Hi everyone!
Welcome back to this months state of the game! This time we will take a look at some of the stuff coming with the Military Update as well as the usual stuff of course!
Roadmap:
There were no changes to the roadmap since last month and we are on track for the release of the next update early January. Here is our current content roadmap:
Military Update:
The Military Update will bring a couple of new game systems and features to make combat between players (and in the future AI opponents) interesting! This includes the ability to declare war, attack enemy spaceships as well as buildings but also new spaceship types, different weapon types, new items and new defensive buildings. We wont cover everything in this post as we are not done with implementing everything and of course we want to keep a few suprises for the release! So today we will focus on two things: Weapons and siege of colonies.
Weapons:
The update will introduce spaceships and buildings that can attack other spaceships/buildings. Each building/spaceship will have a set of turrets attached to them. These turrets can attack within a defined angle. As a result of that the positioning of spaceships becomes a relevant factor based on what type of spaceship you are using. There will be two different types of turrets: Missile based turrets and laser based turrets. Missile based turrets shoot projectiles in volleys and deal damage per projectile. Laser based turrets shoot a continuous beam at its target that charges up over time to increase its damage. Here is a short video that shows both of these in action:
Each building / spaceship type will come fixed with one type of turrets.
Siege:
The easiest approach for this system would have been to just require a player to destroy every building in a colony to capture it but this would come with a couple of problems. For example spamming a bunch of defensive buildings on one spot would make it nearly impossible to capture the colony and having to destroy every building would make it really tedious. Therefore the siege system in Planet S will work differently:
- First, the attacked colony will go into a "siege state" as soon as a player attacks the colony of another player. The owner can no longer place any new buildings while the colony is in this state to prevent players from spamming down defense buildings just after a player attacks.
- Military buildings take a short amount of time to "setup"
- Military buildings will automatically be assigned to the next local garrison (this will be visualized while placing down for example a turret)
- The attacking player then will have to conquer every garrison of the colony to take it over
- To take over a garrison the player has to destroy a certain percentage of it at which point it will surrender
- Buidings will not get destroyed directly but instead switch into a "ruin" state. That way players can just upgrade the building back into its repaired and working form. This also helps quite a lot when repairing your colony after an attack as you dont have to remember what buildings are missing and where they were placed.
Sadly we dont have a demonstation video for that at the moment as its not quite finished yet so you will have to wait until next time!
This is just the first small overview of whats to come and we are really looking forward to your feedback on that!
We also had a multiple people suggesting to add nukes to the game and our answer to that is: Interplanetary nukes sounds quite High-Tech right?
Current state:
QoL and Bug fixes from last SotG:
Here is an updated list of the things we shipped in the last couple of patches since the last SotG:
- Trade menu update - Shipped with 0.3.5
- Setting a minimum amount of items that will always be kept in storage by trade routes - Shipped with 0.3.5
- Being able to close windows like the trade routes menu by clicking outside of the window - Shipped with 0.3.3
- Chat scrolling no longer being buggy - Shipped with 0.3.3
- We also fixed a bunch of desync issues since last time but we are not quite done
- Part 1 of 3 of our transition to a new and improved text system - Shipped with 0.3.5
Big TODOs:
- New text system to support UTF-16 unicode characters - Currently in the works as mentioned above. Part 2 will bring TTF file support and rendering and part 3 will finish up the transition by adding unicode support to our UI system.
- Rework and upgrade of the Tutorial system - We plan to ship this either with the Military Update or in a seperate update after that
- Modding support (No ETA for that yet)
- Terraforming (No ETA for that yet)
- (Multiple star systems) - Maybe after Early Access
Quality of life:
Here is a list of QoL changes that are in the works or on our TODO list:
- FOV slider in the options menu
- Markers or other visual improvements to help identify the poles of the planet you are on
- Spaceships that are constructed by the spaceship yard spawn in each other
- Ability to click hold and drag a building to a different location to make moving a building easier
Bugs:
- There are still a couple types of desyncs that can happen and we are continuing into investigate and fixing those
That is it for this months SotG! Let us know your thoughts on all the stuff we talked about!
Thanks for playing!
TeamJA