Hi folks. Thanks for reading the latest Airship Commander update! With room scale and touch implemented and tweaks ongoing, the next big feature we wanted to tackle was capital ship combat. At the same time we chipped away at that vision, we also wanted to work in missiles and increased player involvement during combat. A tall order but everyone is very pleased with the progress.
https://youtu.be/Tnx91_6psVM
The first thing you’ll notice in that video are weapons you can pickup. The current tact is that these weapons are “painters”, devices you use to target ship mounted ordinance. Each “function” is a different weapon, though we’re considering making it a single “gun” that you can switch modes on (rowboat targeting, point defense, anti-capship missile, and new stuff we’re think about).
Capital ships always served the goal of Airship Commander with their great scale and gameplay. Our first stab at taking down these monsters are three critical hit points, in the video above the giant green cubes. Paint one of these targets for 5 seconds and your airship will launch an anti-capital ship weapon to destroy this vulnerable ship component. Destroy all three and the capship goes down.
Torpedoes were all over Wing Commander for anti-capship missions so that was what we prototyped first. Beyond working well with “painting” weapons, missiles do that great virtual reality trick of looking cool at different distances. When a missile locks on and launches, whips across the sky and detonates against it’s target, it fully realizes the vision of what we set out to do with this game.
Enemy escorts are going to be part of these engagements, but we also wanted the capital ships to be able to defend themselves. Their weapons up to this point were the massive cannons used to take out OTHER capital ships, so we reworked parts of the missile prototype to be the anti-airship-sized weapons. In the video above the cap ship fires volleys at the player, which the player can use rapid fire “point defense” cannons to neutralize. Using the same “painting” mechanism (albeit with a much shorter required time on target), the player can counter these counter measures. Cool!
Lots of work to do but the initial investigations are paying off in a big way. As always the Airship Commander team appreciates you checking us out and reading this update. There are a lot of great things planned for this game and we can’t wait to get them implemented! Thanks again for your continued support!