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.

Today was not the day I wanted it to be. I didn’t truly get committed to doing the codework that needed doing until this afternoon, which meant that I was burning hard on that until this late hour (approximately 2am). Needless to say, I don’t find myself with the time I intended to have to discuss ship systems with you all. I’ll still try to cover the big bullet points for you guys. Here:

• This ship system is not the system we were talking about months back. That was more ambitious and, frankly, probably a dev-time sinkhole.
• Ships come with some “fixed” attachments and some free slots that can be left open for more crew space or filled by more guns and upgrades.
• Escape is accomplished by charging up your light drive – this takes one round to charge. Should you take any electrical damage to your armor/hull before escaping, the charge is lost.
• Weapons can be toggled on and off individually. This may be an important part of combat if you rely on high energy weapons or have a ship with weaker energy generation capabilities.
• Ship weapons can fire single shots or bursts of up to four shots.
• I just updated storage capacity to pull storage size from your ship’s stats. It’s still 10s across the board for the Casstech.
• You can choose not to fire any weapons to double your ship’s energy generation for that turn.
• You can choose to evade (and not fire) to gain a 50% evasion boost.
• Dodging/Evasion for ships works differently than for land combat. Evasion still functions as a % miss chance, but the attacking ship’s accuracy is effectively subtracted from it. For example, you could have a ship with 120% evasion, but a craft with +60% accuracy would still hit you 40% of the time.
• Upgrade modules that provide large boosts to one ship attribute are planned, but not yet put together.
• Special modules are planned but not yet put together – modules that allow a once per fight shield restoration or full charge of energy, for example.
• I intend to add ship weapons with “Turret” flags that deal slightly more than double the damage of the normal version – to compensate for the fact that you must have a free crew member to staff them (making it effectively take 2 slots).

Of course, while doing this, a number of other things have gotten cleaned up. For example, shopkeeper busts should still display while you’re viewing their inventory. Penny, Amber, and a few other NPCs have been updated to allow them to be removed from your crew and re-hired. We can’t have you getting stuck on a backwater planet because you have too much crew to fly!

Again, sorry for any confusion (and dashed hopes)! I promise, this stuff is falling into place pretty quickly. Wsan is doing a hard burn to write the smutty parts of the first ship battle, and look forward to getting it in your hands to play with.

<3 Fen

Hey guys. Submissions are kicking my ass still. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been talking about them repeatedly on the blog posts. From the 14th of this month on, we’ve had at least one new submission get added to the pile on a daily basis, which is making it damn hard for me to get current. I’m almost caught up to the 6th of this month though, sooo… I would be damn close if it wasn’t for the big uptick in submissions.

Because of this, I am no longer accepting submissions for new characters. New items and expansions for existing characters are all I will accept for the time being.

We’ve been real thin on patches while I’ve been trying to dig us out of this quagmire, and I’m not comfortable with that continuing in the long term. Once I’ve had some chance to do some actual game development again, I’ll see about tweaking the floodgates back open… but for now, let’s slow it down a bit.

P.S. I’m also waiting on new glasses. Reading everything in giant fonts makes me feel old. :/

A quick update on my work – firstly, reviewing has been slow because there’s a number of things I’ve come across that are soooo close to being up to par that I’ve been trying to self-edit them. Additionally, I’ve had some content slide into my box via side-channels to look over as well, forcing me to delegate some of it to Adjatha and review the rest myself. A bit of good news, though: an excellently written “Faux Cow” path for the treatment sailed right through my review with flying colors. I’m honestly not convinced I could do it better.

So look forward to that, I guess.

Also, since the ship code has been going so slowly, I’ve started laying out plans for building a simpler system in the interim. It won’t contain the same ambition as the other system (which is NOT abandoned or anything). I just want to have things laid out so we can finally steal the Sidewinder and finish Zheng Shi’s main arc.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are approximately 20 pages more of treated male zil for me to review~

Additionally, a fan reached out to me to let me know that they were making their own game (though I don’t think with blackjack and hookers quite yet). It looks like he’s got a public build up on his Patreon if you wanna give another game a try! Check out Rimhaven!

I’m still working through reviewing Mirrin, but at least I’m well past the 100 page mark. There’s a few factors slowing me down:

• Dealing with a lot of stress related to trying to buy a house. Turns out that banks hate people with all their bills paid off and no debts, which has me scrambling to provide them with various bill payment paperworks and still trying to get a mortgage approved. (I currently live in a medium-sized apartment and would rather not empty the TiTS bank for my own personal house :P)
• Tomorrow I am having some dental deep cleaning done which will require a fair amount of pain killers and whatnot.
• The day after tomorrow I’m having the other half of my dental work done. Supposedly I’m not cavity riddled – there’s just a lot of tartar buildup to deal with around/under the gum line.
  • Protip: get your regular cleanings, folks.

I’m gonna try and do some more reviewing now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t get that far. My nerves are basically shot. Thanks, anxiety, you bitch.