Welcome to the Spring DevLog for Green With Energy! To those of you who recently joined the official community on Discord, thank you! If youre new to the game - welcome. Its humbling to have you on board. Please wishlist & follow on Steam if youre interested. The purpose of these DevLogs is to showcase the ongoing development on Green With Energy, to both the fans as well as the wider gaming community. Hopefully it serves as a line of communication, as feedback is a critical part of evaluating the ongoing work. As always, the roadmap is public, so feel free to check it out.

Launching the community Discord server

March saw the introduction of an official Discord server to be the home for the Green With Energy community. Exclusive content such as in-development screenshots are regularly shared by Cameron Brown, the designer and programmer building the game. This server is intended to be the central hub for playtesting, as well as the most important line of communication for feedback on the game.

Refining the core game mechanics

The core game loop is modeled similarly to the real engineering process. Players are given an interesting problem along with sandbox of tools they could use to solve that problem. Programming is also very similar, and has a suitable analogy. Players can: [olist]

Build power stations, batteries & transformers of a given size. Part of this requires planning for the effects weather (e.g. rain, snow) has on the power grid.

Review power supply and demand curves, to engage in capacity planning

Lay power lines, building in redundancy and capacity

Run simulations to test their design over the course of a single day

If the simulation succeeds, they can continue to the next level. If it fails, or they are interested in improving the design further, they can take what they learned from the simulation and edit their design further. [/olist] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IxnXKoP1s

Settings, Main Menu & Level Gallery

In addition to the game itself, there are a couple of critical pieces of the user interface that cannot be overlooked just because the user isn't always interacting with them. For example, the gallery isn't just a way of selecting what level you wish to play, and we can actually use this to highlight how you did in your previous play-through, relative to the wider community via Steam Leaderboards.
Time has been spent making everything flow beautifully, from menu to game in seconds, as this quick screencast shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B5lhzRZK0k

More isometric art as the style takes shape!

Power storage

Store energy for smoothing out capacity or even provide full grid power when green power generation (such as wind or solar) is unavailable.

Power substation/transformer

Step voltage up-and-down.

Wind farm (small)

Intended to be similar in cost to the solar farm, but more versatile in it's deployment, wind farms can be operated at any time of the day with the trade-off of predictability. These obviously work best in windy weather.

Playtesting begins soon, but first...

...we'd like to survey the community about operating systems, opinions on input methods, etc... so that we can craft the most effective playtests for the whole game. Thank you for reading! As always, you can wishlist the game on the Steam Store, and join the community Discord server to stay up to date. We also have accounts on Twitter and Facebook. - The Green With Energy Team

[ 2021-04-10 14:21:02 CET ] [ Original post ]