Hey folks! Thanks for checking out a quick preview of Airship Commander 0.4. The team came back from the holiday break more fired up than ever and we're happy to show off two work-in-progress features that we're planning on including in the next release.
When thinking about the second campaign for Airship Commander, something quickly became apparent. While the Narcopope Campaign that shipped in 0.1 accomplished what it set out to do, we felt like there was a lot of areas to improve upon.
The first area we targeted was mission structure. The Narcopope campaign is a combination of 15 hand-crafted "missions," but they're pretty much locked. Nothing the player does (except dying) has any impact on future scenarios. Giving the player agency over the types of scenarios and fights they embarked upon appealed to us immensely.
Thinking back to Wing Commander Armada, we started to wonder if having a "Strategic" layer of gameplay added to the existing "Tactical" layer wouldn't be a solid approach. We quickly prototyped the idea and sure enough it added a great deal to the whole experience.
Each faction has a single Capital Ship that is the goal of the game to destroy/protect. The map is comprised of a number of Strategic Waypoints, each of which when under faction control contributes resources for building new squadrons of airships. More Waypoints under your control than the enemy's means you'll be able to flood the map with friendlies, pushing their faction back to their starting location. Once hemmed in like this, the Destroy Capital Ship scenario becomes available which is very similar to the 0.3 Capital Ship Gameplay missions.
You can see a quick overview of that functionality here:
https://youtu.be/nUfEhgCzwbQ
Once we played this format to completion a few times, we knew we were on to something. Adding new "verbs" to this structure is natural (i.e. minefields, bombing, etc), and gives the player even more authorship over the types of scenarios they play.
Another big area of improvement continues to be the moment-to-moment gameplay of piloting your vessel. The 0.3 release introduced man portable weapons to the deck of your ship, and this proved to be a major step in the right direction. The problem however was that you only got to employ this engaging gameplay in rare situations: when taking on capital ships. What if there was a way to integrate it into most of the combat encounters, specifically airship versus airship?
As you saw in the video above, this works splendidly. Your focus becomes a critical resource. Should you spent it on lining up the perfect broadside? Or firing some of your limited number of missiles at distant targets? Or shooting down incoming enemy missiles? This juggling act proved very engaging, and having it be a part of every airship encounter increased the teams enjoyment of the game immensely.
These two features are major steps forward for Airship Commander, and we can't wait to hear what people think when they get to try them out. We're spending the next week-ish finishing these features as well as a few others we're keeping under wraps for now. After we lock-down for release, we hope to spend about another week polishing and bugfixing. If all goes well we should be releasing early February.
As always we continue to be incredibly grateful for your support. The entire experience of making Airship Commander has been a dream come true for the team and couldn't be more appreciative for you checking us out. Thank you for your time!