Moon Base 99 | Designing UI and game loop |

I've been designing this game all in my head and need to write it all out. So I might as well make a devlog.

Right now the game loop is this: Collect moon rocks with the rover. Convert moon rocks to rocket fuel and send cargo back to earth to gain extra crew. Once you have enough crew you can start researching the monolith. This increases the science bar. Astronauts have a fatigue stat. If fatigue gets high enough they have a chance to go insane. Once insane they have a chance to murder any one they cross paths with and they won't refill their oxygen. The goal is to keep the base going with more and more crew. Try to keep everyone alive, and complete the research on the artifact. 

Some things I've added recently: Communications terminal brings up a menu where you can buy an extra crewman or you can spend science on a defibrillator that allows you to resurrect dead astronauts. I want to add more things you can buy from this menu. I started trying to make a inventory system where you moved icons around with the mouse, but I decided to just go with a grid of buttons. Its just made out of slightly transparent boxes. I want to gussy this up a bit. It takes 1000 moon rocks to get an extra crew the next time the rocket lands. You need to transfer moon rocks to cargo of the rocket before you can trade for crew. Maybe this is too complicated and should be simplified. 

If an astronaut runs out of oxygen or gets murdered by an insane crewmate they are considered dead. Their body will stay there and take up space. If you have the defibrillator you can resurrect them or you can move there body to the rocket to make room for more crew. The animation is silly how bad it is. I will change this eventually. I also added a debug kill button. Press K and it will kill the selected astronaut. 

I added a warning button. In the future I want to add meteor showers or solar flares. You would need to get everyone inside. If you hit the warning button T every ones moves toward the base entrance. Maybe meteor shows could damage the base and you would need to buy a tool with science to repair it. Solar flares could knock out computer terminals until repaired and so on. 

Since the game is basically 1 dimensional. It frees up time for other things. I'd like to have a simple story about an alien artifact discovered on the moon. The moon base is there to research the artifact and strange things start to happen to the crew. I had GPT4 right me a story that wasn't half bad. 

The game still needs music and sound effects. I have some one helping me with this. I normally put on the FTL sound track and play it. I want to add a radio chatter sound effect. It would be like old moon mission radio chatter but gibberish. Maybe mission control could give missions in this gibberish voice. There is a million things I want to add so I need to be careful not to go overboard. Hopefully these devlogs will show the process of making a thing. 

If you don't mind a unfinished game and no sound, you can try it here:

https://jhyde.itch.io/moon-base-99?secret=nMWN4LuNlmgP4TAEUWhzeDoKsw

https://twitter.com/J_Hyde_ I share things about the game here.