For example: if you had a system that instantly got rid of all of the ship’s flux, and could be used on a short cooldown – but otherwise freely – you’d want to use it every time your flux is right around maxed out. What “interesting” means is subjective, but I think it’s reasonable to say that if it’s obvious (also subjective – what fun!) when to use a system, then the decision-making process is too simple. Using a ship system is an action you decide to take, and it’s important for that decision to be interesting. The EMP Emitter is one of the more esoteric ship systems A system is specific to a hull, and can’t be customized the way weapons and hull mods can – the goal is to make each ship have more uniqueness and flavor, as well as play differently. Might as well grab a beverage of choice and settle down for a long read.Ī brief reminder: a ship system is an active ability, something a ship can do – teleport, engage afterburners, use flares, etc. Besides, it’ll help me to put this down in writing, and then go through the ship systems again, with hopefully greater clarity of thought – so, you’re stuck with this being the subject of the blog entry. Nonetheless, looking at the dev build so far – the results seem promising, and I hope you’ll find the process interesting. There are many ways to do things, and I’m not claiming that the way I ended up going about it is the best. In this one, I’d like to talk about the thought process and decision making that went into the design. The previous post was an introduction to ship systems. What, then, are the issues? Read the rest of this entry » That essential concept remains unchanged in this new iteration the changes are looking to address some specific issues with the implementation. That sounds like fun but didn’t turn out to be practical, so phase cloaking changed to become a way to avoid damage instead – shift to another dimension, let enemy fire pass through/over your ship, uncloak, and fire back. Way, way back, the original idea for phase ships was something submarine-like, being able to hide on the battlefield and deliver surprise attacks. There’s a post from a while back on how the current mechanics came to be if you’re interested in the details, but let’s summarize: In fact, a lot of the upcoming 0.7.2a is turning out to be about “paying off” technical and design debt – things that are “good enough for now”, but do have to be addressed at some point. As usual, after a major release there’s some time to polish up some things that there just hasn’t been time for up to that point.
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