Temperature in your space ship

Temperature plays a role as a new game mechanic. Part of your life support system allows life to survive by providing oxygen but also a good ambient temperature, with oxygen but not adecuate temperature your crew will burn of freeze in space.

When being closer and closer to a star the temperarature of your ship will increase over time and damage modules, your crew will also suffer burns and may die due to the heat or start fires inside your ship too!. Having a fire incident in your ship will also raise the temperature of the modules on fire and melt your ship's hull and armor having even more leaks.

Now you can also check the temperature inside of your ship like the image below, in this case I am too close to a star and things started to get too hot for my crew to survive.

Turning your systems off can lower the radiation leak your ship makes into space making it more difficult for enemies to find your ship or track it, but it also means that it will slowly turn colder and colder and that will affect how your crew react and survive, but if you are close to a star the temperature will raise a lot faster and be more dangerous. If you have lots of robots in your ship the temperature ratio will not affect them that fast compared to humans, lack of oxygen do not damage robots and allows easy fire management. Hull breaches decrese or increase temperature depending how close to a star is your ship, and makes your ship leak oxygen, if too much oxygen is leaked you won't be able to recycle your module's oxygen properly and some human crew members may die over time or go crazy!, but you can replenish your oxygen levels in space stations or other places.

In the following screeshot, the ship is located far from any nearby star and all systems were turned off, after some time the temperature dropped very low and started to affect your crew.

And here is when fire spreads with taking any action, some areas are getting hotter and hotter to the point that it will be very hard for your crew to get in there to extinguish the fire.

Much more to share soon.

The prison in your ship

The prison is a new working module for your ship as seen below.

Just make sure doors are locked or they may escape...

You may be able to save enemies and put them in jail until you reach a starport and deliver them to justice and get some reward, also slavers may have many prisons in their ships so you may be able to save and free the good people. But also means that you may decide to go the dark path and use it to imprison others, is up to you to decide which path you want to go.

Many updates, lights, cockpit chair , system modules and robots

Many new items were added in the past few weeks to the game, now to fly a ship you need at least one crew member sit in a chair like the screenshot below.

Also, many more options become available whenever a crew member has access to a console and when some additional systems are added to your ship. For example we have a gun locker and a food dispenser in the corner of the command center module seen below.

A gun locker allows storage space for the armory and equip your crew with weapons, but if not enough lockers are available you won't be able to securely store them and avoid enemies to get access to your arsenal. Food storage allows your crew to get proper food and adds food storage into your ship, lose them and your crew may die of famine in a long trip, so make sure you have enough storage for long trips. Other consoles allows you to have access to different options, like being able to have an Oxygen overlay to see the oxygen distribution in your ship, low oxygen makes it harder for any fire to expand, but overtime it will make hard also for your crew to get proper oxygen, and if any crew member stay for too long he or she may die.

In this screenshot you can see the O2 availability in your ship, have a breach and oxygen will drop very fast and if your O2 machines break you may not survive for long. There will be many ways to replenish your O2 in your ship but that will come into another news later.
Having access to your main consoles allows you also to lock/unlock doors for safety purposes.

Also, there may by places where light is not available or if there is any power failure, and you will be able to see what your crew can illuminate as seen below:

You may have noticed also that there is a new type of character standing in the gif above, that one is a robot. Not so long ago robots were added to the game but didn't have any animations, now fully animated into the game, more to see in the next few weeks.

Also some new animation added when using small airlocks.

More news to come soon.

Locations lights and shadows - mechanic

As you cruise the vast space with your ship you may encounter places like asteroids with caverns, derelicts and face events in which you may not have full visibility to see ahead, in those cases your crew will be able to turn on their helmet's lights and show up a portion of the screen. Here is a screenshot in-game with the shadows casted by your own crew, some parts of the ships are not fully visible due to the lack of lights.

In some other situations you may decide to turn off completely your ship to avoid detection, you won't be able to maneuver or activate any other system so only your main control center will have auxiliary lights like the red ones below, but the rest of the ship will be in complete darkness, your crew will have manage that on their own.

Low visibility affect accuracy and many things will not be available to your crew to attack or repair for example. Exploring unknown locations like caverns or dereclicts will have similar setup with limited visibility to the unknown, so you will have to be careful how you deploy your crew in the map and how to interact and advance forward, there may be enemies hiding in the shadows...

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.

Handling events and how complex can it be...

Lately I've been adding new events into the game, just to illustrate how events are being handled here is a screenshot.

There are quite many different options that happen on each event so there is a lot of dynamic part based on decisions you made in the past, for example this event is called when the player hails a pirate ship, there are many random parts of the event and the response and options the player will see depend on the crew, your resources, your cargo and many other factors, those will affect what the player will see when playing. So each gameplay will be different and decisions made during those events will change also future events, for example if the player decides to join the pirates guild there will be a few occasions in which that option will be available, fail to do so and the option will never be available, or if player refuse to do so the pirates will remember that and will respond accordingly.

Another example of how decisions affect your crew, for example giving up your cargo without a fight will affect your crew member's loyalty, some are really blood thirsty and won't give up without a fight till dead, some others will be fine, so you need to know your crew, and remember that if loyalty goes to low, you may face a mutiny! or something worse.

Now time to go back and write more stories and make more shaders.