Dev Update - June 2022

The major focus is currently on the UI and ship control. Turns out that handling space ships and situational awareness in space is hard, who knew.

Still, there's progress.

I've removed the little radar display and it feels like the right call. It wasn't really useable in its previous form, there were just too many things crammed on top of each other.

The two indicators that replaced the radar are far more useable. The nav indicator now also has a lateral/antilateral velocity marker that indicate the direction 90 degrees off the current velocity. This is the most effective direction of thrust in order to turn, so I thought it's worth displaying. Feels useful in-game, and by definition it never overlaps with the velocity markers, so I think I'll leave it in, see how it goes.

I'm liking the warning indicator even more, and have been adding a few bells and whistles to it recently (an alarm sound when you've got incoming, some animations when new stuff appears etc). No more getting hit by surprise because you were looking at something else!

And, while I was at it, I redid the point-defense targeting logic. Had to be done anyway for the warning display to work correctly. It's not immediately visible in-game, but the new architecture is better optimized and works better too, so that's cool.

Tuned the ships a bit to make engine burns occur more often. It feels kind of bad to want to change course only to realize you've got to wait a couple minutes for the engines to recharge.

For the future, I've got a big gameplay addition planned and I'm pretty excited about it, to be honest. EMP pulses scramble ordnance in a wide area, and may even knock out enemy ships! Stay tuned for more.

Thanks for reading, fly safe The dev