June was a good month; we got a lot done. Many things are coming together nicely.
We’ve begun to put effort towards the various actions you can perform in the game with ships. In June we worked on the Protect action since it is pivotal to the game. All of the edge cases for Protect (that we have been able to find!) are implemented. A preliminary visual effect for Protect was developed that still needs work, but is definitely going in the right direction.
We worked on the fleet list UI, adding health bars and adjusting ship icons, and in a few cases creating them where they didn’t exist. There is considerable work to be done there, as with most of the UI.
Enemy ships now automatically harvest resources and can therefore run out of fuel just like you can when combat gets intense. It’s pretty satisfying to overwhelm a shieldship with multiple laser warships!
Resource collection was adjusted and some edge cases were implemented. There are some tricky bits to consider, so that system is not yet complete, but it is close.
A good amount of writing was done as new bits of the UI were implemented: scout and ship lost messages, barks from faction leaders expressing praise or discontent when relationships change, and work started on barks to support the upcoming trading UI.
Some more pieces of the UI mockups were completed, including the UI for dealing with riots in your fleet if you run out of water.
Considerable effort was put towards formations; you can drag ships from your fleet into different formations, which is really cool. Where you choose to place ships definitely makes a difference in combat, but there is a fair bit of work remaining with respect to positioning and issuing orders to formations once they are created.
Overall I feel that our pace is improving – for example testing on the faction relationship change UI led to an implemented improvement the next day. I’m seeing fewer bugs and lots of new features implemented, and feeling very good about things. But we still have a long way to go. Thank you everyone for the consistent support and offers to help. It really makes a difference!
Brian Jamison
Portland, Oregon