Lost Eden Gold development thread

[Kilkakon]

A bit of a long shot but seeing if anyone knows how to address this... I have updated interface.pcx and text.pcx for my mod to be more fantasy, and to change the colour of minerals to pink, which works well, except when the number of production rows grows too large and the game stops using the pcx and changes to raw colours



Any ideas?

[Kilkakon]

Might as well cover some of how the writing is coming along. After all this new version has revamped a lot, including the faction lineup, and I have like... 60 quotes to write to cover all the new factions and techs and wonders

One of the big changes has been the removal of the female gender. It took a long time to go through all the dialogs in the game and update them with the new plural gender, allowing me to have plural leaders in the game now. I've had this idea a long time ago after trying out some of those plural leader factions from the Network Node. Here's some sample dialogue, showing how it can go both ways:



When it comes to the faction list, I had several goals. Some of the old characters had frankly bad writing and I wanted to give them a face lift, other characters didn't resonate with me personally anymore, and others were female or human which I wanted to drop to focus more on the pokeboy theme. Some of the new factions were also included to try new experimental gameplay styles.

Cut factions include:

• Seafoam Collective: led by Arko, refugee theme
• CyndaTech Industries: led by Saig, edgy atheist theme
• Darrus' Adventurers: led by Darrus, adventurer theme
• Community of Rakis: led by Edge, liberal theme
• Deadly Assassins: led by Morgius, spy theme
• Vixen's Path: led by Victoria, feminist theme

Reworked factions include:

• Protectors of the Wild: now an Old Gods agenda faction, after the religion rework
• The True Arena: now a dual leader faction, with Arko returning from Seafoam to join Sarok, now renamed from Chuck (silly Chuck Norris reference)
• Bloodthirsty Buccaneers: now an aquatic native faction with some bonus amber production (currently working on better character name and writing)

New factions include:

• Seafoam Collective: returning faction name, but new dual leaders Noah and Toka, and new mechanics, now being an aquatic faction that wants to sink the planet through global warming
• Gardeners of Eden: led by Evelyn, terraforming theme, starts with some super workers
• Children of the Light: led by Daelon, has a major focus on a tall build, with -4 Order/Effic and starting with crawler tech
• Carnival of Dreams: led by Alister, this is a combination of the old Rakis and Assassin factions, so has both spy and diplomacy focus, and a fun fairgrounds theme
• Quark Institute: led by William Blaze, science theme
• Toxitech Industries: led by Salem, industrialist theme, starts with extra colony pods but needs water supply to exceed size 3 cities

[Kilkakon]

I would like to confirm if a problem I'm experiencing is just on this computer or an actual problem with the image

Could someone please test this pcx file (it's the secret project event pic) and telling me if they get messy red pixels all over it or if it's fine? It's fine on my old PC but not on my 10 PC and I'd like to know one way or another

Thanks

[Geo]

I'm seeing a cathedral-like structure.
And my desktop runs on Win10.

[Kilkakon]

Thanks Geo, that's reassuring to hear at least. On my new computer I got red messy pixels all over the main structure. I think it's something to do with using colours from the bottom row of the palette--maybe those are more system specific?

[Kilkakon]

My tester friend and I realised recently that giving away Weeping Golem tech (1/5p/1) at the start of the game was a bit overpowering, so I decided to make a new Tribal Totem unit to replace its role as a starting unit. It's a 0/1t/2 unit, purely designed for hiding away in cities in the early game, with a small niche of being a cheap unit that's good at resisting native attacks.

Here's my attempt at the voxel. It's using the artefact as a weapon to try and make it look native


And the regular artefact for comparison, hopefully still seems distinct enough

[Geo]

It must be a happy occurence for you that the artifact kinda appears in the middle of the rover chassis.

[Green1]

I would like to confirm if a problem I'm experiencing is just on this computer or an actual problem with the image

Could someone please test this pcx file (it's the secret project event pic) and telling me if they get messy red pixels all over it or if it's fine? It's fine on my old PC but not on my 10 PC and I'd like to know one way or another

Thanks

Late to party.

Opened in Win 11 with GIMP.

Attachments have been funky, but it has been a second since I have tried. Seems to only liked .pngs for a bit. Which maybe if I was to do another AAR, I could use transparencies. It would go quicker. But still, i like jpg for size unless I absolutely must do something beefier.

[Kilkakon]

Late to party.

Opened in Win 11 with GIMP.

Attachments have been funky, but it has been a second since I have tried. Seems to only liked .pngs for a bit. Which maybe if I was to do another AAR, I could use transparencies. It would go quicker. But still, i like jpg for size unless I absolutely must do something beefier.

Thanks for downloading Green... how did it look? I didn't see any results.

I'm mainly wanting to see how it looks ingame, if it was distorted or not. If it's easier you can rename it to replace space_sm.pcx, as that's the one that comes up when you try to quit the game

[Kilkakon]

I've been hard at work on trying to write the quotes for the various technologies, buildings and wonders in the game. It's something I had partially done in the old release so I am both rewriting my older quotes (for the characters that remain) and adding new ones, hoping to do a much better job of it. I'd overused some tropes in the past and frankly I'd like to think I've improved as a writer over the last 13 or so years haha. So far of the 89 quotes in the game, I've written 60, with about a third of that with voice lines I can retain (editing those was a bit tricky, oof).

Still, doing what I can with that It's basically the last thing to do

Some of the technologies have been renamed too:

• Path of Squirtle Mastery -> Squirtle Ninjutsu Code
• Social Initiatives -> Frontier Politics
• Realisation of Values -> Memories of Earth
• Social Constructs -> Cultural Traditions
• Combat Initiatives -> Military Strategy
• Rapid Transit -> Fantastic Engineering

As you can tell the older names here were quite vague, and didn't really tell the player what they were about or how advanced they are. The social technologies in general were particularly bad for this, I thought about how to make them more clearly distinct and also have a better sense of progression between each one.

On the subject of techologies I have also updated all the technology and facility icons too. It's hard to fully show everything, but here's a sample of some of the improvements:


Of course the last version I had released of Lost Eden didn't have any wonders anyway, but you can see how I've replaced the old Economy symbol with Gems where appropriate, to better fit my use of Amber as the main currency now. Religious Expression was using the same book as the Library, I've replaced it with a prayer sign to be more distinct in that regard. The Crypt is another one, as I've replaced espionage with ghost trickery (the skull is the new social engineering icon) I've updated the facility to suit too.

I might as well show the new city screen too so you can see the new resources in action:

Note how I've now got Materials and Amber resources! I'm quote proud of the icons, they took quite a while for me to make. Unfortunately the game ignores the texture for the unit currently under production, so there's a bit of a mismatch there, but I like how it makes the game look different from AC.

The red tile improvement is my replacement for the Thermal Borehole, I call it a Burning Orchard:

It's a 4/1/1 tile

Eagle eyed readers might also spot the Materials bonus, Amber bonus, Hot Spring (replacement for Monolith) and Resin Sailtrap (replacement for Solar Collector)