Hey people!
Been six months since the last update (an experimental build release in October with a lot of new stuff). My team and I finally got our update out for ATS (v0.91) so now I'm back on my lonesome in the Great Skies.
It's time to Vector Armadas.
As always you are welcome to comment with your own opinion on things in the comments or on the Discord server, I read everything.
What's the roadmap?
OK. So I need to sort out a few things.
Making campaign smoother to play:
When you pick a mission, you are now brought to the Warbench. Your opponent fleet is spawned opposite you, and you are able to build and modify your fleet in situ. When you're ready, hit play and watch the fight play out. Once you're done, the fleets are reset and you can edit and hit play again. No more jumping between awefull menus!
Better Battles and Budgets
VA was built at lightning pace so that I wouldn't run out of money, and it worked and saved me. But now it's time for VA's general battles and scenes to get a serious face lift. They look lame, they're pretty underwhelming, and honestly don't feel that cool. Some of the fleets are neat, but the initial fights are rather bland.
The mission budget for VA (Awe, Blocks, Ships, Tier) serves to help keep the player challenged - and keep the game from lagging. But I'm going to revisit a lot of them and try to give the player more overall freedom for going over (or under) budget, and having bigger fleets.
I'm going to try and rely soly on Awe, Tek and Tier.
Tek
Is a new resource working along side Awe to help make some parts more rare, without bankrupting the rest of the ship. For instance, shields, reactors, and controls all now cost Tek, and you have precious little Tek. However guns, hull, thrusters, and such still only cost Awe. Some things are a mixture of both such as the Armour blocks. Which have been rebalanced to be far more HP dense while being lighter but costing mostly Tek instead of Awe.
Victory Banners (and difficulty rewards?)
I'm messing around with the age-old idea of "budget difficulty" so beating a mission under budget, or over budget gives a completion reward. You can think of "3/3 stars" from other games.
Annoyingly I don't actually have anything to reward the player with - this isn't that kind of game - but most people love the feeling of completion, and mastery, so victory banners that visually track your competence should be meaningfully nice.
(Difficulty rewards?)
For beating missions with less budget I could reward the player with more Awe/Tek for the next battle... but I don't like the idea of forcing someone to fight a mission - that he might not have enjoyed - just so he can go and fight a different mission with more budget.
Fleet Management and Editing
Part of the Oct experimental build was an overhauled Fleet management and editing setup. Selecting a fleet from the Fleets menu load that fleet into the Fleetbench, and lets you edit it and save it, test it, do whatever you want just like the Workbench.
Workbench tweaks
All the new workbenchs (Workbench, Warbench, and Fleetbench) save their own seperate state.
Meaning you can hop into the Workbench to toy with something (some people like having a big collection of testing ships and other things), then hop into a fleet's bench to edit it in it's own private space, then hop over to a War mission's bench with a completely different set of stuff in it to try and beat your last high score.
War Content
I'm finally in a position to continue working on the campaign, and add the final missions of the game. The Oppressor himself is still going to take some creativity to setup, but I think I have some ideas for a grand bossfight.
Game Balance, Tutorial and Design Entertainment
VA is about designing ships, so most of the point of challenge missions and counter-weaponry is to force the player to build a fleet that is totally different from what he had before. But helping the player to realist this without handing him the answer takes a lot of carefully designed missions and interactions. Something I've rather slapdashed across the board since I sadly have far more technical issues to solve than gameplay ones. But now I have to take the time and actually sort out
Tutorial
I have to get a proper tutorial sorted out, and that's going to take some doing but I'm sure I can get there. Some things don't need to be taught (the idea that bullets break things can be seen and is far more fun that way) but the idea of missiles and PD (shoot down missiles), the idea of energy and weapon fire, it's all a bit much for someone to figure out on their own. Also the nature of thrusters and movement.
TL:DR
There's a lot to sort out, but it's a fun challenge.
Cheers,
Luke AP