Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore,
the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and
conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an
outpost, and a survey.
The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to
call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The
breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest
after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted.
Three pieces:
Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys:
nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points
come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that
costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names
one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief
rather than split into an errand of its own.
GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each
goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one
quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot
un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is
asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface
is still finished after take-off.
the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's
idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out.
Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than
emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on
a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be
lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest
finished underground is announced underground.
The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses -
the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself
a reason to start briefing somebody.
Landed as one piece across #122, #123 and #124: the frame is useless without
a script, and the script has nowhere to run without the frame.
The director drives the REAL scene rather than being a scene of its own. It
wants the real fleet, the real enemies and the real asteroid field, and it
makes "then the game starts" cost nothing - the director stops steering,
clears the flag, and what is left running is the ordinary game.
The script is a list of beats, each with a deadline as well as its own
completion test, so a beat whose condition is never met - a player who
refuses to fly at the ambush - runs out rather than wedging the prologue.
skip() ends the whole thing at any point and lands in exactly the state
playing it through does, so the game has one way to start rather than two
that have to be kept in step. The test pins that equivalence.
"No action button available, only movements" is enforced where the buttons
are decided, not by the director reaching in: the ability controllers set
their own visibility every frame and would have put them straight back, and
the map button belongs to the map. The joystick, the pivot and the fader
stay.
The convoy is ten hulls where a new game's fleet is one, so it needs an
explicit fleet-size override - a plain number rather than a fake doctrine,
because nothing about the player's own progression should be bent to fit a
cutscene. It is carriers rather than transporters: transporters belong to
hubs and are not fleet-eligible, so a convoy of them would be silently
filtered down to its escorts.
The ambush is chasers and only chasers. "Easy enough" is the requirement,
and a sniper against a convoy the player cannot yet fight properly is
neither easy nor a good first impression.
The breach takes the wheel through one check in GameController, covering the
stick, the keyboard and the released-again path together - three separate
gates would be three chances for one of them to keep steering. The shake is
written to camera.offset, never to its position, because GameController owns
where the camera is and would smooth a shake away.
The vessel that survives is chosen as the interceptor rather than whichever
happened to be first in the list, and the prologue ends on exactly a new
game's opening position.
Also: PlanetAtmosphereController no longer spawns the opening fleet while
the prologue is arming, and the tests that are about what the GAME starts
from now say so by turning the prologue off.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything lived in one flat directory, so a diff gave no clue what area it
touched and finding the file you wanted meant knowing its exact name. Twelve
folders now, grouped by what a thing IS rather than what type it is - a
vessel's definition, its component scenes and its upgrade resources sit
together, because that is the set you read when you change one of them.
buildings core controllers enemies logistics planets
resources shaders surface ui vessels vfx world
332 files moved and every res:// reference rewritten - 306 files touched,
including the autoload and main-scene paths in project.godot. Nothing renamed:
this is purely where files sit, so the diff is a pile of pure moves and no
behaviour is buried in it. ui_theme.tres, icon.svg and web_shell.html stay at
the root, where Godot and the export preset expect them.
Verified three ways, because a suite alone would not have caught all of it:
the full 117 pass, the web export builds clean, and the game renders.
The export is why that matters. The FIRST export after the move failed with
"Attempt to open script 'res://GameState.gd'" - the old path - while
project.godot on disk plainly said res://core/GameState.gd. That is this
project's documented Android FUSE mtime trap: Godot served a cached copy of a
file whose content had changed. A `touch` fixed it. Nothing in the test suite
would have found that, because the suite runs from a copy on a native
filesystem - the one place the bug cannot happen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds a Dev Mode entry to the main menu and takes the play-testing
conveniences out of a normal game, which turn out to be the same change
from two directions.
DEV MODE. Banks 2000 of every resource, grants 500 research points, and
plants one of each planet type in the chunks around the spawn. Built ON TOP
of reset_new_game() rather than beside it, so a dev game is a normal game
plus a stock rather than a second definition of "fresh game" to keep in
sync. Offered only when running from Godot - OS.has_feature("editor"), the
tag an export clears - as is the map editor. Hidden AND guarded: pressing
either anyway is refused, because visibility is presentation and the rule is
the rule.
The menu now lays its stack out in code. Hiding two of four entries with
scene-authored offsets would leave holes in a shipped build - the same
failure the HUD columns had - so it measures the entries that actually exist
and centres on them.
A NORMAL GAME NOW HANDS OVER NOTHING. No 500 banked ore (removed from both
reset_new_game and the autoload's own default, so the two cannot disagree),
and no gas giant guaranteed in the origin chunk. Both were play-testing
conveniences that had become part of the real world's shape: every player
got the same landmark in the same place. Play-testing wanted all four planet
types anyway, and a normal game wanted none of them - different needs, now
different mechanisms.
WorldGen cannot read GameState back (an autoload is not resolvable as a
global identifier that early, the hazard PlanetSetups.gd already works
around), so GameState.dev_mode's setter PUSHES the flag down. World
generation stays static and dependency-free, GameState stays the single
source of truth, and dev planting is applied after every rng draw so a dev
world and a normal one differ only in those four chunks.
FLEET SIZE. BASE_FLEET_SIZE was doing two jobs - how many slots exist AND
how many ships you start with - which forced a new game to open with a full
fleet, leaving the first ship crafter nothing to do. Split into
BASE_FLEET_SIZE (3 slots) and STARTING_SHIP_COUNT (1 vessel), so the opening
has two empty slots to fill. A third copy of the old value turned up in
PlanetAtmosphereController, hardcoded as spawn_ships(5) and silently
degraded into "however many slots exist" once max_fleet_size() clamped it.
The doctrine branch now runs 3 -> 10 slots. Wing (30 -> 15) and Squadron
(70 -> 35, 2 -> 1 points) are cut hardest: they are no longer a mid-game
luxury but the ordinary way out of the opening, and pricing them as a luxury
made the early game feel stuck. Armada follows at 90/2. Two new tiers,
Battlegroup and Grand Fleet, grant +2 each - seven single-vessel nodes in
one lane would be a long monotonous chain for a branch that only ever does
one thing. DEFAULT_FORMATION grows to 10 slots, because max_fleet_size()
clamps to its length and a doctrine past that would charge real resources
for nothing; test_fleet_growth.gd asserts that invariant directly.
TEST FALLOUT, all of it from the deliberate change rather than a defect:
- Tests that silently inherited the old 5-ship default now ask for the fleet
they need. Several had to crew it from their first frame rather than
_initialize(), where the engine's deferred tree-entry finalization undoes
it - the same hazard those tests already documented for set_process(false).
- test_planet_landing_proximity and test_return_position_matches_planet take
the FIRST chunk holding a planet and land there. The guaranteed gas giant
had been masking that this can now be a black hole, which destroys ships on
contact. They exclude it, and clear the asteroids the field already placed.
- test_pivot_controls measured rotation with angle_difference, which wraps at
+/-pi, so a hold that turned a full circle read as no rotation. Latent
flakiness that only ever showed under load; it now reads the controller's
unwrapped pivot_hold_amount.
- test_research_points was failing on ore, not points: can_unlock() checks
the ore price too, and a fresh game banks nothing now.
- test_gas_system's "a reachable gas source near the spawn" premise moved to
dev mode, which is where that guarantee now lives.
Full suite green at 97/97.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Loïc Wisniewski