July Update and Devlog: Modules, Maps, and Tractor Beams

Hello out there! I've been very busy this month making lots and lots of new ship modules, improving the user interface, and adding a new loot collection mechanic.

Before I jump into the devlog, I wanted to thank the many people who stopped by to play the demo and check out When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears during Next Fest. I hope you all enjoyed the demo, but even if you didn't (maybe especially if you didn't?) please stop by the community thread and leave some feedback on the demo!

Now, here's a behind the scenes sneak peek at this month's development on the full game:

Modules, Modules, Modules

This month has mostly been about making more weapons, engines, and other equipment modules. I added dozens of modules including heat beams, a cutting laser, M.I.R.V. missiles, a cloaking device, a repair arm, and lots more! The total number of modules in the full game is now over 60, about a threefold increase from the 20 or so modules in the demo. I also added a new inventory screen so you can more easily have a look at your modules and their statistics:

Maps and New UI

Related, I've massively improved the pause screen and heads-up display (HUD), including adding a large map to the pause screen showing lines of control for all the competing factions in the sector:

Believe it or not, that map required a surprising amount of development work. Designing the map so it would show each area of control without internal seams, and would dynamically update during play (as systems change hands) was harder than I initially thought. I initially tried to work out an algorithm from scratch by bisecting the map into a bunch of pieces to tesselate the map space, but it didn't really look right, and performance was not so good. Eventually I realized I was barking up the wrong tree and did some more research, which led me to a kind of visualization called a Voronoi diagram. Just knowing the correct name for the concept was a big step forward and let me easily find some algorithms people have historically used to generate Voronoi diagrams. I ultimately wound up developing a variation on a nearest neighbor interpolation algorithm that was pretty simple, and was performant enough for the pause screen (after some optimizations). More work than I expected for a map, but it was very rewarding to learn something new!

Tractor Beams and Loot Modules

Another change this month is how module looting works. In the demo, when you take out an enemy ship, you get all the undamaged modules (and half the damaged ones) added to your inventory automatically. That always felt a little "flat" to me, so now when enemy ships are destroyed they drop their ship modules as floating loot capsules that you can scoop up with a tractor beam. The actual modules the get dropped are the same ones that previously would have been added to your inventory, but the change isn't only cosmetic. The new system adds a little risk because the floating modules can be destroyed by weapon fire before you grab them, so if you're too trigger happy it can cost you.

User Interface Improvements

Finally, I added some small changes to help make the user interface, and especially the heat system more legible. First up, I've added a heat indicator outline around your ship that glows through the colors of a flame cycle (red to orange to yellow, etc.) as your ship heats up to make it more obvious when your ship is close to overheating. I got a lot of feedback that it was hard to keep track of heat during a firefight, so I thought that putting an indicator on your actual ship should help make it easier to know how hot you're running your weapons without having to look away from the action. As a bonus, the new indicator will also let you see when enemies are close to overheating too, so you'll know where to aim that heat beam module I mentioned above.

Second, you can see I also redesigned the bottom right part of the HUD. I got some feedback that the old indicators for shields, heat, and health weren't very legible at a glance, and they took up too much space for the information they provided. The new design combines indicator lights that change color (e.g. green when shields are full, cycling down to blinking red when the shields are down), with small numerical indicators for when you've got a second and want to "see what condition your condition is in" (to quote an old song) The resulting bottom panel is about half the size of the old one, which freed up some space to expand the ship wireframe diagram above and add a nice outline of the current ship there.

Next Up

Over the next month I'll be: designing a whole bunch of new ships using all these modules; working on a new system for adding text-based exploration events to make abandoned or uninhabited planets more interesting; and then working on a crew system to let you take characters like Stella or Lucius aboard your ship.

You may have also noticed that there hasn't been a demo update in a little while. I froze the demo for a little while because I wanted to make sure the demo was in a stable state for Next Fest, but now that Next Fest is over I'm planning to push a new demo build later this month to show off some of these new user interface refinements. I just need to do a few more quality assurance passes to ensure that everything is ready for prime time.

Talk to you next month!