UI Scalabilty, Sandbox Test Mode Update, and info on what's next
2018-12-03BlockShip Wars: Roguelike has been in Early Access for nearly a year now, and I think the game has enough core features to go ahead and starting working on the rest of the content. One episode is complete, two more remain. These are roughly planned out, and most of the work involved is creating new ship components, special abilities and AI ships to fill out these episodes. All of the new components & specials for the second episode are planned out (however there may be additions, removals, and changes), and the plan is to have this 2nd episode in the game by the end of January, and the final episode within a few months of that.
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In order to get started on this the first task was to redesign parts of the UI to allow for much larger number of ship components and special abilities, which is the majority of this update, as a result many parts of the UI have been redesigned to scroll, and to allow for better finding of things with a large number of items. Here are some screenshots of some of the changed UI: The new component palette in the Ship building mode: The new crafting window: Scrolling special abilities/unlock screen window: And scrolling component lists for the blueprint builder and info section in the blueprint library: Also in this update a test mode has been added to the free ship building mode, click a button to enter test mode, your current workspace is saved to memory, and you can spawn AI controlled enemy ships (currently 8 to choose from in the mode, and up to 3 at a time) to fight against. Clicking 'Stop Test' will exit out of test mode, despawn any enemy ships and scrap laying around, and return your ship to the state it was before starting the test. My focus will be completing the content for the next several months, but I will still be releasing updates with bug fixes, smaller features, optimizations, etc. and still would love to hear your feedback. Also looking forward to seeing and testing out some of your own ship designs in the Steam Workshop!
