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.

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.