Monthly Archives: May 2014

More Happenings

I did a play through of the game and am nearly finished. There was a bunch of little issues I found with the scripting that I fixed. A few more ships have appeared in game and hopefully more are on the way. The first 1/2 of the game is getting polished and “filled” with what I had in mind. Though there’s still some ways to go.

 

I added a fairly unique ship combo – one that I wanted to add for a long time but didn’t have the assets. I had a bit of a bummer moment because the constant – this game is also a RTS gets in the way of some of the intended – memorable moments. For example the new ship combo – happened to die too quickly. This gets looked at by me via these ways – improve the AI so that the ships have a bigger chance of doing damage to the player – thus being noticeable. Tweak the other nearby ships – so that the ship that I want to be noticed – has a greater chance to survive (while the player’s ships are dealing with the other baddies).

 

During the play through I had a thought – the content that happens near the first 1/2 of the game (the current content) – is in my opinion – pretty awesome. To be more descriptive – it is the core of the game as I envisioned it. There is opportunity for the player to make tactical decisions on what enemy assets to destroy and the player must defend against enemy attacks – yet there is opportunity to actually jump into a ship and pilot it. This strikes me a bit – because I thought – I would love the earlier portion of the game to be this good as well. But this would probably be overwhelming for a player new to the game. Still the early game needs improvement – most notably some early fights are over far too quickly, this will be remedied :)

Happenings

This week has been mostly about a boss fight. This is good news because it means that there is going to be a boss fight. When I prepped a map and an opposing fleet for the next steps in the mission/story – I realized that once it was all said and done, without a boss, it is just another space battle that. So in those terms boring and not unique. With the help of a Kickstarter backer I’ve had an idea for a boss, and was lucky to get an 3D model to be able to put into the game.

 

So the week was spent on tweaking the 3D boss model’s texture/geometry. Adding weapons, defenses, etc etc. I don’t want to say too much because it would be a spoiler, but I’ve added the ability for ships to “turn towards the enemy” in certain ways. The best term is “broadside” attacks – like naval dreadnoughts.

Another unique addition to go along with the boss is the ability to attach “something” to it. Right now this is fairly basic – but it can easily be expanded to support “sub systems” or just plain blowing off parts off of a object – for example a wing of a ship. The biggest issue is that I don’t have 3D assets to support such a thing, but this opens up cool possibilities for future updates.  A bit of a challenge arose here due to the (somewhat) recently added “physical turrets” – turrets that are part of the physical game world – not just visual representations. The physical turrets and the attached object were colliding with each other, causing physics glitches. Had to do a bit of research and filter out some collisions that don’t have to take place.

 

Finally – I hope that there is another surprise waiting for the player – don’t want to say too much, but it is another chance to turn something from fairly dull to memorable.