Hello again!
It's been a few weeks, we've made some progress, that means it's time for another dev diary! Here it is:
Previous Dev Diary: Youtube.com
Planet Exploration
This is a new mechanic we added that we plan on making quite important as we go along. While staying inside the planet's atmosphere you will start to explore it. Exploring planets will be required to clear the level and open the Worm Hole to the next galaxy. Exploring also reveals treasures and allows you to refill your oxygen supply. So Explored planets will become a bit of a safe haven for you to stock up on supplies before heading out to space!
Planet Quirks
We're focused on making planets more interesting while still being simple and easy to understand. One of the ways we plan on doing this is to have each planet type have a "quirk" that the player will have to deal with. An example that we have implemented so far is the Sand Storm on Desert Planets.
Mouse Input
We've had discussions about our controls for a long time, there has been a worry that controls are too complicated and difficult. We adjusted the number of "Action Buttons" down from 4 to 2, which means that the mouse buttons are enough. So we finally decided to at least try it. So far so good, we think this will help a lot with accessibility and reduce frustration. Time will tell!
Scrap remake
We actually really liked the previous system where scraps were a kind of module you had to attach to slots on your ship. So why did we change it? Two main reasons:
- It doesn't encourage the player to build a "complete" ship. They will always need to save some slots just to carry Scraps in order to grow the ship which we think is unhealthy. More freedom to build your ship however you want!
- It limits what we can do in terms of balance. The ship only has so many slots to carry scraps so one scrap will always take up one slot, because changing that would just be too weird. So we've reduced the value of 1 scrap, so now we can hand out scrap rewards for small accomplishments whereas before 1 scrap would be too valuable to hand out.
Hope you enjoyed watching and reading!
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You can also join the discussion at our Subreddit! And by "discussion", I mean deafening silence, because no one is there yet ;)
See you next time!
