There’s been a fleet of ships waiting to be put into the game and the time has come. Some were already in the game – for use in screen shots and videos so – not always all the way in, and sometimes causing crashes depending on circumstance (eg: firing a weapon, or dying – the assets not existing or being changed causing a crash). So that is what I’m doing right now, going through the fleet starting from the drones and calling it a night when I got to a destroyer. Making sure that sound assets are right, that particle effects match the projectiles/missiles, that turrets have proper skeletons and that debris exist for when the ship is destroyed.

Adding a ship to the game is easy, but adding a bunch gets repetitive, luckily adding a ship includes testing it – something that I very enjoy and I get to add it to a testing map where I look at the fleet as it grows. Though what strikes me is that the fleet as it currently stands is uniform in terms of weaponry – I’m going to have to tweak some ships to be a bit more unique and memorable.

In other news – I spent the week still working on the new story content, this leg of the story had a bunch of particular loose ends to be filled in. Including fully adding some new features to the game engine, and resurrecting some very old features and getting them ready for players that enjoy nosing around into things. The story portion is very particular so I had to think of a few different out comes and plan for those, basically adding “non death” failure states, in case the player doesn’t do what I want the player to do I have to make it clear that the path is back in the other direction. I have to be vague about it here because saying what exactly I did would spoil a bunch.

So as I’ve been working on story content I’ve been thinking more and more how long it takes to add an hour of story game play, it appears to be about a month per hour. I hope that the end result is as good as I think it is (I’m pretty proud of it) but then again maybe it is held up by paper thin illusions? I tend to be very surprised by what players actually do. I’ll have to wait and see. With this content the game should be at about 50% completion story wise – so in thinking of the month per hour time line – I’m really hoping that the ending 50% of the story is going to go much quicker, and it should the way I imagine it, much less talking and much more explosions.

Another bit of news – some new HUD additions, replacing my terrible art, hoping for more very soon.