{"id":397,"date":"2016-04-07T21:26:42","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T21:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brasswatchgames.com\/?p=397"},"modified":"2016-04-07T21:26:42","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T21:26:42","slug":"shipyard-development-news-4-april-2016-back-from-the-dead-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/brasswatchgames.com\/?p=397","title":{"rendered":"Shipyard Development News 4 April 2016 — Back From the Dead Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a long time. Like, a really long time. Like more than half a year. Yeah… Sorry about that. I can’t even say I’ve been especially active either. Between starting my first year at university and various other real-life engagements, as well as a general lack of inspiration, development of Shipyard has been at a complete standstill for most of that time. However, I’m finally climbing back on the wagon with the intention of finishing alpha 1.0 before putting the game officially on hold to work on smaller, more manageable projects.<\/p>\n

Since I’ve been inactive, I’ve been playing a lot of games. In what can be very<\/em>\u00a0loosely described as research, two in particular–World of Warships and From the Depths–have grabbed my attention and given me some fresh ideas that got me interested in working on Shipyard game again. Specifically, they’ve given me idea regarding how to deal with weapons now that the majority of systems are free-form.<\/p>\n

Armor and Weapon Type Changes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now, a system’s only defense is its hit points, which has a number of negative effects on gameplay. Since the beginning it has been possible, and indeed optimal, to focus fire on an enemy ship’s rectors to quickly disable all of its defenses. This is a cheap tactic that requires little in the way of skill and, once you figure it out, makes the game significantly less enjoyable. Additionally,\u00a0since free-form systems are really just 1×1 systems with very little HP under the hood, weapons that deal a lot of damage in a single shot are wasted on them. I’m planning sweeping changes to address these problems.<\/p>\n

The first of these changes: armor. In addition to hit points, which represent the integrity of the functional parts inside a system, systems will also\u00a0have an “armor” stat representing the thickness of solid metal protecting the outside. At first, each system will have a hard-coded armor value, but eventually I plan to allow the player to control the armor thickness over different parts of the ship. At the moment, reactors and engines have the most armor\u00a0because they are the most important systems to protect. Each weapon type will behave differently when confronted with higher armor values:<\/p>\n