Dev Log -25: Rechargeable Items

It's been a while since the last dev log. Unfortunately, some day job stuff caught up with me and I didn't have as much time to work on this game as I would like to. But that's been taken care of now and things should be returning to normal.

The good news is I've taken certain steps that should allow me to devote even more time to this game in not so distant future.

 

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I've changed some devices to require energy in order to be used. You can restore item's energy by expending energy cells, but you can do this only when out of combat.

So this change introduces a twofold resource management concern for the player. First, they will have to ensure their combat devices are charged up before combat as well as use them more rationally now that they can actually run out of juice mid combat. And secondly, they must be sure to pack up enough energy cells when going out on an expedition.

Most energy cells are single use consumables, so they also act as commodity money in the TLV economy I talked about a while back.

I might allow alternative ways of recharging items, but I haven't decided yet. One thought I'm having is adding power stations at certain locations in the world that you can use to instantly recharge all your items (like in System Shock 2 for example). I'll have to take into consideration the resource management I mentioned above first, however, as I wouldn't want to encourage constant backtracking in order to save money. Perhaps these power stations could have a long cooldown (1-2 hours).