Been meaning to do more posts. There’s a few reasons why it seems that I haven’t been very successful at this task.

One of the reasons is that there are now three separate spots that I tend to talk with the community. Here, Kickstarter, and Steam. This section tends to be mostly left behind – as in my guesstimate it sees the least traffic. Another reason – when the initial Steam Early Access launch happened – my work load spiked (now it has fairly subsided) and I got out of the habit of updates. I’ve been meaning to fix this via a grand summary post, but that appears to just add to the whole – “don’t have time for it right now” excuse. I’ve also been meaning to combine Kickstarter updates and toss them here, but again – the whole don’t want to start because it would take too long creeps in.

So I decided to make shorter posts about what’s happening right now, and hopefully get back in the habit of weekly posts.

Here’s what I’m currently excited about (as in bored my wife telling her about yesterday)- I’ve been working on instant action scenarios while waiting for new ship assets (the new ship assets are by themselves very exciting to me). Anyway – instant action scenarios are a great way for me to design one off maps/missions – I know exactly what the player will have, and I know exactly what the enemy will have. This – as opposed to the more “flowing” nature of the continuous mission structure of main game – where the player can chose how many and what types of ships to build – is a great way of custom tailoring the experience. Still players have a lot of freedom, but I can at least start them off how I want. The other cool thing about instant action scenarios is that they are a great way of being able to tell the story from another angle. I’ve always loved this idea, and I’m happy that I’m able to realize this dream I had a while back. I hope that players see this the same way.

This new instant action scenario features a neat little twist – an ability/tactic that the player wouldn’t be aware off – it isn’t documented anywhere – though in terms of the game world makes sense. So it is an added bonus for the player to play this scenario – see the trick and potentially use it in the main game. Have to think of more ways to put these sort of happenings in.

Another great aspect of instant action scenarios – is that they let me re-use some ships that I wanted to be unique to the story line. For example boss ships. I didn’t want them to show up all over the place and diminish their uniqueness, but if I have a cool ship – I want to use it more than once. So having a scenario where a unique ship is involved – awesome!