The work on improving the building system continues, with new transform manipulators, and a better way to align parts together.
The demo pre-release branch is updated now with the new manipulators and alignment system.
It’s been a while, so time for a quick progress update! I’ve moved into a new place now and I’m back up and running, so that distraction is out of the way thankfully. I’ve been continuing work on trying to improve the building system. Part multi-select is now pretty much done, and I’ve been trying out some ideas for selection rotation, check out the latest dev diary video for more details.
These changes are in the demo pre-release branch on Steam, so give that a try and let me know what you think!
Hey everyone! Things have been kinda hectic lately, I’m currently in the process of finding a new place to live, which has been quite disruptive to getting work done on the game. But, I’m still slowly making progress, and it’s time for a long overdue update I think.
As you may know, in the past I’ve gone back and forth on whether to change the building system in the game to make it more user friendly. Although many people have gotten used to the current controls, I still think that quite a few (especially new players) find them a bit awkward and off-putting. I really should have dealt with this a long time ago, but I just couldn’t think of a design that I was happy with, so to be honest I just kept putting it off. Anyway, lately I’ve been having another go at prototyping some new ideas to try and address these problems once and for all.
I’ve made a dev diary video on all this, that way it’s a bit easier to explain what I’ve been working on!
Hey all, I’ve just put out another minor demo update, just a few tweaks and bug fixes in this one.
Release notes:-
Just released a minor demo update with the help screen improvements and quick / auto save!
Release notes:-
Time for a quick update on what I’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks.
The first thing to mention, in case you missed “tutorial week” last
week, I released a series of tutorial videos for GearBlocks beginners,
so do check those out if you haven’t already. Click here for the playlist.
Help screen
I’ve been working on improving the help screen in game. There’s now a section that lists all of those tutorial videos, and clicking on a link will open up the Steam overlay and play the video.
I also added a quick reference guide to the main screen UI:
The last section has a list of controls for the tools, but I’m planning on improving this by changing it to be more of a step-by-step “how to build” guide.
Auto save
Currently there’s no undo functionality in the game, and it’ll be a while until I can get to this, so in the meantime I’ve implemented an auto save feature. At least this way there’s less chance of people losing all their progress from an accidental deletion for example. In the gameplay options menu the time interval between saves can be configured, or auto save turned off altogether.
Right now there’s only one auto save “slot”, but I’d like to add multiple save slots (e.g. two or three) that it cycles through.
Quick save / load
I’ve also implemented quick save and load. Pressing F5 saves the world (again, there’s currently only one save slot). Holding F9 for half a second will load the last saved world (whether it be from an auto, quick, or regular save).
Hopefully all of these improvements will make life easier for both new and experienced players!
The seventh and final episode of the beginner’s tutorial series, introducing the world tool, and wrapping things up!
Episode six of the tutorial series, introducing some more tools, for changing materials and painting your creations.
Five episodes into the tutorial series, and we finally get to try out some gears!
Part four of the tutorial series, this time focusing on parts with controllable behaviours, such as motors and lights.