I’m happy to announce that Ludeon Studios is now a federally registered corporation in my home country of Canada! This new ephemeral paperwork status should allow us to actually manage money properly to make deals with contractors and such, avoid some taxes, and learn entirely new kinds of paperwork.

Work on the game continues. Recently I’ve added a whole ecosystem of plants and animals, enhanced various graphical features, and made colonist behaviors even more robust so they’ll sleep and eat outside if needed.

I decided to remove the old breathability system. For a long time, various actions couldn’t be undertaken outdoors because the air wasn’t breathable. This system was a holdover from when the game was called Starship Architect and was basically a mix of Dwarf Fortress and FTL.

The original idea was that being left without air would kill colonists, as it does in FTL. Later, the game was moved to a planet’s surface and became about exploring and going outside to do things. So I weakened the air system so that lacking air merely prevented eating and sleeping and made people unhappy.

Unfortunately, this arrangement proved to be rather annoying. It wasn’t dramatic like vacuum deaths in FTL. It wasn’t interesting to work with or construct. It was mostly just an obstruction and a chore. Players would pressurize their rooms and then forget about them. When a wall was damaged or destroyed, colonists would become unable to sleep in their rooms and players had trouble understanding why. And it created really brutal failure spirals where a colony would be damaged in a fight or something and the lack of pressurization would leave them unable to eat, leading to their insanity or starvation. I’d rather colonies be able to recover from hits and soldier on – the game makes much more interesting stories this way.

I’m working on weather next.