Maia

PROBE 233.23.A CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

INCOMING TRANSMISSION:

 

Blog

Maia 0.68: The Penultimate Truth



After several months of work Maia 0.68 has touched down. Watch my video below to see a quick overview of some of the new features and fixes.

This is the penultimate development version of Maia. The next update, 0.69 will take the game out of the early access program. This of course won’t be the last addition to the game and there are plenty of new and exciting things to come. (I’ll also be sticking to my no DLC policy, all main game content updates will remain free.)

Maia game IMP robot

If you enjoy Maia’s updates, but want to try them earlier, don’t forget to set your game to use the development beta branch on Steam which will give you access to my daily builds. (Right click on the game in your library, click properties and go to the beta tab.) We also have a new Discord server to report bugs and talk about the game. Leaving a review would also help us very much as we approach release.

This update brings the all new fire fighting utility robot. This nifty little machine will dart across your base to extinguish the inevitable conflagrations of your poorly maintained colony. If you need a more hands on approach it is of course fully controllable in first person too.

Maia game fire fighting robot

New AI behaviours have been bestowed on the animals, robots and alien creatures in the game, adding many new avenues for emergent game-play. Chickens now can be startled and will flock dynamically to avoid perceived danger. But don’t worry, they’ll also now nest on many items in the game, providing plenty of annoyance to your colonists and plethora of new and exciting fire hazards.

Maia game chicken

Colonists are more aware of the actions you take and will sometimes mention if they think you followed their advice and will also comment on what they think of new equipment. They’ll also produce more detailed emails and discuss new topics such as the weather, storms and climate and how it’s affecting the base and it’s inhabitants.

The alien creatures of the planet have had many of their territorial behaviours improved and will now migrate independently in herds on and off the mission area. The changes will also see them attacking your bases in a smarter ways, leading to more dramatic incursions.

Maia Megacephalalgia

Your IMP robots are now more fragile and can be seriously damaged by earthquakes and have their circuits scrambled by solar events. You’ll also want to keep them happy as they can now take action against your poor management, hijack your email system and organise a labour movement. Listen carefully and you’ll hear IMP robot’s new voice-over lines. They’ll comment on the awful state of your base, provide snide but perhaps useful observations of your colonists and go on endlessly about how depressed the doors are making them.

The base announcer now has twice as many lines detailing equipment state and supplies, and several new call outs for the colonists. Several of the announcements note ongoing progress in the base that will save you from watching every unboiled kettle.

Maia game

The new rename tool allows you to set a callsign for any item, room, animal, plant, colonist or robot in the game. The new name will appear in the quick selection menus and emails to help you better manage your base.

The mouse over information on unbuilt objects now states any recent attempts to build an item and if those are still ongoing or if the colonist has given up and why. The base manifest has had another pass too with a new layout with more information and an easier to read format.

But that’s not all. There are a lot of changes to the game.

  • Meteors can now break up and hit your outdoor equipment.
  • Fresh meteors produce more research data when sampled.
  • Colonists body bagging corpses now pick up food and building materials from the dead.
  • Colonist food preparation need increased when there is little food.
  • Colonists looking for somewhere to shiver (show hypothermia) will tend towards warmer places.
  • Colonists no longer wait for an escort if there is a turret within 30 metres of the destination.
  • Colonist choice of airlock when suiting up fixed on complex multi entrance bases.
  • Fix for colonists getting stuck in a panic cycle when patrolling towards creatures.
  • Change for colonist power generation needs balancing due to bug calculating current wattage.
  • Earthquakes now need to be a little stronger to hurt colonists.
  • Placement of objects that colonist need to get on and off now requires more space to stop players boxing colonists in accidentally.
  • Research generated from sleeping reduced.
  • Colonists will no longer come up with new research data if they already have 64mb of data on them.
  • Wait added to dog movement to make them more likely to follow move orders.
  • New research perk: HUMAN BODY LANGUAGE AI ANALYSIS. To allow utility bots to move faster down corridors.
  • Biosythesised Antibiotics research perk hooked up.
  • Ablative armour research fixed.
  • Creature lure research added for sight and scent lures.
  • Flywheels, turrets, wind turbines and solar stills, degrade slightly slower depending on conditions.
  • IMP first person labels updated.
  • IMP mineral drops now limited.
  • IMP method for finding storage space now requires a larger clear area.
  • IMPs no longer use incomplete body storage.
  • IMP first person now uses camera movement key bindings.
  • Minerals complaint email now takes into account contents of the hopper.
  • Minerals in hopper now tracked (Manifest screen now includes hopper Minerals.)
  • More information added to the colonist identity structure.
  • Power report emails now include a maximum theoretical output.
  • Wait between colonist popups choice increased.
  • Fix for missing electricity graph label on wall screens.
  • In game crew selection added.
  • More colonist misc inventory items.
  • Turret range increased up to 20m.
  • All first person text now has shadows for easier reading
  • Email for when megacephalalgia and other creatures destroy surface equipment.
  • Creature lure scent added for Megacephs.
  • Synapsid creature eating code clean up.
  • Synapsid creature now more susceptible to lures.
  • Fix for molerat contaminating livestock with millions of exterior plants.
  • Protobird will now ignore items that are on fire when invading your base.
  • Sounds for colonist pistol bullets hitting metal or meat added.
  • Rewrite of code dealing with reactions to invading creatures for more dramatic attacks.
  • Creature wander position generation bug fix.
  • Nitrate boost mode added to crop planters.
  • Portable solar array’s now close when clicked.
  • Solar energy generation now more impacted by settled ground snow on panels.
  • Countdown for power and colonist report emails now written to and loaded from save file.
  • World generation cleaned up.
  • Chickens panic when near fire.
  • Chickens send a new transmission when dead.
  • Creatures placement changed to ensure better placement.
  • Plant sample container now requires a click to transmit collected data to the terminal computer.
  • Placement of various items tweaked on world generation.
  • Create colonist landing issue fixed with ignoring airlock pos.
  • Dining table now tracks how many meals have been eaten.
  • Message system brownout warning fixed.
  • Infotips cleaned up for many items.
  • Super capacitors, Fusion and Fission reactors now need associated research to build.
  • Fix for megacephs incorrectly performing actions when they had not reached their target.
  • Removed error from megaceph for distant attacks on wind turbines.
  • Circuit breaker room detection fixed.
  • UI focus fixed with several pop ups.
  • Fission reactor shutdown on low fuel and damage.
  • Fission reactor output reduced to that of a experimental system.
  • Fusion reactor interaction points moved out.
  • Subtle vector screen flickering effect added to UI borders.
  • Utility robot movement fixed so it’s no longer backwards.
  • Power requirement for scanner added.
  • Agent path to targets optimised.
  • Corrections in warning emails.
  • Materials hopper resized.
  • Research tape pick up bug fixed.
  • Email for when the game can not find a lander location.
  • More famous (British) author names added to generation list (Kickstarter names coming soon!).
  • Fix for ascii rendering error on text glitch effect.
  • Fix for unbuildable aesthetic plant pots due to no propagator.
  • Lava code cleaned up and optimised for different system types.
  • IMP invisibility fix and NAN glitch.
  • Colonists no longer wait for an escort if there is a turret within 30 metres of the destination.
  • Large sections of game and engine code cleaned, modernised and made more portable.
  • Save compatibility lock set to new 0.68 save implementation.
  • Load times have been greatly improved with several save optimisations.
  • Mission saving expanded.
  • Check to see if building facility is valid before making build order.
  • Async thread waits on load to ensure no data corruption.
  • Sound options menu added with slider interfaces.
  • Objective tracker no longer culls objectives that are waiting on a countdown timer to launch an event.
  • SN1572 mission start made easier.
  • Potential crash to AI player fixed.
  • Escape can now be pressed to go back from a menu.
  • Text input in the console and in game improved.
  • Escape can now quit out colonist selection screen.
  • So many spelling corrections.
  • Tutorial line switched from double click to middle click to prioritise builds.
  • Tutorial now ticks off keypresses and scrolling faster.
  • Change so game does not force a screen native resolution when saving a windowed screen state.
  • Fix for crash caused by pathfinding cache corruption.
  • Updated to a new Microsoft compiler to fix the random crash bug plaguing the game caused by their broken Async implementation.
  • SDL update to 2.0.8
  • [There were a few more but I’ve maxed the character limit on this post!]

If you’re playing the game for the first time I would suggest watching the 0.67 video guide, as it will help you pick up many of the things the tutorial has to skip in the name of brevity.

Remember you can read every single commit I make to the repo on dev.maiagame.com. If you are enjoying the huge amount of work going into the game, don’t forget to update or leave a review and send me your feedback.



Maia 0.67: The Polisher



Maia 0.67 is here! This huge update is all about polish. Check out this quick video of me showing off the major changes:

 

Polished.. floors.

Fine dust in a humid underground base quickly turns to sticky, sticky dirt. Colonists will inevitably traipse it all around the base, making everyone intensely miserable at the state of it all.

Thankfully there is now a floor cleaning robot ready to remove dirt and polish scuffs off the floor! Just build it and watch it methodically work its way around the base. Or maybe take it for a spin in first person?

Maia game cleaning robot

[Seedyness Intensifies]

The propagator adds a new level of depth and interaction to your hydroponics room. The systems grow seedlings in a carefully controlled environment to maximise yield from the colony’s seed stocks from earth.

Maia game propagator

IMProvements

The IMP robot can now pick up items (and creatures) in first person, manipulate them and carry them about. This new level of interaction gives you more control over the little things in life (such as chickens).

The repair bot has also been upgraded with new first person user interface systems to help identify items requiring immediate repair.

Maia game propagator

What are they plotting?

The colony’s wall screens are now able to show useful base data graphed. See real time feeds of room temperature and atmosphere, grid status, storage amounts of rations, materials and minerals and even receive advanced notice of earthquakes using the accurately generated seismograph.

Maia game cleaning robot

Inbox Zeros

Colonist emails are now more detailed and varied and will focus on core issues in the base. They also include profile pictures for the colonists sending them to help you identify the sender and grow closer to them before they inevitably die in a fire.

Maia game colonist emails

Mist opportunities

Exterior rendering has been improved substantially with new detail in snow and ground water. A new volumetric effect outside will render fog, dust and smoke with realistic movement depth and shadows.

Maia game volume rendering

It must be f/8

The user interface has had a lot of tweaks and improvements. The game camera is now smoothed and can also zoom into rooms and will adjust its height automatically when moving around the base.

Placing rooms is now easier with new icons for each room type. Many of the UI modes are more responsive or have been tweaked for clarity. More text has shadowing, and mouse over info tips have been clarified and shortened to make them easier to skim.

Maia game volume rendering

 

Other notable changes:

  • AI player added. Type “aiPlayer” in the console to activate a basic self-playing base AI that can construct rooms, items and manage basic functions.
  • Tutorial reworked for new items and to give the player more time to digest information.
  • Cassiopeia mission lengthened, made easier.
  • Colonist stockpiling needs tweaked.
  • Other misc colonist AI needs balancing.
  • Colonists will no longer interrupt social interactions between others.
  • Colonists are less (intentionally) suicidal.
  • Breakdown rates for many items tweaked.
  • IMPs are less grumpy and won’t smash everything now.
  • Ground overlay info no longer comes up if emails are open.
  • Game meta-progress now saved.
  • Finished mission names now shown in blue.
  • Fix for flywheel sound when locked.
  • Click interactions added for more objects.
  • Building geothermal power equipment underground no longer requires airlock proximity.
  • Tape drive infotip added.
  • Tape drive power use increased, disks spin down during blackout.
  • Atmosphere generator, smelter and nanoprinter infotips update slower.
  • Megacephalagia creature attacks on wind turbines are now more dramatic with extra animation and pfx.
  • Vox Nocturnis creature territorial need increased.
  • Game will now push new players to try a tutorial.
  • Wait added to dogs and robots when clicked on to give player more time to give a move order.
  • Dogs place a higher priority on patrol orders given by a player.
  • Chicken breath amount slightly randomised.
  • Colonist diseases added to save files.
  • Shader generation info now goes into log.
  • Shader fix for MSAA not showing lines in IMP first person vision.
  • Fix for IMP vision masking out text due to sky mask.
  • Removal of log terminal on Windows builds.
  • Text renderer bugs fixed.
  • First person mode labels now have shadows for easier reading.
  • Width fix for border for colonist names on selection panel.
  • Numerous shader optimisations.
  • Fix for potential crash caused by colonist memories.
  • More code modernisation to C++14 standards.

If you want to see more changes to the game as they go live. Get on the Development branch on Steam. You can also watch as I update the repository on the development site.

0.68 is already in the works and will again be focused on improving the AI and feedback from the game, rounding off some of the sharper edges.

Please let me know if you find any big bugs or issues. If you appreciate the effort going into the game, don’t forget to leave a Steam review!