It's good to be back. But do you know what's even better?
A complete overhaul of air combat with new sprites, new fighters, new balancing, and a whole lot more you'll have to fight through if you want to take over a planet.
New Fighter and Starfighter Sprites
I've gone on record saying that I really don't want to use AI art. But at the same time, I've been mostly using placeholder assets. They're nice, but a bit too generic, if you ask me.
With that said, I'm happy to announce that Infinite Voyager has new fighter and starfighter sprites from the great Vitaliy "Kruger" Ostaschenko.
Seriously, this guy is awesome. You can find his Artstation here, and follow him on social media here.
Additionally, the Scouting Drone sprite is getting reverted to a previous version I'd made a few years ago, to fully phase out the placeholder assets.
New Enemy Fighters
Another new chance coming to this update is the addition of different classes of fighters to Aerial Combat.
The original way this worked was that there were two types of enemies: Fighter Drones and Starfighters. Fighter Drones were your basic enemies, while Starfighters were the stronger, harder-hitting enemies.
In the Starfighter Pilot update, there are now four types of enemies: Fighter Drones, Advanced Fighter Drones, Starfighters, and Advanced Starfighters. Advanced Fighter Drones and Advanced Starfighters are heavier, more up-armored versions of their normal counterparts.
A quick and easy way to tell the difference between the two is that regular Fighter Drones and Starfighters use basic paint designs, while their Advanced versions use camouflage.
Aerial Combat Rebalancing
Aerial Combat itself is also getting its own rework. The main difference is that now, players will have to fight through dozens of waves of Fighter Drones and Starfighters if they want to conquer a planet instead of the usual four in past updates.
It might be a lot, but that's what you get for trying to attack an entire planet.
Other rebalances include modifications to weapon damage, an increase in health repair time on Easy and Medium difficulties (Hard doesn't have any auto-repairs), and a fix to the glitch where the player's Starfighter would continue to repair itself, even if they were hit.
Bug Fixes
There aren't as many bugs fixed this time, but the ones fixed include:
Cursor appears in the pause menu during aerial combat.
Impacts immediately stop damage repair on the Starfighter.
Player-controlled starfighters don't immediately spawn in running into walls.
Conclusion
That should do it for this update. Now that all the placeholder ship and fighter sprites are replaced, I can get to work on the main storyline of the game and the 1.0 release.
But until then, I hope you guys have fun with this update!
-Chris Providence
Proponent of the "Deploy three dozen or more fighter drones at invading starships" school of planetary defense
Social Media
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