Devblog Update: 27/10/2015

I’ve been very busy these past few days polishing the game and doing bits and pieces where I see a need as I play test. Lots of things got done, but I focused on these:

1. Overhauled the economic simulator to respond better to events and player actions, affecting restocking, price adjust over-time.

2. Add tracking of player buy/sell of goods at ports, if player is actively engaged in trading with a few markets, they can boost its productivity to a higher than normal status, giving the port a bonus to wealth generation (stronger faction!), restocking rates and prices. The goal is for traders to make a difference in the grand scheme of things just by trading!

3. Added a contraband scanning animation; “scanning beam”!

4. Added a new faction, the Zerkers. Self-replicating AI remnants of an ancient alien civilization with one purpose: destroy the invading humans who dare trample on ruins of their creators. They are extremely dangerous to engage for a newbie squad. Worked them into the lore of the factions.

5. Separated the pirate raid system event from the trade crisis events. So now a system can have a worker riot (damn those lonely workers and their constant need of Pleasure Sims!) + Pirate raid + Zerker skirmish all at the same time! I feel bad for those colonists.

6. Re-balanced the bounty system, rep, exp, faction standing, loot. Quicker early progression.

7. Added and completed the dialogues to join the major factions as hired mercs/allies, giving the player a special bounty system for killing enemy faction ships and granting access to better tech & ships.

8. Added an interactive title screen, within a dynamic system where NPC ships freely do their thing. Some pretty epic battles happen right from the start! 🙂

9. Added death mechanic for both “Normal” and “Easy” modes.

10. Revamped some special fx. Nicer warp, more oomphy ship explosions (with screen shake based on the size of the explosion & distance from player ship).

11. Added a friendly fire system & coms responses for all factions! They will warn you, then sternly warn again, then some moderate faction standing loss, then major faction standing loss. It decays over time, so multiple “accidents” in a pro-longed battle won’t be an issue.

12. Finished the Emergency Warp module & mechanic.

13. Added dynamic night-sky for most planet-side port landings. Ships in orbit will fly by, based on the faction that owns the port. Also, pirates, zerker or enemy faction fleets present in-sys will be shown to do battle in the night sky.

The game is finally “Completed”. No more features to add, can start and end in a normal play-through.

To Do List:

1. Music & Sound integration. It’s gonna be “3D positional” sounds!
2. Intro & Outro scenes (my artist is busy working on those!).
3. More random encounters. <- I want to have as many as possible before release.
4. Final balancing & play-test.