Put out Iteration 21 about two weeks ago, but finalized late last week. Happy about that and then once again hit my “post bigger update” slump. I did a bunch of house keeping type things – making new assets and prepping others.

I knocked together a new ship – I had a fairly unfinished ship that I chopped up, combined with other parts and textured to create a “bounty hunter” corvette. It turned out pretty well – however it is a bit lacking in detail compared to some of the other ships. Adding this new ship meant that I re-balanced some of the bounty hunter fights and then even further modified one of the missions and to flesh it out some more. I almost forgot that I did this – I guess I’m a bit more absent minded than usual.

Speaking of new ships – I put in a ship that’s been hanging around – unused – for a few years. It was driving me a bit nuts – its shape wasn’t working for me when I looked at it in game – so I actually cut it in half then took the front half and flipped it 180 and then re-attached. Now the new carrier looks pleasing to me. I spent a bunch of time on tweaking its texturing to finalize.

And speaking of new assets – I needed a “destroyer shipyard” so I split up the existing “frigate shipyard” into a smaller platform, and re-purposed the original shipyard as a destroyer shipyard. Oh the things we must do when there’s no 3D modeler available. I’m glad that the model was so versatile and detailed to be able to create a smaller asset from it.

Other things – re-balanced /scaled missiles and torpedoes. Re-scaled all the fighters – decreased them by another 25% – I’m happy with their scale now – they look fairly small compared to larger ships And scaling them down has the added benefit of making them survive fights against larger ships – since they are 25% harder to hit in a sense. I prepped and tweaked a bunch of other assets – including scale.

So now that I look back at the above I actually did more than I thought – and today I started on new story content. Its getting close – I’m nearly done adding ships/stations/etc into the game that have been sitting in my dev build – exciting times – but a big challenge is coming up – how it all ends and begins.