Work continues on what looks to be our biggest update yet. This is part 2 of our development blog about 0.9.0.00 which means the features listed here are being added in addition to the feature discussed in the previous blog post. Lets talk about more upcoming features:
Experience
Mastery points for completing quests was a great idea! It gave the power to our quest designers to directly control the speed at which the player's power and sense of agency ramps up as they move through the story. There was only one problem...we don't have any quest designers on our team. So mastery points have been feeling like an incomplete feature for a long time.
You know what? EXP is a perfectly good system that doesn't need to be reinvented. Who doesn't love filling bars and receiving rewards? So that's what we are doing now, we are giving the player exp for things and filling a bar. When the bar fills, you get a mastery point, just like in every other game, including all the ones which can afford to keep a quest designer on staff all the time. There's more than one reason why this system is nice.
So one feature you can look forward to in 0.9.0.00 is finally being able to use all of the mastery points we designed so long ago. Who knows, maybe we will even add more of them some day.
World Save Overhaul
This is a long one...which is why I made an hour long video explaining it.
The short version is this: While working on mining and resources I decided my life was miserable because our world save format was terrible. It was some of my earliest code and I made a lot of mistakes that became systemic problems impeding my daily development. So I burned it to the ground and started over and I think the new system is much better.
One immediately obvious result of the new world format is that gameplay is much smoother on average and free from the hitching caused by asset initialization and disk operations.
End Game activities!
Well all of that is neat, you say, but what are we to do with our ship once we've harvested the resources and researched the technology and filled it with crew and stocked it with supplies?
Why blow it up in the new end-game activity of course!
This is supposed to be a game about getting to a planet, so I suppose it's about time we actually added that planet right? Well we added it. So now winning the game is an activity that you will be able to do...finally.
Inconveniently, it seems that the planet is guarded by all the meanest enemy ships in the star system. Also some sort of energy field will force you to progress through a series of procedurally generated zones one at a time, periodically defeating a boss in order to reach the next area until eventually you reach some sort of final challenge.
I'm calling it a gauntlet. It's the end of our story. It will be available to attempt pretty much immediately after starting the campaign, but it will be pretty difficult so you won't want to try it in your starter ship. It will also only be partially complete as of the release of 0.9.0.00 because ultimately we want all of the T3 stuff to be in the gauntlet and T3 assets are probably going to take us until 1.0 to make.
I'll be paying closer attention to gauntlet feedback because I kinda eyeballed the neutrino bombs on this one. If people absolutely hate it big changes can be made.
When is it coming?
Probably the most important question to answer. Here's the current status breakdown:
* Clouds are in
* Sensors and vision is done
* World overhaul is done and mostly debugged
* A whole lot of new items were made
* Mining modules and nodes and animations are done
* New tooltips are done
* Core framework for resources is designed but not fully implemented
* Mining nodes spawning across the entire universe is nearing completion
* Space dungeon core framework is working and the details are now being fleshed out
* World layout and economy rework is looming ominously over us
* I started a side project of trying to optimize big ship interiors but it is low priority
* We're doing some changes to our website
We're trying desperately to get this all finished before the world formally ends but we may need an additional month or two after it has in order to wrap things up. In other words, I'll try to keep you appraised of the progress.