I told you I’d let you know when we finished Mexico.
We finished Mexico!
It was mostly done a week ago, and we moved on to Chicago (which actually entailed moving backwards to the first zone).
Making things is hard.
Mexico
Last time we talked, there were a couple maps in Mexico, but none of them really worked.
Now we have the Mission (a quest hub), the Old Church (a raid), the Cantina (a raid), the Bank (a raid), and the Textile Factory (another quest hub).
We also added a new vehicle for the Mexico zone: a Tubman 601.
Yes. There are lots of Three Amigos references.
Customer Orders
When we finished Mexico, we planned to turn immediately to Chicago’s high-rise towers and bustling sausage factory, but there was still one piece of core gameplay I hadn’t invented yet, and it needed doing before I started on that suburb-heavy third zone.
The missing piece was customer orders. I already had raid maps where you run around a warehouse battling the worker drones and stealing from the opened boxes. Those provide you robot parts to unlock and upgrade your prototypes.
But building prototypes was never the goal. You want to mass-produce an army of robot dinosaurs to take over the world! And that’s going to take some real money.
This week we added a new type of map where you deliver consumer goods to residential buyers in exchange for Cybercoins, which you deposit with your factories to mass-produce your dinosaurs.
You get to choose a vehicle from among the ones you’ve unlocked (a Roadster, a Cybertruck, or a Tubman 601). The vehicle determines your inventory capacity as well as your movement speed.
Next, you load it up with high-priced consumer goods (flamethrowers and bottles of tequila), and drive around a residential community racing FedEx guys to snag the delivery fees for these items so you can get back to building armies.
Still To Do
We only have a few house tiles drawn so far. We’re going to need a solid dozen to mix-and-match to make an interesting map.
We also still need to program and animate the competitors’ trucks. I think I know how to clear events in neighboring tiles, but it’ll take a little while to hash out the right script.
Once that’s done, we’ll finally be ready to make Chicago.
I think it’s going to be a starting quest hub, one warehouse raid, three suburbs maps for deliveries, and the final quest hub.
It makes sense in the grand scheme of things, and also clarifies why I needed to do this before I could get started on that last zone.
I’m ready now. Let’s do it!