After more than five months of development, I’ve decided to release version 0.8.1. I finally made the decision to push shuttles back to a future update, as holding back 0.8.1 until they were finished would have meant another month or more without an update. Nevertheless, version 0.8.1 has plenty of new material to keep you going in the meantime.

Downloads are on the Shipyard official webpage.

NOTE: The drastically increased file size of the new version has caused problems with the launcher. I have updated the launcher with a fix, but it will not be automatically installed. If you get a message saying “The files received from the server are corrupted,” redownload the launcher and try again.

Working Items

Items are now usable, and are divided into two categories: consumables and upgrades. Consumables are once-use items which provide a temporary effect. Upgrades provide a permanent effect as long as they are installed. Technically, you are only allowed 8 upgrades at a time. However, there aren’t yet 8 upgrades in the game, and you can’t stack two of the same upgrade.

Some old items have been removed, and a few new ones have been added. I didn’t get as many as I would like, but since the code is in place, it’s only a matter of coming up with ideas for new items to be added in the future.

The cargo hold window has also been improved. Now, items are shown as a scrolling list which, unlike the fixed-size window of the previous version, allows for more types of item to be added to the game.

Improved Navigation Screen UI

The navigation screen has received a bit of a makeover on 0.8.1. Instead of the chunky buttons of the old version, your abilities are now available from a snazzy hotbar at the bottom left of the screen. Likewise, your ship’s hitpoints have been changed from a bit of text at the top of the screen to a visual gauge at the bottom. The gauge ignores the bottom 40% of your ship’s hitpoints, as 40% is the threshold for ship destruction (thus, the gauge will appear “empty” at 40% of your max HP and “half full” at 70%). Additionally, any active consumables you have will be displayed at the top of the screen, along with how many turns are left on each one.

Character Window

Though non-functional at the moment, there is now a window where you can view your character and their personal skills. These skills have no effect yet, but will be implemented in a future update.

Background Music

There is now background music for the game. Written by my good friend Jesse, there are currently three tracks. One is ambient and “spacey,” and plays in the navigation screen when there are no enemies visible. The second is the battle music, which plays in the navigation screen and battle screen when there are enemies visible. The third and final song plays in the Shipyard screen while editing your ship. This has also warranted the inclusion of an options menu to control the volume of the music and a credits screen because more than one person has worked on the game.

Ship Size Limit

Because a giant blob of tiny class 1 parts is just plain stupid, there is now a size limit on each class of ship. Class 1 ships can be no larger than 16×16 and class 2 are capped at 32×32,.When class 3 parts are eventually added, class 3 ships will get the full 48×48 workspace.

Auto-move

At the request of a friend of mine, I’ve added the ability to have your ship automatically move to the position of the mouse by shift + right clicking on the navigation screen. Later, it turned out that he didn’t realize you could just use WASD, but the feature was already implemented by then.

Balance and Bugfixes Galore

Plenty of smaller changes for game balance as well as bugfixes are also included in 0.8.1. There are too many and I am too lazy to list them all here, but you can read about them in the full changelog.