
Spearhead SS by JassBefrold.
This morning I slogged through establishing four types of AI routines for enemy ships: Aggressive, Tactical, Defensive, and Random. Right now the differences are fairly subtle, owing to the limited moveset and lack of implemented gadgets, but they are discernible. The advantage of this is that most ship battles should be able to bank on these AI routines without having to have wholly new ones written. Any tweaks that need to be introduced for specific fights can benefit all encounters in the game (hopefully).
Then I turned my focus to coding the first ship fight into the game – a lone, low-ranking Corona Lord that’ll ambush you on your way to Tarkus in an older, smaller, Casstech Z7. Did I make it that so that I could re-use the same art as the Casstech Z14 and just scale it down? Definitely not. Perish the thought.
The fight works great and isn’t too difficult. I was able to defeat her using a stock Casstech Z14 without dipping into my armor, which is the desired outcome for making the right moves in the introductory battle. And did you know that she has sex scenes too? There’s four different loss scenes: two scenes for any genital configuration, one for male centaurs, and one for those with particularly cumbersome male endowments. (And yes, you will be able to encounter her again. Wsan made some small variations to her repeat texts that are pretty choice.)
You’d think I stopped there, but you’re wrong! After that I went to work on the user interface for buying a ship from Vahn, including a rather detailed stat comparison breakdown. Then I made it so you had five ship storage slots in the hangar for your extra ships. Then I coded another ship into the game, the Spearhead SS. Give her a gander!
Tomorrow, the plan is get the “Trade In” option working, roll out a few more ships, and make all the ship buy/sell shop stuff actually workable with other NPCs besides Vahn.



It was brought to my attention that when I said “bigger update” in my last note, some understood that to mean a game update instead of a verbal update on the work I was doing on the ship systems. Apologies for that.
Fen Edit: Y’all might not have noticed, but Gedan authored the above. With that bit of credit out of the way, I wanted to let everyone know that I made some fantastic progress on getting together a basic ship system for you all. Bear in mind that none of this is live yet. Basic ship combat works in 1-on-1 encounters as well as group-on-group fights. Vahn can sell you new weapons to equip, and you can toggle weapon systems on or off each round of combat as your power budget demands. Expect a bigger update tomorrow night (if it’s a slow news day.)

I and most of the other writers have spent this last week writing up codices! It’s super exciting and interesting work, let me tell you 😛

