Every aspect of our development at the moment is labled as design, gameplay, or sugar improvement.
So I would like to tell you a bit about each of them.
Hello everyone here is the Egor "Din" Morozov, founder of Fatal Error Games, and today I would like to tell you about what we have achieved in last months.
Design
We have suddenly noticed that all in-game textures and UI look blurry, and during the investigation, we found that game was not actually ull HD all that time.
More specifically it was mobile-like 800x450 scaled up to 1920x1080. God, i was so sorry to admit it. So we spend some time redrawing all UI, scenes and lables to higher quality.
We alse made some huge improvements in particle systems and animations. As you can notice, now every spaceship and object in battle have 6-seconds animation loops, which change each other (almost) seamless.
So we made animations for idle, dodge, hit, destroy, and retreat actions, and they look really nice at the moment, but I wish we would improve them much further.
What about shooting and ship wreckages? Yeah, right. We have some plans to make ships more realistic in destruction, but a bot later. And for weapons, we re going to rework weapons system for first campaign DLC in 2021, so animation would be adjusted accordingly.
Gameplay
Last few weeks we've been constantly analyzing and designing our plans for December and whole next 2021 year.
It's not a secret, that we want to make assymetric gameplay with several factions, and would revel those factions one by one, making existant factions more distinct with every major update.
So, for gamepaly AS IS it meaned that we wanted to make Black Knight a bit more special than humans.
After all we came to decision, that there would be three Human factions, and three Aliens. We would not speak today about latter, but here is some sneak peek for Humanity:
- Black Knights: Fanatics (with no moral issues) with Tier-1 equipment, lacking of reinforcements, having no market or trading sports, but able to survive even after losing a battle (newbie-friendly faction).
- UN Space Fleet: Military professionals, getting a lot of Tier-1 and Tier-2 equipment, but suffering from constant moral issues. Gameplay rely more on special units and less on pure rush.
- Mercenary Company: Ex-corporate vagabonds form Earth and colonies, trying to survive with Tier-0 equipment, but having access to black markets, reputation levels and a lot o ECM modules.
So, what you will see in upcoming 0.6b Update is Black knights literally surviving after destruction. Or avoiding it, thanks to Jay Song engineering skills. At the other side, you wouldn't be able to retreat from combat willingly.
Sugar
At first, I need to describe what we call Sugar in team. It is cosmetic and UX improvements, that only need to make your gameplay more immerse and smooth.
Basically, it is optional, but we spend 25% of our time to Sugar tasks. For next update, we have improved UI borders on clickable objejcts, reworked some button positions, and added sorting to modules and ships.
We re constantly getting feedbacks from you about what feels right and what feels wrong during game session, and put all those thoughts in backlog. And i must personally thank you for giving us that feedback.
That's all for today, feel free to contact us in Steam discussions or by email on [email protected]
We are also starting to work with Crew skills and ship Tactic system for Update 7, and would be glad to describe it in next Dev Diaries. So stay in touch!