Junkcraft Armada, the Crew!

Most space ship games allow you to control your ship or a bunch of ships, recruit units without names that are used just to die in battle to accomplish your main objective and if lucky survive. To make a personalized story you need different characters and each of them with some back story that will make some impact on the gameplay, but I think giving the player the opportunity to get attached to specific characters through the game may bring a more memorable and personalized story. Initially I was thinking to just keep the space ship game moving around the ship only, and in a later version add the crew, but after a few hours of playing I couldn't find more ways to expand the universe without having characters attached, so decided to move the crew part into this phase of development.

So Junkcraft Armada will allow the player to have different crew members onboard the ship that will make it better or worse depending on the skills of each of the crew members, the captain rank can only be assigned to the player, and if the captain dies the game ends, simply said you are one of the characters and death is permanent, so be careful what you order crew members to do. Crew members can help fix other's ships by boarding and repairing the ship, can attack and board enemy ships, and in some cases they may become hostages if enemies are too smart or too strong for them, you decide their specialisations and how will they develop over time, and if lucky you may hear and do some missions based on their needs and development, more to come soon.

Jump points in Junkcraft Armada

Traveling through space can take long time and can be very boring traveling for hours without nothing to do inside the game, I have decided that having FTL engines doesn't make sense in the context of Junkcraft Armada, so a way to overcome the time to travel between sectors players will have to use jump points, worm holes or other space anomalies or other advanced technologies. In this screenshot you can see a working jump point concept image.

Junkcraft Armada status

Development is going well, in the last few weeks I've been able to do some major fixing and making the pre alpha version very stable but still many modules need to be updated and balanced as well as the missions, with only 2 missions built I still have about 10+ more to make and add all the randomization between them so the end result will be more than just 12 to 15 types of missions, it will end up with many different variations since there will be environment effects combined that will make the adventure more interesting.

Some screenshots of the last enhancements.

Close combar explosions.

Non balanced ship test, with controls and more weight on one side to test ship response.

Guarded derelict entrance with light effects

Parts color tinting to add color variation to each ship, this is just a test that helped me test the module manager and added several parts from different enemy ships I killed white testing, that's why the ship has so many different colors on hull parts.

Close view of the 179 module test ship of today, just very few parts were tested in this scenario since I haven't been able to add more enemy parts yet, all the modules were captured while playing.

If you are interested on this game, please follow me on http://www.indiedb.com/games/junkcraft-armada , don't forget twitter account. Soon I will publish some gameplay videos.