Gosh, from a player's perspective, this is probably the least exciting update that I've released so far, but it's a very important one (to me)! 

My main goal with this update was to optimize and refactor. I knew that I needed to spend some time updating things in order to make future development easier on myself.  Difficulty was increasing! Up until now I had basically just been programming as fast as I possibly can - putting little thought into my game's performance (common for me when I'm prototyping). Luckily, I love optimizing and refactoring. 

The biggest refactor I did tied together a bunch of systems that all rely on the objective manager. The objective manager is in charge of spawning new objectives and sending out an "objective complete" event. This event was used by a lot of systems to move gameplay forward, for example, completing an objective might unlock a new UI, or it could cause an NPC to call you. This worked fine, but it made testing things difficult. For example, if I wanted to test something towards the end of the game, I would have to play through the entire thing in order to trigger all the events and unlock the correct world state. To fix this, I introduced a campaign structure that is composed of "chapters", where each chapter contains a set of objectives and has the ability to change the state of the world when it is loaded. Now I can jump to say: "chapter 5 of the tutorial campaign". This will make my life so much easier as I work on the next segments of the game. 

I also introduced a few fun new things! 

I added a nice little "poof" particle effect that appears when you place an object.

Lil guys can now talk to each other! I gave them a "social" value that is constantly falling and is refilled through conversation. *side note* (One funny thing that happened during development is that the lil guys were registering ghosts as people and were getting up in the night to talk to them and it was scaring them to death! Talk about facing yours fears! )

And finally, I added a funny feature where double tapping on the ground will now tilt the pod (sometimes scaring the lil guys!) This is actually useful if you do it at night because it clears all the ghosts in the scene. Besides being sort of funny, the real reason I added this is because you can now rotate the pod and flip it over. It's not accessible in the current build because I'm still deciding what I want to do with it - but the backside of the pod is fully navigable and will house the machines that make life possible in the pod. (namely an oxygen machine that you will upgrade in order to support more guys)  

As always, thanks for reading, and paying attention to lil guys! I'm having a lot of fun making this one :)

Clay