The world is my kitchen! And it’s full of poisonous gas! Wait what!?

So last week’s underground test convinced us that building underground was pretty fun. You get a cool ‘secret base’ feeling and the dirt provides natural shape to your tunnels. There’s still going to be a lot of tweaking required for many buildings to make them functional but, we’re hyper-aware now of building underground with each new thing we think of.

We wanted to further explore ways to make trips to the surface dangerous with good risk-rewards. Something requiring a certain amount of effort to get up there and maintain a presence. Time for some more extreme prototype testing! We’ve filled the entire atmosphere with poisonous gas to see what it would be like. :)

Immediate differences were all the plants & animals which grow & live on the surface suddenly became super valuable. Also, the warehouse still needs to be built with clear sight to the sky to allow the company ship to pick up shipments, so heading to the surface to store soup was initially impossible. We anticipated this much though and made some airlocks to go with the poison gas. They also clean the air inside them before opening the doors. Gas currently doesn’t do any damage, but we’re using our imaginations while playing :P The goal would be to have it kill you fairly quickly while touching it.

Gameplay gains have been on two fronts. Venturing to the surface has become more of a journey, but ensuring your base is airtight has also become critical. Enemies that affect the terrain around them now apply indirect pressure when letting gas in from the surface, or puncturing an underground gas pocket. Players will have to run and repair any holes plus safe guard their base in new places you didn’t even need to build towers previously.

Some interesting risk-reward situations have sprung up now which are kind of cool. Staying safe turtled in your base farming mushrooms will let you sell cheap mushroom soup, but venturing to the surface can get your something more rare and exotic… like grass! It also encourages intelligent base design with decent fall backs.

Current problems though include how to “fix” the gas (IE: your base network is now filled to the brim with gas and there’s a gaping hole to the atmosphere. Watcha gonna do?). Threats and disasters are only fun when there’s a solution or method to “fix” the damage done. We’re currently still testing a variety of ideas on how best to clear out the gas and patch any holes.