Hi friends,
It's about time we have another development update, as a lot of things were added this past month!
June was all about designing and implementing "meta-game" elements (in this context, elements outside of the core combat loop), and adding some cool new visuals.
Designing the meta-game presented a bunch of challenges that basically had to be solved at once before we could test them and get a feel if they work together as intended, as all of these systems are interconnected and you can’t get the full picture of how the meta-game play until all of the pieces are in place and work together.
So we really focused on implementing a first iteration pass of each of these systems.
The biggest of these pieces, that interacts with all other meta-game elements is the faction relation system. This will define your interaction options and outcomes in narrative events and quests, how regular non-combat nodes play out, access to space stations, and how likely it is that you will encounter hostile ships as you traverse regions of the solar system controlled by these factions.
Narrative events are major story events that happen in each system, based on what the system's theme is, and each event involves one or more factions. These events can have multiple possible outcomes, and a lot of branching ways to get to each - based on your relationship with each of the factions involved, who you have on board and what their specialties are, your crew’s morale, your ship’s equipment, and what items you are carrying in your inventory. So there's plenty of things to keep track of as we're making them.
Quests are basically even more complex narrative events that unfold across multiple nodes.
Non-combat events are a much simpler, more generic version of narrative events (they play in a similar way to distress beacons in FTL), and how they unfold is based on the relation you have with the faction that controls the area that event takes place in.
On the combat side, we have added some new additions in the form of activatable crew abilities and in-combat events:
- Crew abilities are based on your crew’s level and role. The higher crew’s morale, the more often you can use these abilities.
- In-combat events allow us to have a greater variety of combat encounters and victory conditions, outside of either ship blowing up. This can enable things like escaping combat (for both you and your enemy) if combat is not going well (this will also allow us to have a greater variety of optional enemy difficulty). Additionally enemies can offer you bribes to let them go, or allow you to disable a ship’s engines, and weapon systems in preparation for boarding them.
On the graphics side, we have a new battleship ready, for end-game enemies and bosses:
Also now when you attack and destroy a ship’s weapon or equipment, you actually see it blow up, and get rebuilt after a duration. We are now working on a visible ship damage system that persists between fights until you get repaired:
Oh and you can also space people 🧑🚀
See you next month, Space Cowboy.
Victor