a few pockets of space dust and floating rocks. Your first cue is the sound of dozens of tiny objects bouncing off the hull until a heart-wrenching crunch lets you know there's a fresh hole in the ship. Grab your space putty because we need to patch the cabin before all the oxygen is gone.

Of course, I don't have the space putty yet, that's scheduled for a later week. As is the camera shake. Actually there's a lot left to do, but hey, I said I made hazards not repair systems.

Wedding Disasters

In-between these physical issues, the wedding itself will be throwing out its own disasters which you'll have to navigate as well, possibly at the same time as these more immediate problems are arcing through the cabin. This week I did some research into what wedding disasters I might have happen.

Here's some of my favorites so far:

• The bouquet toss gets sucked into the air recycling system.
• A guest brings a contraband space pet; it eats the entire wedding cake.
• One of the wedding photographer is actually a station stowaway, gets adopted by the family when security come.

Unlike physical hazards, which are based on how close you're getting to the station, these social situations are time-based, and will run independently. Keep your ship AND your social life together at the same time!

Preliminary Assets

I've been working on stepping up my game, but I'll be honest, a few things this week are at that "prototype" level. The audio lacks spatial positioning, there are no spark effects when the lighting hits... heck, I don't even have visible asteroids when you run into debris—just sound.

But there's time for all of that after the core systems are in. Sometimes you need to embrace the quick-and-dirty implementation and move forward. The electrical storm sounds stormy, the asteroid impacts sound impact-y, and the air leak sounds... leaky. Good for now.

Tracking Time

One of the design challenges for the game is to give the player enough to do. Hazards are a huge step forward to giving players actions that matter in the game. Can you make it to the station? Can you help your cousin recover the alien before the ship falls into a gravity well? These questions make the ride more fun.

Next Week: Armed and Dangerous

Week 9 needs to be dedicated to overhauling the pickup system. In order to repair the holes in the ship, you're going to need space putty, and that means picking up the putty, and animating slapping it on with a putty knife. I've done animation, but this will be fun to see if I can pull off cleanly.

I'll get some new arms from the Fab store. If you're going to celebrate chaos, you might as well look good doing it.