You can customize your ship using various modules which provide offensive, defensive and other benefits. You use these same modules to give your ship a unique look with various colours and shapes.
You can then use this ship to fight battles in the galaxy and collect more resources to continue upgrading your ship.
Void Surfer has 3 modes:
-Story Mode - follow a short story where you start out as a Void Surfer Recruit and work your way up to general to defeat the forces of Emporer Ironfowl.
-Survival Mode - survive as long as you can against waves of enemies. Salvage their remains to upgrade your ship and figure out the best builds for getting further!
-Power Struggle - capture objectives alongside your army and battle the enemy force. Watch out, a rogue Void Surfer is on the enemy team!
Planets are now interactable in that you can build modules into the slots when you’re near them.
For now, there’s only an automatic turret available for planets.
I plan on adding more weapons, shields and utility modules such as resource processors, repair stations, docking stations.
Adding the modules to the planet works in a similar fashion to how you add them to the ship, but they don’t need to be connected to a “core module” and they work independently.
There’s also a limited number of slots so you need to choose wisely and explore to find more planets and bigger planets!
Here’s a video of it in action. The enemies pounced on me a bit earlier than expected so I had to build my turrets mid battle!
Thought this was pretty cool, I learned about predictive aiming so the turret will shoot ahead of its target based on distance, velocity of the target and velocity of the projectile.
I rendered a yellow crosshair to show where the turret is aiming in order to hit the moving target.
Been a little while since the last update, here’s what I’ve been working on:
3 new planets: Leafy, Puffy and Icy
2 new planet modules: Resource Gatherer (this replaces the “Resource Processor” circles) and Docking Station (this replaces the “modify ship” button)
Updated visuals for the orbital cannon
AI now spawn periodically in neighboring sectors rather than only once per sector
Ship now has a “gyroscope” on the core module which allows you to rotate the ship to face the cursor without having to use turning thrusters (you can still use turning thrusters if you want a faster rotation)
@Antypodish A brief response is better than nothing!
I’ve definitely considered the gravitational pull but there is a lot of things to consider.
I need to find a good balance between realism and fun.
Do you think there would be any fun mechanics using gravitational pull?
Currently, I’ve got black holes which are like obstacles that the player needs to avoid and they’ll pull in anything that gets close enough with the force getting weaker over distance.
Watching projectiles orbit the black holes is quite entertaining and I suppose it could be fun to “bend” bullets around a planet to hit a ship on the other side.
I think yes. I personally love that stuff. Shutting something hidden, playing with gravity and flying around things. Considering playing something like Angry Birds in space
You don’t need make like super realistic. Keeping arcadish way should be interesting. For example, forces acting, only when close enough. I think only challenging part will be the AI, to recognize and act upon such mechanics of gravitational pull.
You could also consider adding experimental switch in gameplay options, for switching gravity On/Off.
I spent a bit of time working on fixing up friendly fire, so now you can’t damage your own ship and you can place weapons anywhere you like because the projectiles ignore your ship and only damage enemies.
Part of this was driven by the new “autoturret” weapon which works the same as the orbital cannon on the planets except it’s on your ship! (with slightly less damage).
I also started adding a map that shows which sectors of the galaxy you’ve explored.
I always struggle with UI scroll views so it’s been a bit painful but I think I have the base of it working nicely.
I’m going to add the ability to place waypoints and obviously some indicator to show where the player is in the galaxy.
Here’s a video where you can see some of the new things!
I’ve got about 10 more items on my Trello to complete before I build another playtest… stay tuned!
Where has the time gone!?
March is almost over and I feel like I haven’t gotten very far but there’s a lot of tedious stuff I’ve been working on which I’m glad I’ve finally conquered.
Now I can make way for more fun stuff!
So what was I doing?
I added a minimap, I gave up on the idea in the video above because the scrollrect really wasn’t playing nice with dynamic updates to the content. I went with a simple minimap for now which just shows a small icon for different things in the unverse:
I put together a small tutorial for learning to pilot the ship.
With feedback from these forums, I cut down the ship building tutorial to some very basic steps to get people into the action faster.
Fixed loads of bugs
Added lots of Menu updates for easier navigation
Added automatic saving when quitting or going to main menu
Fixed a MAJOR performance issue
Added resources which can be drilled into - this is still a work in progress.
I’ve been thinking I’ll increase the immersion of the planets by having a “Landing view” where you can actually see a representation of the planet at ground level.
I think I’ll show the planet modules you’ve built too, space out around the scene.
Attached the beginnings of the frost planet landing view.
Chopping up the void serpent! I changed the code a bit so I can have a dynamic length on the serpent and you can actually kill it and harvest resources from it now!
If you’ve been following, you might notice that there are also some triangle hull modules on the ship now to make it look a little less blocky.
Anyone have some ideas for what kind of attacks the void serpent should have?
Maybe gazing laser eyes?
Like 2 strong long beams, in direction of looking at.
Or, Grip of Boa, when any ship is near any part of serpent’s body, ships will receive damage.
I may have missed this, but are the resources in the corner clickable buttons? To me they look that way - I almost think it would look better to add more of a hud or no background at all, if you could make them look good like that.
I love the “Rigidbody2D is destroyed but a script is still trying to access it” errors haha. Just making sure you aware of it.
Would it be possible for you to export the project into a WebGL build and upload it? I feel like more people would try it if they see it.
@ianswerquestions20 Hey thanks for the feedback!
Parallax background layers is definitely on the list.
Those fonts look cool! I’ll try some out.
The resources aren’t clickable but I see what you mean. I’m just being lazy and reusing some of the art for now, I will improve it at some stage!
Yes I see the errors haha.
I will do a webgl build next time (hoping it works fine in WebGL).
