Hey folks! Thanks for tuning in for the latest Airship Commander update! Last weeks diary talked about the major features for the 0.3 release, so today we’ll touch on a couple of the minor features.
https://youtu.be/RBJPXpGAqBw
Once we started down the man portable weapons route for missile and point defense targeting, lots of ideas came bubbling up. The ambient creatures (currently birds) were always meant to have gameplay associated with them, so this seems like the perfect opportunity to expand their role.
The unambiguously named Bird Gun is what we came up with. Shooting from the deck of a moving ship adds a surprising number of challenges, but we finally tuned it to where it feels pretty good (heavy deflection shooting required). While blasting the robo-birds currently offers little more than a distraction, we’ve got lots of plans to use this mechanic. Think a “swarm” weapon that you can use on an enemy airship, with the defenders having the option to shoot the individual elements from the sky.
Another nice addition are in-world tooltips. It’s not remotely obvious what many of the deck props do, and these popups convey lots of useful information. At the very least it’ll allow us to remove the info-kiosks that litter the decks and replace them with tips that only appear when close.
We’ve been trying to find a good options screen solution, since we want to keep the player in-game and commanding the airship at all times. A solution that we’re starting to circle involves a row of levers that the player can flip to do option screen kind of things. The two initial options are the ability to disable the play area chaperone and enable tooltips regardless of player distance. I suspect we’ll add a few more before we’re done done done.
If this update seems a little brief it’s because it is. I lost a bit of time when my beloved nvidia 970’s fans got so clogged with dust that the thing actually started to melt in my case. The acrid aroma was easily noticed and I shut everything down quickly, but it took some doing to track down what happened. I’ve replaced the card with a 1070 (it was surprisingly tough to find a 970) and am back up and running. I’ll have to be sure to stay honest on perf though with the new hardware. Until we replace the minimum spec machine, please let us know if you feel perf is slipping from where it currently is.
We hope to lock down new features by mid week and start the QA process for release by the weekend. The next update has lots of great stuff in it and is another solid step towards realizing the vision our team has for Airship Commander. Thank you for being a part!