Release planning for 0.5.9 (and 0.5.8.1)

I’d like to put my money where my mouth is and finally get into programming. I’ve been building myself up to it for a while, and given I spent a year as a software developer a while back, I think I’ve got the skills for it. Although I never used C#, I did a lot of work in Java, so…close enough.

Unfortunately I won’t have time for anything until I’m free of university (I’ve only been around so much this last week due to Easter break). That will be the end of May. So I can’t help with a 0.5.8 patch, but should get at least something into 0.5.9.

I compiled a list of things I’d like to work on, roughly in order of estimated difficulty so that I can work on them in order as I get up to speed. Some of them are things I’ve personally wanted to see in the game for a while, so they don’t really match the list of priorities. If anyone wants to tell me something here should not be prioritised in the near future, please do.

  • Adjust some sound effect volumes.

  • Finish my alternative movement control scheme mod. The actual code changes are done, I just didn’t get time to package it into a proper mod (probably using Thrive Harmony).

  • Pause hotkey. I seem to pause the game a lot, and it’s annoying not having this as a hotkey. To avoid player confusion, this would come with a GUI element when the game is paused telling the player to press the key to unpause.

  • Some basic Easter eggs, from this list or elsewhere.

  • Improve the visuals of the chemoreceptor line. Currently it’s too thin and visually uninteresting.

  • New game settings screen, including a functioning LAWK toggle, but only placeholder planet generation. The planet generation seems the hardest part of this, and I’m of the opinion that it’s not necessary to implement in order to include this screen, and can instead be added later. There’s scope to include a few other things here, such as rudimentary difficulty settings.

  • Providing LAWK gets implemented above, add the thermoplast.

  • Add fossilisation. This was a feature planned eons ago, where players could select species from their environment when the game is paused and save them for later viewing in either the freebuild editor or a content library (similar to Spore’s). Given that we have both pausing and a method to generate PNGs from species in the game now, this may not be massively difficult. Or it might be. I don’t know yet.

  • Slime. Ok, hear me out. This is another agent, and one planned a long way back. Once the player adds a slime secreting organelle, they produce slime (or mucus or whatever a more scientifically accurate description would be), much like the way they currently produce OxyToxy. They can then release it into the environment, creating a cloud. Cells which swim through this cloud are temporarily slowed and temporarily can’t engulf. I think this would be a good addition for two reasons: a) it sounds fun, and b) it would nerf engulfing, which can get OP at times.

  • Day/night cycles. Probably requires more design work than coding to be honest, but I’d like to see it in the game soon, if only so we have a reason to add bioluminescent organelles.

  • Adjust membrane maths to create cell shapes closer to their hex design. Definitely tricky, but I am doing a maths degree, so maybe I can give it a shot.

I highly doubt I can get through all of this before 0.5.9, and it may be more fruitful to ignore some of these and jump on other issues. But if we’re talking about things people want to work on, then this is my list.

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