We’re in Cape Town, South Africa this winter. Our first time in Africa, so we had to do a safari and see us some Big Five. We chose Etosha national park in Namibia and rented a 4×4 with two friends, two tents on top. I nearly had this release ready to go into testing before we left, but a last minute bug stopped me from uploading it in time.
That’s okay. Game development rule #5: Never release the day before you go on vacation, or on a Friday afternoon… unless you’re indie work all weekend anyway.
The biggest change in the new version is children. Tiny humans (called Goats in the code justcuz) who are born and grow up, assuming they’re spectacularly lucky enough not to die in the process. Luck is indeed on their side in build 0.70.2, since the events that might kill them aren’t in yet. They’re treated as equipment… I know, I know, it isn’t a very kind metaphor, but it keeps them from getting underfoot in a gameplay-and-ui sense. They DO each have a “Colin ID” in the code, which is kind of the Rebuild equivalent of a soul.
Children must be equipped by a caretaker at all times. Equipping a child lowers your skills to represent the time needed to raise them, but they provide a happiness boost because they’re such inspirational little devils. They eat half as much food as adults but don’t take up a house. They can be born (to a married couple only right now) and grow up to be full adults at age 14, whether they’re actually mature enough for it or not.
This is just the start for children. Next month we’ll be adding events to make them more interesting and useful. Young Sophia Sassy-socks will soon be able to:
- help her dad out around the farm
- ask her parents to check for monsters under the bed
- get lost and need to be rescued by mom
- climb down a narrow well to see why the bucket’s stuck
- go to school
- make friends with the boys from St Micheals
- find a cool toy and learn an important lesson about sharing
Any other suggestions? Let me know.
Namibia was intense btw – we saw lions DOIN’ IT and all kindsa other animals: two kinds of zebra, thirsty giraffes, snoozing hyenas, the delicious kudu and graceful springbok, common warthogs and baboons (both are suburban pests here), snoozing hyenas, and the terribly endangered black rhino.
Hello, I spent 5 hours playing Rebuild 3, and It was an amazing experience. I enjoyed being able to make polices, communicate with factions, and many of the other features in this game. Now, I dabble in the arts of coding, but I doubt I could even come close to the scale of what you achieve. I know the game is only in the beta, but I have some ideas for the game I think you may be interested in.
Will this game be free like the other two or will it just be a steam game because I looked at it and $10…