Alpha 2 is now live, and free to download on itch.io!! 🥳 

Over the last few months I’ve added electricity, refined diary entries, added in the first background music, fixed a bunch of bugs, and generally improved the whole user experience. If you’ve submitted any feedback, thank you!

Electricity

Following on from the previous update, some buildings (such as lights, and the transmitter you need to win the game) now require power to function. You can either go the renewable route with solar panels, or the quick route with coal.

Be warned, though – while coal generates heaps of power, it also generates heaps of carbon dioxide…

Diary entries

There’s still a lot more work to go on this, but now pawns write their diary entries when they’re idle (rather than the entries appearing out of nowhere), and you can see them writing away.

Building feedback

When you’re trying to place building blueprints, you can now immediately see what’s about to be built. You also get immediate feedback (visual and sound) if you try to place a building in the wrong place – for example, a light with no ceiling, or a tree with no foundation.

Release notes for 0.4 (Alpha 2)

New Features

• Electricity!
  • Some buildings (such as lights) now require power to function
  • Power needs to be supplied from generators using wires
  • New buildings: wire, battery, solar panel, coal generator
  • Batteries can store excess power, but gradually discharge over time
  • Coal generators can consume coal to generate power (and a lot of carbon dioxide)
• Diary entries!
  • Pawns now visibly write diary entries whenever there’s an interesting topic they want to write about, and they aren’t doing anything else
• Music!
  • Adaptory now has its first music track, written by Katie Morton ❤️
• Pawns can deconstruct buildings using the new “Deconstruct” tool (keyboard shortcut X)
• Individual buildings can be deconstructed by clicking on “Deconstruct” in the building panel
• Pending build errands are rendered with dotted outlines, making it much more obvious what’s going on
• When trying to place a building somewhere it can’t be built, it’s rendered in red
• Added custom mouse cursors to provide extra feedback about the currently selected world action
• The volume of sounds and music in the game can now be changed in Options

Balance

• Maximum daylight is now 2000 lux, not 200 lux – so lights can’t power solar panels
• Blobs of coal are now generated throughout the world, closer to the landing site
• Trees can now absorb carbon dioxide from its diagonal neighbours
• The transmitter now needs to be powered
• A new game now starts with 4 pawns

Internal

• Build errands for buildings that require a ceiling or foundation can now be placed against other build errands
• Raw items that are gases and liquids (e.g. carbon dioxide previously stored in a tree that’s since been deconstructed) dissolve into the element simulation if there is space
• After a tile has been built, automatically push out any pawns or raw items within that point
• Pending automatic supply errands from the same item to the same target can now merge
• Added social links to Steam and our Discord
• Camera can be moved with arrow keys as well as WASD
• Updated libgdx library to 1.11

Fixes

• Fix pending tile errand icons not showing above some buildings
• Fix some bugs where buildings could be built on top of other buildings or solid tiles
• Add some missing raw element images
• Trees that couldn’t emit any more oxygen are now displayed as blocked/unable to emit
• Fix a bug where buildings were sometimes not accessible immediately after they were built
• Fix content blocks in panels sometimes not immediately refreshing when they should
• Fix pawns not going outside to supply or build until the door was already open
• Fix a crash on M1 Macs when trying to open a web link