Hello hello mateys! It is Alex again this time with a little update on what we have been busy with the last couple of weeks.
SHIP SILHOUETTE DESIGN
We are currently working on adding NPC ships into the game. Our artist Sofie is therefore busy with working on the silhouettes for them. One tricky thing is we don’t want the ships to look cute- which is proving to be a challenge! With the top down perspective things are quite small on the screen and small things automatically look cute. Think for example chibi figures from manga and anime. Sofie has therefore tried designing some new silhouettes, that are a bit more twisted and aggressive to get away from that. As she wrote on our team slack:
MAP UPDATES
A new feature that was also added recently is the map is now slowly revealed. A fog of discoverability if you will to half borrow a term from strategy games.
This makes exploration a lot more interesting, since the player gets the satisfaction of revealing where they have been on the map. It's also a great way to show the player where they haven't been yet. Still needs some iteration to look prettier but I’m going to focus on adding NPC ships next so Sofie has something to test her new ship art with.
BUG FIXING, PLAYTESTING AND ITERATING ON THE TUTORIAL
This week I also did a playtest. It's been about a month since the last time we tested so it was about time to get feedback on the game again. The tester is a fellow game designer, so there were a lot of good ideas on how to make the tutorial better, and improve the readability of the game.
That's it for this time. Merry Christmas from me and the rest of the team! If you want to give us a gift then consider wishlisting the game :)