Game Design and Content

Consumable Items

Added multiple limited use items to the game. These should be fun, sometimes broken, abilities that players should think about using tactically throughout their play session. Ships can carry one type of item at a time, if a player finds more of the same they can pick them up and add them to the ship. Items can be broken down into spare resources.

Design thoughts behind these Items:

From a design perspective items give me the ability to test out crazy ideas and balance them around one or a handful of uses per run. Things like speed boosts feel more reasonable when the player can only use it a handful of times where permanent speed boosts are entirely too powerful when the game revolves around how long it takes the player to traverse a star system. They also give me a better mid tier reward to hand out in containers. Health, Weapons and Upgrades all represent significant balance if the rate of acquisition is too high or low. Handing out items at a high rate doesn’t swing balance too much because the player can only carry one at a time and breaking them down does give the player a power boost in any form.

Eventually I want to add unique starting items for most of the ships, still thinking about what those might be, as I want them to appropriately complement the ship’s ability.

Ship abilities

All have been adjusted to be a bit more interesting and encourage skillful usage:

• Barrel Roll - reflected projectiles will now damage anything they hit.
• Shield - absorbing projectiles will add ammo.
• Time Warp - Warping back to a point where you have more health or ammo will reflect that status appropriately. Amount of time you rewind is significantly longer as well.
• Slice - Hitting multiple objects will reduce the cool down of the ability.

Most ships stats have been tweaked slightly to compensate for the power level of their redesigned abilities.

Secondary objective changes

Both the rescue and the seek and destroy side objectives had had their pings removed. It feels easy enough to stumble across them in the course of searching a system. This also means the “civilian decay” of the rescue objective has been removed and the number of civilians you can rescue from has been drastically reduced because the risk is very low. Additionally both objectives exist in all systems. There’s been some variance added to both so they stay somewhat interesting.

Other additions

The galaxy is no longer a save place in between waves of enemies… players will find new dangers scattered throughout their journey.

Two new weapons.

Two new upgrades.

UI/Graphics

All resolutions should have the same field of view now. UI will scale to your resolution. Previously smaller resolutions were nearly unplayable because you could not see threats soon enough to avoid them and very large resolutions had a significant advantage here.

* Larger field of view means your ship /feels/ slower, I’ve bumped up all ships speeds considerably to compensate for this and planets are a bit further apart as well.

* Most of the UI has had significant back end changes done.

* Ability UI has been completely redesigned.

* Added clearer key bind indicators to the UI.

* Items/Weapons have some UI updates.

* Regional Health UI has been cleanup.

Balance

* The resource cost to power up shield generators will no longer increase as you progress. I had originally intended this to be a difficulty curve but it was adding too much value to large systems. I want the choice of systems to be a balance between loot and saving civilians. This should incentivize the smaller systems if you are in a rush to the finish line and the larger systems if you are trying to gain power with your ship.

* Death Orb and Charged Ion Cannon have received significant damage boosts. These were both pretty hard to use weapons but felt insignificant even if you were able to use them properly.

* Shotgun has had the number of shots increased but the range overall decreased.

* Tri Laser has had its ammo cost decreased from 3 to 2.

* Homing Missile has had its ammo cost decreased from 2 to 1 but its fire rate lowered.

* Single Laser is a little less accurate, again trying to make sure it almost always feels like an upgrade to find a new weapon.

* Railgun is a little less accurate as well, this gun is a little too strong in all situations, it should still be really strong just less precise.

* Most enemies received a buff of some sort. Lots of them are just speed buffs but the larger enemies have had their health buffed. This is to offset the power creep of adding items to the game. Having a new tool at the player’s disposal automatically makes it significantly easier to deal with enemies, for them to remain threatening I needed to buff them a bit.

* Number of Armor Charges needed to gain an extra max armor has been increased to 6. With more plentiful sources of armor charges it became a bit too easy to get 3-4 extra armor in a run, which is too much for the first region of the game. I want extra max armor to be a reward for skilled play it should be a reflection of the player’s ability to avoid taking damage for a long time while collecting rewards.