More forces at work!

Something that bothered me for quite long time is the fact that not many forces are factored inside space ships, in games or movies. Let's think about acceleration or rotating your ship, that do not really affect things inside, I haven't seen any single game handling this at all, so your crew should be affected by many different forces.

Well in the next few days I will add momemtum and centripetal forces, so accelerating or turning your ship will cause many things. For example if your crew is floating without gravity inside your ship and you decide to turn around very fast, your crew will hit walls and get hurt, also if you leave unsecured stuff on the floor while you accelerate or turn around your items maybe get destroyed by the impact or fly around, so storing everything properly will be very important. There won't be a magic wand that will let things stick on the floor.

Accelerate your ship very fast and things may get ugly inside, you can add as many thrusters in your ship but the faster you turn or accelerate the more cautious you will have to be with your crew and stuff inside, better keep your crew sit and your stuff stored in secure places. This is a new dynamic being added to the game.

Here is a small sample, some stuff left on the floor while accelerating my ship and rotating at the same time.

Lots of updates

Development the in the last few months went pretty well, but haven't updated the blog that much, you can see what happened in the daily log to have an idea what's coming up to the game.

For now, hope you can enjoy a small comic strip about several things I have in my mind around the game, at least once a month you will see one.

Party time! alcohol consumption

Nothing can be better than having a few drinks with your fellow crew members and have fun in space! well excesive consumption of alcohol can be a dangerous too...

After a long afternoon drinking my crew members passed out and are sleeping on the floor, quite bad I would say, but you can see them there with a hangover headache already

and still wake up for more beer a few hours later...

Alcohol consumption will help to improve mood for some crew members, some may not drink depending on their traits but in general a moderate consumption of alcohol is fine. Sometimes you may find alcoholic crew members and that may be a problem, having them drunk during service may be a problem if a pirate just started to attack your ship! not being able to wake up your crew at a proper time may be another problem too.

But for now, let them sleep peacefully and wake up with a headache, traveling through space with not much to do may be boring sometimes and having different things in your ship to pass the time will help. Having a good amount of alcohol stored will help too, besides food of course!

You can brew alcoholic beverages too! more to come soon.

Some crew members may be stronger than others to alcohol... let her finish her beer...

Crew hygiene

No spaceship should go out in space with proper ways to clean your crew, after long work days and a lot of effort a shower will be needed to refresh your crew , or as needed.

So a new system was added into the game, hygiene. Some activities will decrease it more than others, like jogging around or doing heavy work, while others will do little to lower it.

What's the implication of not being properly clean? well if your crew is injured and have blood loss that may turn into an easy infection. Also it may cause disconfort between crew members, a smelly crew member may affect another one and the other may even refuse to be around because of the bad smell, this will cause stress between your crew members, also crew members that enjoy being clean will be highly stressed if not being able to take baths regularly.

The easy way to keep them clean is to give them enough free time during the day, so your crew will do things like joy activities, baths, eating , sleeping and other things, working is important as well as free time for them.

Farming

Farming is a new activity you can do in your ship, since trips may take many months it will be necessary to either buy a lot of packed food or grow yours in your ship, you will be able to select a vegetables to grow so your crew can fill up an empty stomach without much trouble.

Some crew members may hate the standard space ration and even get unhappy while eating that for a long period of time, so growing some vegetables may help them feel refreshed during a long trip.

Time on planets, time in your ship, time everywhere

Recently I got stuck thinking about time, this is a thing that has not been addressed in any other game the way I am looking at it. On earth you have 24 hours day and you can have a similar time scale while traveling in your space ship, so time can be managed easily and assign duties to your crew and create day/night shifts as needed, no issues, but now, what if you go to a planet that has a very long day/night cycle? how will the natives will behave?

I haven't seen any game in which time is a game factor in that sense, most games will just default to a 24 hour cycle and NPCs will just go to their beds and sleep and come back to work the next day, but if a planet has 100 hours per day, how will the NPCs behave? time to sleep every 18 hours for example? so all the planet will be adjusted into a 24 hour cycle with a 100 hour day? if that happens then there will be days in which what is supposed to be early morning will be a complete darkness because it just happened to be in the middle of the planet's night. And what will happen if the planet has a 5 hour day/night cycle? or worst case scenario 200 years of light/night?

After doing more and more research, I figure out that there is no simple answer to this question yet, human will eventually leave earth to other planets but we haven't figure out yet how we, as a human race, will manage time in other planets, and this is becoming an issue with the game, since I can't really seem to find an easy solution to something that looks trivial, how to measure time and divide it properly.

So the first solution that came to my mind seems to be to divide the planet's time as close as a multiple of 24 and adjust the internal people clock to that multiple, so if a planet's day/night cycle is 12 hours, the NPCs will live in one day with day/night cycle plus 4 hours to get a full day in which they are awake because the total is 16 hours, and the rest 8 hours will be time to sleep, that will give us a night of sleep with light and darkness. But now if the planet has a day of 100 years the local time will be divided in 24 hours as usual and let people sleep as usual even in plain light or darkness, most probably same as the people that live in the poles.

Another solution that came to my mind is to make seconds faster or slower, so it will be still 24 hours but each second will be faster or slower than we normally perceive, so for a 100 year day/night cycle each second will be very long, and for planets with a day/night cycle of few hours each second will be a lot faster, problem will be that trying to stay awake for 8 hours in some planets will be impossible.

The other solution is to let the time run in the planet, so if a 50 hour day happens let native people live and sleep in cycles as needed without any schedule , just live and do what they can in any cycle so no single person in the planet will run under the same clock and just live, this is the easiest way but not very nice. What's the implication about this solution? since shops will run by NPC, if the NPC goes to sleep and the player goes to the shop and it is closed, how will you know when is the shop going to open? and what will happen if you have many shops you want to visit but all of them are open at different times? this doesn't looks good from business point of view, but the easiest to implement, if a NPC close a shop to go to sleep, then it will post the time it will open again and this will solve the issue. So until a more elegant solution is found I will stick with this one for the time being, now it is time to implement this solution.

Enjoying your trip in space, allowing your crew to relax

This week added arcade machines. Arcade machines will help your crew cope with the long travel in space but not everyone enjoys doing the same things, some may enjoy to play games, while other may enjoy running around, eating, gardening etc... many more activities to add so your crew can relax!

You can now see your crew's traits , likes and hates so you can plan accordingly.

Installing new hardware in your ship

You can buy new hardware to improve or add functionality to your ship, but buying is not the only thing that matters, your crew will have to install the hardware and the time until the hardware is ready for use will depend on the technical expertise of your crew members, some items will require weeks until fully active, while others a few minutes.

You will be able to see the progress on the brown boxes containing the new shiny upgrade of your ship and see as well who is working on that equipment, also the crew member working on it will gain some experience over time and the more time your crew spent installing or fixing the more proficient will be on those tasks.

You will be also be able to select what to install first or assign specific crew member to install hardware as desired.

So the next time you purchase something, think first if your crew is capable of installing it at a reasonable time otherwise the wait can be very long.

Planetary landing continues

It took a little bit of time to get this working properly, but now very big maps are created on the fly and the player will be able to explore large areas, part of the game will take place on land where away teams will have to explore.

Here is a better screenshot of a desert biome with some rocks and plants. Planets will be different in many ways, like the day/night cycle depending on the rotation speed of the planet, gravity will affect how fast/slow your crew will be able to walk, weather will also be part of the game and will affect your crew, in the screenshot below the desert will affect how confortable your crew will be since the hot and dry environment may cause a lot of stress for some crew members.

A closer look of your character in desert.

There will be a wide variety of biomes to explore, more to come soon.

Planetary landing progress

It has been quite a while since the last update, planetary landing is the next big module in the game and it took a lot of trials to make it look good enough and it is getting better by each day. Just to illustrate the progress made in the past few weeks here are a few screenshots with some brief details.

This is a brief summary in weeks...

And here are the details

1- First a tile map for easy terrain management similar to space ships but it didn't look so well. It means a lot of tiles to be made manually and the work will take years to complete if I wanted to incorporate all the biomes planned, and it looked flat

2- Next step was to make soft transitions on the terrain so those ugly blocks will go away. A little bit better but not by much, still flat looking and the tile was really visible. It was not at the level I wanted it to be.

3-So the next logical step was to unblock the map and make it look more organic, after a week of playing with shaders and a little bit more of work the map became a lot better like below, but still looked a little bit flat.

4- This week changed the logic again and added lights to modify the terrain, the result can be seen below.

Terrain is becoming better each day, so some more biomes will be shown later once all the parametric values are automated, each map terrain belongs to a part in the planet and all are procedurally generated, so the variety will be vast. After plain and simple terrains are finished, cities will added so you can roam around any city, any place in a planet to accomplish your mission.

Procedural planets!

A few weeks ago during the holidays decided to add procedural planets in 3d to the game, I was looking at flat textures of planets and gas giants and I didn't feel confortable with that, so I just added terran type planets and now working on gas giants. Here you can see below a few examples.

And a first gas giant produced today.

There will be many more planet types and moons to explore, you will need to have shuttles in your main ship to land on those places and explore them! since all data is procedurally generated the terrain will be also based on the planet information already created.

A better version of another gas giant.

Happy holidays and Merry Christmas!

This year has been a very interesting one with lots of new ideas put in game and a lot of game mechanics that were not initially thought in the scope of the game, but it is giving it a lot of fun and allowing me to build the game that I want to play.

Enjoy the holidays and wish you Merry Christmas!

My crew is also celebrating and looking forward for the alpha release next year! see you soon!

Food!, restaurants, cantinas and others

As mentioned before, food rations were available for long trips, but are boring to dead to eat and after long time your crew mood will deteriorate, so it will be very important to visit space outposts to resuply and visit fine restaurants, fast food restaurants or maybe cantinas, here is a sneak peak of a fast food restaurant where you can order your food and then sit down on any table, and if lucky you can event talk to other people, maybe get jobs or negotiate sneaky deals.

Different food items can improve mood over time and bring joy by eating the food they like the most, different restaurants serve different food plates and different prices! the people you may find on each kind of restaurant will vary too, so if you want to meet smugglers you may want to go to a cantina for example, so you can sell also illegal goods if you are in that business.

And finally, nothing better than having my crew enjoying lunch together.

Warp, battery and power distribution updates

Power generators provide the electricity around your ship, different components can be added to your power generator as seen below, also a power button was added to all systems so you can decide at any time which systems to turn off if you need extra power for something else like life support or weapons.

Also a battery system was added this week, so excess power is stored for emergencies.

And finally, a more accurate traveling calculations and warp control, now you can decide the warp speed to travel and know ahead of time what will be the estimated time for arrival (ETA) on screen

You can choose to go at 100% of your maximum warp speed or if needed you can push it over a little bit more up to 10% more but that will consume more energy/resources and will degrade your warp components faster or even destroy them if the maximum warp speeed is overclocked over long periods of time. For example, the image below shows the warp core system panel, and if warp speed is pushed up for too long components like the warp coil seen below will degrade from 100% to 0% over time, at 0% it will get destroyed and you will need to get replacement parts, when a components gets destroyed like the warp coil, the maxium warp speed will also drop according to missing parts.

When boarding enemy ships you may also get some replacement parts from their panels or even steal them if you like, anything can happen, even pirates can steal some of your components if they are able to break through your security.

That's all for this week!.

Electronic system panels and automated tasks

Inventory items were added recently into the game, now you can equip crew members with different kind of armor types, boots and guns. Food will be also displayed in the inventory as well as medical kits and many other things. One new addition on top of that is electronic components, now each system in the ship has a control panel where components can be arranged to make the system work as seen below.

Different components will be needed to make sure that the system will work properly, you can still use low grade components and get lower than expected results in the performance of those systems, you will find that for example a turret will show up 4 lanes of components and if some portion of it is broken the performance of the turret will degrade or you can utilize enhanced components or researched ones to improve efficiency. Since all the system modules in the ship can be modded it seems that there will be a lot of micro-management and a lot of work to make sure that all systems are working, but that's not the case, crew members if assigned to fixing tasks will actually go and fix those panels for you , for example an engineer will make sure that all the components are in place or at least make sure that is patched with the parts you have in your ship, they will go and pickup the parts from lockers or other places and install them as needed, but you can also manually do different configurations to suit your needs and the repairing team will still fix those panels if something gets broken if you have the electronic parts needed.

Whenever a crew member is tired or hungry, they will try to find the best place to get their need fulfill, hungry? then go to the proper food source, if you assign a bunk to a crew member they will go there to sleep when tired, but there may be situations in which you really need those crew members working regardless if they are hungry or sleepy, so raising the status to red alert will put everyone who is capable of performing a duty to do so, so you can make sure you have your pilot, gunners and others ready for combat even if they need to sleep, eat, get medical attention or any other task. Crew members will also make sure your ship stuff is properly stored, for example you can drop guns on the floor and other stuff, but that is very dangeous in space with so many bad things to happen, so free crew members will store those items in proper locations if there is empty space, the last thing you want to have is guns on the floor and get a hull breach and lose all those guns into space, or get your food spoiled if not properly stored in the food refrigeration system.

So in summary, there is a lot of new AI written to automate tasks, you are the captain of your ship so you shouldn't be micro-managing everything to survive, you have to use your crew to get to your goal but if you really are the micro-manager type you can still do that as needed, the main purpose is for you to set orders and expect your crew to follow them the best way they can under the circunstances, but don't expect a baddly injured crew member without legs to stand up and walk, there are physical limitations being put, but instead of walking they may float in space if gravity is disabled. Gravity and inertia control in ship will be the next major update, more details later.

Inventory!

Added inventory!, each character will have an inventory, the use of the inventory will allow for example a doctor to carry many medical kits, and medical kits do have a consumption level depending on the use, food also use space so be wise to choose your equipment when going outside , more weapons, armor, or other things to choose from.

Recently I had my crew feed prisoners but found that they were actually picking only one food ration at a time so it was taking a lot of travel time spent when I had many prisoners, so an inventory allows them now to carry multiple rations and distribute them properly.

Time, search and rescue , sleep and injury system

Until recently I had this feeling, why should I leave an injured crew member behind in battle? or let it burn when fire is spreading everywhere, with no capability of pulling injured crew members from those dangerous places it became frustrating in some events, losing them because I couldn't extinguish the fire on time, well not anymore, now you can carry injured crew members and put them in a safe place so medics can cure behind the lines, or you can carry enemy robots destroyed and try to hack them or get spare parts from them, but beware trying to hack enemies can result in booby traps too!, in a future update funerals will be also available for the fallen ones, why is this important? your crew interact with each other so losing a friend will affect them and having a funeral will help them overcome the loss, though if some crew members do not care nothing will change for them.

Also added current local time in your ship, this will allow the player to know the standard time in your ship, why is that necessary? well crew members need to eat and sleep, so according to the time shown on the corner you can see when night time is coming, though there isn't really a night time in space, but still your crew need to sleep. In this case I overworked my crew and they slept on the floor, later I will show the crew bunks where they can go and sleep. There is also a robot carrying another broken robot which I am planning to hack later. Robots do not need to sleep but need to recharge.

Beware, do not leave bodies to rotten in your ship, your crew will be affected emotionally if they see dead people, some may not even properly sleep for a long time.

Lastly, I've been working on the injury system, now crew members health can be monitored and see which part of the body have been damaged, they can loose limbs or internal organs and more advanced medic facilties will be needed to repair or replace limbs, a missing leg will not allow a crew member to walk, or a missing hand will not allow a crew member to wield double handed weapons like rifles, only pistols. Depending on where the injury happened some crew members may develop phobias.

Some body parts will be easily replaceable with 3d bio-printers and other machines while others may permanently affect your crew member, a damaged brain will impair some of the capabilities but if proper equipment is acquired it may be possible to save them, I will leave the medical facility for another post.

Crew in your ship

So far until now all screenshots have shown crew members in space suit only, but that just changed and now your crew will be visible in their own clothes inside ships, only space suits will be needed when being in space or while going to places without life support.

This will add a lot of variety to the game and the look of it. Space suits have a color per ship so you can easily identify the crew member belonging to the ship and the ones that are yours, this will be very useful when boarding ships but when a crew member is not wearing a space suit a casual cloth will be displayed.

Another important thing to look at is that each crew member do have an area in their cloth that will change color according to their duty, so for example a crew member assigned to security will have an orange section in the uniform as well in the suit so you can easily identify by colors the assignment, but if you have difficulties differentiating colors you can always look at the window and see the icon assigend to that crew member.

One year ago I started a summer challenge...

I just noticed today that exactly one year ago I started my summer challenge, to make a new game and put some new ideas on it during the summer and at the end I am still working on it adding lots of new features and having a lot of fun working on it. Junkcraft Armada is becoming the space game I wanted to play, travel through the universe, handle your crew, do some jobs and complete a mission by saving the universe, it is a quite ambitious game since there are a lots of assets and a lot of procedural content, a roguelike adventure.

Here is a new screen of the latest update.

You can set your weapons to target specific parts of an enemy ship, so you can disable thrusters, or hit a fuel storage module for a big explosion and disable more parts of an enemy ship. Depending on your sensors power you will be able to see more details on the enemy ship, like module status and some of the upgrades so you can plan your attack.

This week also, I rewrote all the weapons code and now it is very easy for me to add many different weapons without having to customize in code much, so a wide variety of weapons will be introduced in the next few weeks, initially I was planning for 5 different types of weapons but now I have way more and still growing. I added beam lasers which took me most of the week to implement due to the collision detection algorithm but now it is working.

Just a quick screen showing up a beam weapon firing.

Many more features coming soon, just hoping to finish the game before the end of the year crossing fingers.

New designs, new shadows, new shaders

Lots of updates and many new skins added to the game, it is taking quite a lot of time to do blog updates because I am having a lot of fun designing new ships and other things. Took over a week to redesign the shaders to calculate shadows on the fly, now that the new shader is working along with the normal maps you will be able to see even more details on each of the modules.

For example this is one of the new ships:

And ow trying to dock to a newly designed space station (still WIP) for repairs , trading and other things.

Also, you can upgrade or sell modules, sometimes you may be able to recover debris or modules from defeated enemies, plug em into your ship and sell them in your next stop and get some quick cash, in this screen you will be able to sell your excess modules.

 

 

Some other ships added.

More screens to come soon.