Steam Greenlight

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks. I’ve been working hard on getting the special ability system up to snuff and implementing some special abilities. I added two special abilities to the game, and created a couple of levels that use them. One of the abilities creates an impenetrable shield around your ship, nothing gets in…or out. Your weapons are disabled while the shield is active. It’s pretty cool, it lets you get your ships in past defensive fire, and pull them around behind the enemy. The other ability is a mine layer. You can drop a series of mines which will then detonate when an enemy gets close enough. The damage radius is larger than the trigger radius, so you can catch a couple of enemies in the blast, although it will damage your ships as well, so stay clear. I’ve added a total of five new levels, not all of them use the special abilities, but you do get to play around with them. They aren’t available in multiplayer yet, I need to do a little bit of balancing with them first. I also added a couple of new ship designs. I think they look pretty good. I need to make some changes to differentiate the ship designs more. There is a small amount of difference in maneuverability, but most of the difference is just in where the component mounting slots are.

I was working hard to have this all done this week, in time for the Salt Lake Gaming Con. I’m going to be showing the game there all three days with several other indie developers from the Utah Games Guild. I’m really pleased with where the game is, I’m going to have my booth set up to have three people playing at a time, and they will be able to play multiplayer against each other as well. Last year I only had one station where people could play. the hope is that people will have to do a lot less waiting to play.

The final bit of news is that my game is active on Steam Greenlight. You can head over there and vote for it. When it gets enough votes it will be allowed onto the Steam storefront. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it certainly helps.