About two weeks ago my wife and I went on a mini vacation – which came at a great time because my “mouse forearm” was killing me. Every time I’d sit down and move the mouse around a bit it would start to hurt. A few days away from the PC and the pain is gone, luckily. So as far as two weeks ago – nothing much happened though right before the vacation I tweaked some very early content to make it much more epic.

Basically I extended a lot of the fights. The challenge here was that early on the player is either in a single (and fairly fragile ship) or in a big ship with very few guns. So extending the game meant a careful addition of enemy and friendly ships. Some tweaks to the map, some tweaks to how ships exit gates (specifying the “exit distance”) and other fiddling around. It was worth it in my opinion because the early game is now expanded, more dramatic and more interesting. The early game is so incredibly important, one of the biggest reasons is that nearly every player that plays Void Destroyer will play the early game, but much less will play the late game. The late game is pretty good – big battles, boss fights, unique enemies, surprises etc – so I’m glad that the early game got some love to hopefully keep players interested in the game to reach the later game.

So this week I spent working on a bit of a house keeping task that I’ve been meaning to do for a while – making some turrets always visible in tactical mode. Before only turrets on a “selected” ships were visible – this meant that some huge turrets (turrets that are attached to platforms, or big ships) didn’t show up in tactical mode – and this meant that the platform or ship model – looked bare and incomplete. This was fixed on Saturday and early Sunday – hopefully not many bugs were introduced.

Then late yesterday and today I spent tweaking the current final portion of content, the big boss fight. The challenge is that at a certain point I need the boss to go through a certain thing, but in 3D space this isn’t a guarantee. So what I did was to disable the ship’s engines via a script, however – this lead to a problem – momentum on collisions, the ship would/could drift – so I had to do a non-cheating way of accomplishing this, and it appears to work… we’ll see

Then there’s the matter of actually fighting the boss. What happens with the way I design/create boss fights is that overall I think of a strategy to fight the boss first, then model the boss around that. Noticed the “think” part? Well eventually I have to actually test this in game – and it wasn’t working… until I tweaked some values in the ship’s xml data file.. and voila! Strategy I had in mind is now viable. Only question is whether player’s will figure it out, I think this boss fight is a bunch more challenging than the first. Hopefully interesting and fun in its own way.

Almost forgot! A few days ago was the 1 year aniversary of the start of Void Destroyer’s Kickstarter campaign. This means that the project is late – as far as my promises and time lines a year ago are concerned. Though I’m sorry that I was wrong and my estimates were (and still continue to be) misleading – I think that the project is – a better project than I envisioned delivering a year ago.