Wow, it’s been nearly a month since my last post, I’ve been busy with a vacation, and Salt Lake Comic Con, which was last week, no time for posting. So here’s all the latest stuff.
Comic Con was great, I had a lot of people looking at the game, and a lot of them were enthusiastic about the game. So it was really good to get that positive feedback. It was also good to get a little bit of media exposure, Big Shiny Robot, a nerd news site, interviewed everyone at the Indie Megabooth, including me. If you’re interested, you can see the video here, I’m the second video in the playlist. The show reconfirmed for me that making the changes to the movement control that I did, taking it from turn-based to realtime-with-pause, was absolutely the right decision. At times it was a little bit difficult to help people understand how to manage the movement, and this new system is way more intuitive than the old control method. So I shudder to think what it would have been like with the old control scheme.
I was only there showing my game on Saturday, I went Thursday and attended some panels and looked around at the vendors on display. Worked all day Friday to get the game in a showable state, then showed it on Saturday. I’m glad I only did the one day, it was nice to be able to attend the show as a guest rather than a vendor, and it would have been very straining talking to people all day for three days in a row.
The game is much improved from my last update. There are numerous little fixes made for Comic Con, and some big feature improvements. I should have the combat demo that I showed at Comic Con up soon, sometime next week. The two big improvements I worked on this week were shields and cannons. Shields have been around for a long time, but now they look good:
I’ve also added cannons, basically slugs of metal propelled by chemical explosives. As seen here:
The cannons are the third and final weapons that form the basic strategy. Missiles have a long range, but they also can’t hit anything too close. Lasers have a medium range, and deal medium damage. Cannons deal a lot of damage, but have a pretty short range. Combining ships with different weapons makes for interesting strategic decisions, at least I’ve found that to be the case. And that’s it, funny how the longer you wait between updates, the less you have to say. I will resume regular weekly updates now that the Comic Con crunch is over.