August Update and Devlog: Ships, Crew, and Planetary Exploration

Hello out there! I've been very busy this month making lots and lots of new ships, adding new text-adventure-style planetary exploration events along with a new crew system, and making lots of improvements to the user interface. I also pushed a new demo build showing off some of the user interface progress and adding three planetary exploration events to the demo area. If you tried out the new demo build, let me know what you think over on the community thread!

Now, here's a look at that I've been doing this month:

"Shipmates Have Ye Shipped in That Ship?"

The big project this month was using all the ship parts I made last month to make lots and lots of new ships! Check them out below ( with several variations of the starting ship, the falcon, included for scale):

One thing I personally find very frustrating in space games is when the game doesn't allow you to fly many of the ships you interact with in the game. So a major design goal for When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears is for the player to be able to fly all of the ships in the game if possible.

The demo currently has 9 flyable ship types in it, and this month I added about 20 new ships, so there are now 30 different ships in the game in all. All the ships shown above (except the little mini fighters shown in grey and green) are currently flyable in the full game, and I'm working on finding a fun way to make the mini-fighters flyable too.

But, one downside of letting the player fly just about anything was that it made the ships harder to balance. For example, instead of testing new ships against a small group of player pilotable ships, I've had to test each ship against all the other ones to make sure that ships of roughly the same class/size are all at a roughly similar power level. Adding to the complexity, because players can heavily modify the ships, I've also had to test modified versions of the ships as well. It's all good fun, though, because it gives me an excuse to play around with all the ships I've built!

Planetary Exploration Events and Crew System

As I've been building out the sector, I felt as though my universe was a little emptier than I wanted it to be, so I decided to add in some opportunities to do adventures in planet-side exploration. I considered a few different ways to do this (an exploration mini-game, text-adventure-style events, full on planet-side game levels, etc.)

I ultimately settled on a text-adventure style events for a few reasons. First, WtSTDtS is a retro game and text adventure elements were a big part of many DOS-era games, so I think they reinforce the retro feel of the game. Second, I personally played and enjoyed a lot of text adventures way back when (the Zork series, and "Beyond Zork" in particular, were favorites), so text adventures have a special place in my heart. In fact, while WtSTDtS is my first "real" game, the very first computer program I ever wrote (when I was 8 or 9) was a short text adventure (written in BASIC using GOTO statements) about a battle-field courier trying to get a message through to high command.

For all those reasons, text adventure sections for planetary exploration seemed like a fun way to add a little more narrative depth that was in keeping with the retro spirit of the game. Here's an example of what those events look like right now:

As I was wiring these events in I realized that pure text might be a little boring. To make the events more fun and interesting I've also added RPG-style statistics for the player, and provided opportunities to recruit certain characters as crew aboard your ship. The planetary events will provide options that allow you to take risks based on your (and your crew's) stats, with rewards for success and penalties for failure. Your stats will also have a chance to improve every time you try something risky whether you succeed or fail. There are currently three text adventure events in the demo if you want to give the format a try. I hope you'll enjoy them, I certainly had a blast writing them!

User Interface Improvements

The major changes this month were to the shipyard:

--You can now sell modules you no longer want

-- Ships you own and ships you can fix or buy are now shown in a single unified list

-- There's a button to strip all modules from a ship at once

-- And there's a new interface element that shows what types of modules can be mounted into a specific slot on a ship (i.e. engines can generally only be mounted on slots that don't have other slots behind them, and the interface will tell you that now).

-- The ship yard also generally behaves more nicely with very large ships, and with ships that have larger slots (like the LUNA, which has some 2x1 sized slots).

All these changes are already in the new demo build, so you can check them out right now if you're interested!

Next Up

What's next? Now that I've got most of the modules and ships built, I have all the toys in the toybox and I need to actually do something with them! Next month, I'll be working primarily on two things: level design and improved art.

Level Design

I'll be working on new star systems, new NPCs, new quests, and new planetary exploration events. I'll be starting with the systems inhabited by an alien race called the Eriorans first:

The Eriorans are bird-like aliens whose ships use heat rays to overheat and detonate enemy ships. Prior to the civil wars the Eriorans were a part of the Republic, but they joined the losing side in the wars and haven't been fully reintegrated. While the Eriorans are, in theory, still allied with the Republic, the two nations are drifting closer to the verge of open war...which is where you'll come in!

Art Improvements

I'm also working on fixing up some of the mixed resolution art in the game. For context, I drew most of the art all at the same resolution, but I also drew some of the initial art for the game at a lower resolution than it needed to be as a placeholder. A consequence of that decision was that sometimes low resolution art that was scaled up by the game engine was juxtaposed with full scale art. This made for some not-so-nice composition where different "sized" pixels appear next to each other (aka "Mixels"). For an example of some mixels, check out the section outlined in red where the automaton's head art and body art meet:

So I've been gradually redrawing all the lower resolution art so all the pixel art in the game will be the same size. My priority for this month will be working through the dozens of faces in the game. In the demo right now each face has a 16x16 pixel resolution version for the small hail portraits, and a 32x32 pixel resolution version for direct conversations. Both of those are currently scaled up double (i.e. 16x16 pixel art is shown at 32x32 pixels, and 32x32 is shown at 64x64). This month I'm working on making 64x64 pixel resolution faces for direct conversations, and then the old 32x32 pixel faces will be used for the small hail portraits. I'll be retiring the old 16x16 pixel portraits.

Here's an example with Lucius's face at 16x16, 32x32, and the new art at 64x64 (all scaled up to the same large size for easy visual comparison):

The new 64x64 portrait art will be shown at it's native resolution, which should get rid of most of the remaining mixels in the game! I don't think it will radically change the look of the game, but it will make the game's retro art more authentic and improve the composition.

That's what I'll be up to in August! Have a great month, and I'll see you in September!