Greetings comrades. I'm currently on the road with my face mask searching for a bread line with wifi that isn't actively burning to the ground or experiencing rolling blackouts. I found a nice place that allowed me to stay for a while even though my presence increases their risk of death from the common cold by as much as 0.004% and I thought, why not lets talk some more about development progress and hopefully I don't get cancelled before I can finish this patch.
We're spending most of our time debugging all the horrible changes we made to improve the game at the cost of our quality of life. Can you imagine? We replaced the entire world format! Who would ever think that was a good idea? The truth is that the game runs a lot better now, and after many days of debugging I can even save and load games reliably again. Generating a new game takes a little longer now, but saving and loading is nearly instant by comparison and the actual gameplay performance impact is significant with all ship assets generating off the main thread which means frame rates are up while hitching is down.
This debugging would go a lot faster but in order to procrastinate I've distracted myself with a number of other improvements to the game, lets list some of them:
New crew
I made a ton of new crew members. They all have faces and names and personalities and best of all they have combat stats on the computer chip that's inserted into the part of their brain which otherwise might have warned them against joining your crew. I tried to make a nice variety of them in order to fulfill my original design of allowing you to pick and choose your crew based on their auras in order to min-max ship performance. I'm even making multiple tiers for each aura because crew are going to level up as you collect exp!
At long last there will finally be more crew than there are crew slots.
These crew will also have dialogue interactions and special event triggers which interact with the new gauntlet end-game activities. Each new crew, and also all existing crew, have been given unique specializations that either allow you to avoid something horrible or give you a chance to trigger something beneficial based on the context of the procedural generation.
Home station redesign
We've had a very fancy respawning animation sitting and waiting for a while now, so I thought that it was time to finally remap the home station interior. We're utilizing a lot more of the space available in the station and we've got some new game play improvements along with the remap:
- Cloning bay. You no longer magically appear in a random hallway but instead are 3d printed like a rational adult
- Docking ring. You now have lots more airlocks to work with at the home station so you can manage more than 2 ships docked at a time. The airlocks are located in a new section of the station dedicated to ship logistics.
- It's now much harder to accidentally walk into space at the start of a game.
- Safe storage. Storing items at your station now keeps them in the character database so they transfer between saves instead of physically existing in the map also there's more storage space.
- Construction animations. In addition to costing resources, ships will now actually construct over time. It looks real neat.
- Ship provisioning. Transfer items to and from your ship via the logistics screen
- Expanded effective area for right clicking ships and requesting they be tractored to docks
- Your station now has mining capabilities, since mining exists now and it was always that type of station
Mining operations
This is one of Jan's current pet projects.
Do you just love shooting at rocks endlessly? Well our AI sure does! We're filling the galaxy's ore belts with mindless wage slaves just trying to make a living so that you will have even more opportunities for rapid personal wealth gains. NPC mining parties will now periodically show up at ore nodes and begin mining ore, which will be conveniently left in their cargo holds for you to pillage and plunder if you find yourself lacking for ore and compassion. Their families may never find out what happened to them, but be careful, because their corporate overlords will be looking out for the bottom line. Attack mining operations at your own risk because you may trigger an armed response.
Mining operations will also introduce an entirely new line of ships from another new manufacturer: Goliath Industries. These ships are fantastic for harvesting resources and all of them will come with interior designs well suited for collecting and transporting ore. Expect to see some new mining themed modules and equipment in the game and also built into these new ships.
Control improvements
I've been tweaking controls to try and make them less cumbersome. Slowing your rotation is a lot easier now, and I made thrusters more complex giving them a limited energy reserve for lateral thrust so that you can make ships quite maneuverable in strafing side to side in short bursts without making thrusters better than main engines for forward top speeds. I also added a minor visual indication for engine and thruster energy levels ship wide so you can tell if you can't maneuver because your thrusters are broken or unpowered.
Damage model improvements
Ships are a lot more expensive now, and they feel a bit too fragile, so I've spent some time tweaking the damage model.
I made shields a lot more effective by allowing them to fully prevent hull damage from any shots that directly impact shield pixels. This effectively prevents bleed-through damage from shield pixels that are too close to your hull, and overall makes shields into a much more effective way of keeping your ship alive. I also tweaked values for shield emitters to allow more reserve energy so shields can hold for longer before forming gaps and holes.
Armor was also buffed. If a bullet strikes an armored tile its damage will now be reduced for every pixel touched by the explosion instead of only armor pixels. This prevents bleed-through damage allowing for modules behind your armor to benefit from the protection that the armor provides and makes heavily armored ships feel much more durable under fire while weakly armored ships have a more visible transition in the amount of damage taken when their armor is penetrated.
Visible comms chatter
AI will now sometimes broadcast their feelings about their current lot in life. We've got a fancy new system for animating the things they wish to exclaim and we are filling it with clever and silly little chat events. They might complain about their jobs or taunt you when attacking and we are hoping it will provide some nice atmosphere to the otherwise emotionally empty vacuum of space.
More tuning kits
I've added some new tuning kit types, and reworked the system a little so it's easier to add tuning kit types in the future.