Dear followers!
This is my first devlog here. I will try to keep it simple but I would love to share some videos with you showing the progress I made since last week.
Asteroid Fields
I added asteroid fields to the game. You can find these fields at currently twenty different places in the universe, one is not far from the former asteroid mining station V'loren. You can fly into them but they will probably damage your ship heavily unless you have a strong plating installed. Asteroid mining ships will swarm out into those fields to gather valuable resources. Have a look at this video:
Their strong armour allows them to survive collisions with asteroids and to push them gently to other mining ships to harvest their resources.
Since asteroids collide with all possible kind of objects (e.g. ships, missiles or other asteroids), it took some time and effort to optimise the game so it would still run on my little low-end laptop. But I am super proud of the results and cannot wait to add a proper asteroid chasing sequence as part of the main storyline!
Assistant
The A.I. assistant Hopper is one of the core gameplay mechanics of Black Sun. Even though you would be able to play the game completely without her, the interaction with Hopper allows you to discover more story, mini-games, interesting features and more. Therefore I am very happy that I started to implement an upgrade tech tree for Hopper. You can improve her skills such as flying the space ships or firing the guns by installing upgrade packages. In my opinion, this is an immersive way to let Hopper's skills grow during the game. Especially interesting for modders: these packages are simple Lua scripts. This would allow all modders or technical more experienced players to create their own Assistant skills and to share them with other people!
That's it for now. I am looking forward to the next week when I will revisit the trading and market features. I will hopefully have some new screenshots by then.
Take care,
J.