Progress Update 06/24/2023

A bit of a shift in focus this week as Thrive enters a feature freeze in preparation for the coming release of 0.6.3. We have taken to appointing new leaders of our graphics and sound design teams to help organize our development efforts in those aspects, and begun discussing some pretty big changes to Thrive's code to better optimize the game going forwards.

As for the release of 0.6.3; We have now published a public testing build, the 0.6.3 release candidate, for those who would like to play the update early and help us find any bugs and issues before the official release on July 1st. Please report any issues you encounter in the associated community thread.

Our current paid employee and programming lead Hhyyrylainen is going to be on vacation starting July 3rd, so expect development to potentially slow down considerably at that time.

Programming

• The public release candidate for 0.6.3 has been published. Patron BOTD is now equivalent to the candidate.

  • Added the remaining prototype stages: industrial, space, and ascension. It is now possible to play through the skeleton of the game all the way from microbe to ascension, though the later prototypes have bare minimum content to show off the ideas of the stages.

  • Downgraded our compression library (SharpZipLib) to 1.3.3 which should resolve the intermittent save errors that have been happening the past few months

  • Added a new toxin damage sound (instead of reusing the emit sound)

  • Improved the placeholder tree and rocket graphics for the prototypes

  • Save error dialog now explicitly tells to give us the JSON debug log as without it debugging a save failure is basically impossible in most cases

  • Added a system for window panels to reorder this makes draggable windows go on top of other such windows when they are moved around or opened

  • Added a new feature to the museum screen to delete fossils

  • Fossil saving failure will now show an error popup

  • Added miscellaneous fun screen filter shaders

  • Added an unknown key icon

  • Fixed game not fading out before playing the microbe intro video

  • Fixed 3 microbe backgrounds having non-repeating edges

  • Fixed current patch biodiversity fill always checking potential species to split from in a specified order (the order is now random)

  • Fixed player accidentally becoming awakened if entering macroscopic while already having placed neurons

  • Fixed the ESC key icon not being used (instead the unknown key fallback was used before)

  • Fixed sometimes the close X being invisible on our custom windows

  • Fixed the Thrive logo being blurry in the main menu and the credits

  • Options menu now lazily loads available language list

  • Switched a BOM check around to make dependabot tool updates work

  • Automatic checks now disallow gltf files as they are always worse than .glb files

  • Updated the style_guide on how to add words to dictionary to avoid typo warnings

  • Cleaned up some remaining references to ruby in the repo

  • Updated AngleSharp library to 1.0.3

  • Added support for Godot GUI tab names to be translated

  • Updated translations

• Discussing an Entity Component System

Graphics

• Discussing abiotic elements of the game environment

Gameplay

• Discussed impact of size on the organism

Sound

• Nothing Substantial

Theory

• Nothing Substantial

Outreach

• Nothing Substantial

Other

• Twitchywhalez and Kertit have been appointed as team leads of the sound and graphics teams respectively. Please offer your congratulations!