Hi friends,
It’s time for February’s development recap. What seemed like a month that flew by too fast without much to talk about, actually has some cool stuff when looking back, so let's dig in:
Equipment targeting
The main thing we’ve been working on is refining the Equipment Targeting mechanic. We have changed the way precision attacks work; instead of giving you a percentage chance to damage the equipment based on hull damage dealt, to dealing 1 durability damage per point of hull damage dealt.
AoE attacks like Flak and missiles still have a percentage chance to damage random equipment durability based on damage dealt. This makes damaging and disabling enemy equipment more predictable and just feels better when playing.
We also added a targeting reticule highlighting the equipment on the ship when firing on it with precision attacks.
You can see the change in action below
Bugs and testing
We also started putting out test builds a couple of week ago, first internally, and one to a small early tester group, and we immediately saw how unstable the builds are at the moment.
We acquired a lot of technical debt as we were changing the game’s design to find what works and what feels fun to play, and now that we've found a formula we really like, it’s time to do some bug hunting.
This will be our main focus for March - a feature freeze, and making sure what we already have is stable and balanced.
We should be able to put out some stable builds soon, and let testers get to play the game more than 5 minutes at a time. Once that is done, we can also slowly add new people to our Discord tester group to get more feedback
New ship and a new skin
We finalized another ship this month, a small industrial Tug ship that has both a compact and an extended form (for carrying cargo).
The one you see below belongs to our industrial space mining faction, but you will see it with different paint jobs and components for the other factions as well.
Designed to work either alone, in pairs, or in a formation depending on the size of the payload, you will be fighting these guys mainly in raiding and piracy missions. It might look small and relatively harmless, but it can still pack a punch thanks to having two weapon hardpoints.
Talking about piracy, we also played around with a pirate skin for your starting player ship. Additions like these are really fun to do, and don't take all that much time. We'll look into doing more skins in the future, and other small things that will work well as a meta-game progression unlock, or when finishing a certain quest line, FTL style.
Other cool stuff
Oh ,we also added small astronauts to the hangar, representing your crew, as well as people tinkering on the ship.
Gives a nice scale reference to the ships (we design them with human scale in mind), and we can also send some of these little guys tumbling into space as you unleash some devastating combos on the enemy.
Lastly, we’d like to show you a preview of another one of the factions you will meet in Breachway, the Numen. Seeing the inadequacy and frailty of the human body in space, they aim to transcend flesh and merge their consciousness with their ships.
This is it for this Devlog, if you’d like to discuss anything that is presented here (or just want to show your support,), feel free to do so in the comment section, or on our [Discord Server](https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?url=https://t.co/fQbyj1ENoo)
See you next month, Space Cowboy
Victor