Hello everyone, I took a break from development for a few days, but now I am back with a few changes for you. Thanks for playing!
QoL:
- New player onboarding - Added text prompts around the ship explaining many aspects and systems of the ship, as well as a general outline of how to play. These labels can be enabled and disabled from the settings menu.
- Added settings persistence between sessions.
- Added some particles around the ship (externally) to help show direction and speed of movement in flight.
- Added nametags on players to be able to more easily tell who is who.
Gameplay:
- Added player "ragdolls" which spawn when a player dies, giving better feedback and cues to other players when someone dies. Also it's funny.
- Added a penalty for dying - 15 damage straight to the ship's hull. Let me know what you think of this change. (also added a warning to the respawn button in the menu about this penalty)
- Added a cooldown to the menu's respawn button to prevent easy griefing by rapidly respawning yourself and quickly running down the ship's health.
Planned:
- Settings to Invert certain axes of ship controls
- Better client experience for rover training level
- Better guards/incentive to keep the player ship inside the playable area besides invisible walls, such as damage to the ship (as well as an indication on how to get back)
- Movement stick deadzone settings to be added to the settings menu
- Enemy ships
- Better cockpit ship views
On a more personal note, thank you all so much for playing. It's been a blast to see so many people playing (and hopefully some enjoying) a game that my friends and I have put so much work into. Reading the reviews and feedback is a lot of fun; even the bug reports because I am insane and like solving them (and writing patch notes). Reading "this game has a lot of potential" and "I can't wait to see where this game goes" inspires and gives me pride beyond what I can express across text. Even seeing the game listing in my Steam library was a surreal experience.
At the time of writing, we've had over 10 thousand people claim a license from the store, and over 400 people actually download the game and log playtime. Not a great conversion rate, but 400 people is still more than I thought we would get in the first place so I see it as an absolute win.
That being said, this is was a student project we made to display on our resume and get a job with. Mission accomplished. Most of the team has job offers now and, as you can imagine, are very busy with them. I myself will be preoccupied with moving soon to a new job. For the past few updates it's been just me working, but I too will soon have other commitments. Make no mistake! I can't speak for the rest of the team but I am committed to making this game the product I know it can be. Hopefully, I can check off a few more of the planned features before I move - I really want to get enemy ships up and running.
With the introduction of a day job development can no longer be "whenever I feel like it" and must instead be "whenever I have free time to". I hope you can understand.
Expect slower updates. But they will come nonetheless. Thank you for playing.
-Thomas