Today has been pretty good for progress. I spent 30 minutes or so putting together some commission prompts for art to get from artists like Bashko – just like the Syri pictured at right! Yes, that Syri picture will be sliding its way into the artpack soon.

My next task was to burrow back into the ship combat systems and continue to flesh them out. Today’s project was the “Gadgets” menu, where various upgrades can be used like a PC’s special abilities. I loosely based the structure on the current combat item use, since they function in similar ways, but I had to chase down some interesting new bugs in target selection that cropped up. For example, shield boosters would continually refuse to activate, citing shields being at maximum no matter what your ship’s shields were actually at, because it was incorrectly assigning the item’s target to the PC him(her?)self.

With those smashed out, I’m pleased to report that shield boosters (1/fight shield healing), repair modules (1/fight armor healing), and shield disruptors (1/fight chance to deal 50% shield damage to enemy, based on the ship’s system stats). Note that all numbers, values, and abilities are subject to change.

The remaining things I need to tackle, in no particular order:

  • Putting together some proper AI routines with various personality “types” that can be assigned to enemy ships to control them in a fight.
  • Make sure enemy ships actually fire the full volley from their guns. (Right now only PC ships will fire their machine gun all four times.)
  • Create a new ship type for our first foe, outfit it, and implement Wsan’s finished scenes.
  • Put together the UI for comparing your current ship to a new one.
  • UI for choosing to move all upgrades to your new ship
  • UI for choosing to store or sell the ship you are replacing. (And figure out how ships will be stored/retrieved.)
  • Determine how to deal with onboard storage – all items will always be stored on your “current” ship, which means I may have to prevent liftoff if you swap from a cargo ship back to the z14 and don’t have room for you 60 guns.
  • Actually buying the new ship.