Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Early in the week I was battling some major burn out due to the 4 day weekend of binge coding the week before. There were a bunch of bugs and issues to sort out with the new changes to hangars and ships carrying objects that were worked on and solved. That felt good and the burn out went away as they were fixed. I then continued working on the early game. I tried to look at what’s missing, what’s lame and what doesn’t quite make sense from the world’s perspective.

For example – early in the game there is a pirate attack that for game play purposes mainly serves as a combat tutorial. But for the world building/setting purposes the pirates should have a reason for the attack. Otherwise their actions are strange and would toss the player out of the game world and instead think of the game’s designers as lazy or incompetent. So to give the world more sense I added some loot for them to steal and since I worked on transport ship AI, this was a great spot to use the new AI and logic additions. Here’s the fun part this small thought, leads to other aspects that needed thinking about. What happens when the pirate succeeds in grabbing the loot? What happens if the pirate escapes? What happens if the player follows the pirate? In a dynamic and somewhat open ended game such as Void Destroyer there are a bunch of possibilities, especially considering luck and player skill. So these alternate paths were considered and added. I’m hoping to add in some more branching, with some branches leading to dead ends – going with the idea that making choices have consequences will have the impact that the “right” choices have more meaning.

So I’m very close for final polish, play testing then tossing the newest additions onto Steam.