Hello again! Steam Next Fest starts next week, the demo has stabilized, and I'm hard at work on the full game behind the scenes. I'm planning to do monthly dev logs moving forward so you all can see what I'm up to as I work towards finishing the full game!

Next Fest

Steam Next Fest starts on June 15th, and this game is participating! Next Fest is a great opportunity to see cool demos of hundreds of upcoming games. If you haven't tried out the demo of When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears, Next Fest is a great time to see what the game has to offer.

Devlog -- Capital Ships and Fighters

Now that the demo is in a more stable state, I've been busily working on features for the full game release. I've created 20 new modules for players to mount on their ships, including automated turrets, fighter bays, and asteroid throwers. I've also been building some larger ship frames to showcase the new modules, including a few carriers that can launch different types of fighters. I've currently got three different types of fighters working: mass driver fighters that have shields but do less damage, laser fighters that do heavy damage and aim fast, and missile fighters that do devastating damage, but have very limited ammo. Check out a sneak peek:

The fighters presented a few interesting design puzzles from both a balance and a performance perspective.

On the balance side, fighters need to be small and fragile, but they also need to feel satisfying to use and be effective in combat. After spending a fair amount time trying different stat lines, a key step was tuning the fighters to have relatively limited health and ammunition, but to have them return to the mother ship when damaged or out of ammunition for repair and restock. Adding a return and relaunch step increased the fighter's longevity (making them more useful), but also acted as a bit of a brake on how quickly the fighters can dish out punishment to other ships. It also was more interactive for the player as players now need to stay close enough to the action so the fighters can safely return and then relaunch.

On the performance side, fighters helped expose some bottlenecks. Once I started launching fighters I wondered how many I could have on screen at once before things started slowing down, so I made some test ships that could launch hundreds(!) of fighters. On my initial testing, once I had more than 100 fighters swarming around, things started slowing down a bit, but I knew I could do better with a bit of work. After working through and pruning some unnecessary collision objects and reducing some complexity in the ship targeting code, I managed to get closer to 200 fighters on screen before seeing a slow down. The breakthrough was enabling physics interpolation in my game engine (Godot). It required a bit of reengineering and tweaking, but after those tweaks I could have more than 400 fighters on screen without any noticeable slow down, although I did see a few minor frame drops once those 400 fighters actually started fighting each other!

Realistically, I don't anticipate any playable ships actually generating 100s of fighters (the ship pictured above in its default configuration only generates about 20), but in large combat scenes involving multiple carriers there could easily be 100 ships in play at once, so improving performance for ship counts in the low hundreds was well worth the time investment!

What's Next?

Next up is even more ships and modules: near term plans include working on a heat beam, a cutting laser, and a cloaking device. I'm also planning to do some design work on a few more fundamental changes to the core mechanics around how the player acquires new ship modules. Instead of having the player just automatically get all the modules from a destroyed ship, I'm planning to have ships leave modules behind for the player to pick up. I'm also planning to create an inventory system so players can see what they have at any given time (without going back to base), and some other related systems work.

Talk to you next month!