We have major update to Keep Them Sleeping coming soon. We have another project in the works, but before we dive into that too heavily we feel that Keep Them Sleeping was left partially finished. The upcoming release will be attempting to resolve that.
90% Scripted
The game is now mostly powered by Scribe, our scripting language. At the moment everything except for the very core of the game runs based on these scripts; so items, processes, and sub-systems are all powered by their own scripts. This has allowed us to work on balancing the smaller components more easily. We’ll be including a little bit of documentation with the game for Scribe and the engine, for anyone interested in playing around with it.
Traits
The game originally supported different “immune system strengths” that would affect how the crew members all reacted to the events in the game. However, it was difficult to balance, so everyone just shipped with a standard value. We’ve revisited this and now there are currently 6 traits in the game; a good and bad trait for each stat – Feeble/Hardy, Light/Heavy Sleeper, Weak/Strong Immune System (they can also generate with no trait.) We’ve contemplated adding a few more, but it’s not on the roadmap at the moment.
Music and Sound Effects
We added a music track to the game that was created for us. We also added sound effects to the UI and when asteroids hit.
Merged Cures
We merged the infection and disease cure into a single “cure”. Having both didn’t quite make sense after multiple play-test sessions. For scoring, we averaged the two values together and went with that. For clarification, there is still a distinction between being infected and being diseased, but there is now a single cure item and cure process.
New UI
We’ve revamped the UI with a new skin, some layout changes, and some animation (the layout is still WIP):
We’ve still got a little bit of work left before we can release, mainly testing. Scribe has had lots of testing already, but it hasn’t been used to this capacity before so we want to really work out the kinks.
Since we stopped working on Lord Sen’s Battle Arena (LSBA), we have spent a lot of time stabilizing the multiplayer library that we were developing to run it. We’ve fixed some major issues with player connectivity (receiving the proper message once connected, receiving messages when players connect/disconnect, receiving messages when the server shutdowns to name the major ones.) We’ve also ensured that if a player disconnects, the library provides the ability for the player to reconnect. We allot a certain amount of R&D time each sprint and right now that time is going toward finding solutions to some of the problems that we’ve encountered ourselves while playing some other games.
Now, having mentioned LSBA, I’m not sure if it will be seeing a revival. We have a few different prototypes that we’re playing around with, but we haven’t decided what our new project will be exactly. We have a few ideas that we’ve had in our dev forums for years, so we’ll see. What we can say is that it will be multiplayer-based with PvP and co-op play. We’ll post some screenshots or videos of the different prototypes soon.
