Man, I am so enjoying Dom Dev at the moment 🙂
Rounding off the initial Pilot / NPC AI, Collision detection and basic combat has spurned on a lot of changes to the UI which have been long planned, or long ignored, and every single change is improving on the basic gameplay model that is starting to form around everything.
It’s also inspiring new things not thought of before, as they only surface in context when trying to defeat one or more enemy vessels without getting pummeled in the process.
For instance, the scanner rings which show contacts around the screen edges are changing dramatically. During one combat run I thought ‘It would be nice to have the immediate contacts around me a lot closer to the reticule so I can see them without flicking my eyes about too much…’, so now when you target a vessel, the local space contact ring contracts around the reticule so they are easier to spot. This lead to a nice ‘polish’ effect where all the rings can now rescale as an animation, and also means the player (that’s you that is) can set them to be as large or small as you wish by preference, and even make them circular if that is your poison.
Knock on effects include fading out contacts which are not ‘important’ as they fly around the screen inside the contact rings, to avoid ‘clutter’ and confusion during combat. You can still see them, but they aren’t so ‘in your face’ allowing you to easily spot your target.
There are way too many changes to list at the moment, and ultimately as they are all still very much ‘Work in Progress’ there’s little point as they may well be cut, or changed before any playable version surfaces into the world 🙂
But, I’m really chuffed with progress so far; though I have concerns/qualms/thoughts regarding combat and it’s appeal to the masses. Dom’s current flight model is not the traditional ‘flight simulator in space’ which is precisely what I’d intended. I don’t want ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator In Space’ thankyouverymuch. But, as that seems to be the mass-marketed ‘expected model’ (granted, with variations) which sits nicely with all the HOTAS configurations out there… I’m a bit concerned I may be setting Dom into a niche which people won’t want to look at, even to just ‘try it and see’. But, more on this in another blog.
For now, me happy 🙂
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