Sweating and shivering 🥶 😓

One of our first core ideas for Space Hotel was that the alien guests have individual preferences concerning temperature, air composition, gravity, etc., depending on what planet they are from, and it is the player's job to make them feel comfortable. We have now begun to implement this idea, starting with temperature. It is now possible to set a thermostat for each hotel room to a temperature between 0 and 100 degrees (on an unspecified alien scale). The temperature then gradually rises or falls until it reaches the value. Each guest has a temperature range that they find acceptable. In rooms that are colder than that, they shiver, and in rooms that are hotter, they sweat.

We will try to fine-tune the time it takes to increase/decrease the temperature such that it is a little challenging (you will have to plan in advance to make the guests that are about to arrive comfortable from the beginning) but not too frustrating (it is still possible to readjust when you notice that guests are not feeling great). We will keep track of the moments in which guests felt hot/cold/fine and this will influence their review.

We have decided to try out this system after considering several options; as an alternative to setting the temperature of a whole room, we could, e.g., also have pieces of equipment that heat or cool a certain area around them, like the radiators in Theme Hospital – but this seemed a bit messier and also less straightforward to apply to other environment variables like oxygen level or gravity (even though we are not 100% sure on the science behind settings a room's gravity either).

Decorating walls

It is now possible to hang stuff on the walls. Installing a control panel on the wall is necessary in order to set a room's temperature. There also some first optional things to put on the walls, such as paintings. Since we already had implemented the game logic for putting things on the floor or on top of other things (which involves blocking the tiles such that other things cannot be build on that spot and unblocking them again when the blocking thing is removed), it was relatively easy to extend it to hanging things on walls. There is still a bit of a problem with the ordering of layers that we need to fix: the guests' speech bubbles seem to exist on a spooky plane between the wall and the paintings.

For further updates, follow this devlog or follow Marta on Twitter (@martadendron). We are using the amazing asset pack "Modern Interiors" by @lime_px. Check it out! https://limezu.itch.io/moderninteriors

Best, Marta & Alexej (Gvarab Games)