Hey! :) I've been doing the devlogs on my personal youtube channel, but since the Steam page went live - I think it's a good idea if I describe what has been done recently to keep you all updated!
This week was mostly spent polishing / balancing the battles. There were new ability animations, but the biggest achievement this week was actually figuring out the solution on how the battles should work.
The thing is: the battles were very short, which is great if you are looking mostly for idle experience, but they felt a bit awkward if you were looking for tactical experience where you'd heal, use abilities, evade projectiles. There's not much tactics if shot exchange instantly ends within 2 seconds with most of the ships dead.
To fix that: I've added a special value that determines if player wants to fight longer or have more of an idle experience. It's a simple slider in settings, all that it does is multiplies the hp of BOTH sides by a selected value from 1 to 5. Since the damage remains the same, the battles can become significantly longer, where skill will matter much more: the more projectiles you will dodge, the more health boxes you will be able to collect and prolong your starfighting experience.
Here's the further video with explanation if you want to see how it works in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_q_BTdx-Kg
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for weekly updates (and, of course, the release on Dec 15 :)
Cheers,
Vladimir