I’ve been experiencing some frustrating technical problems, which have slowed down the release process, testing and writing. Once I get the version 0.5.2 out (hopefully in a week or two), it’s time for a hardware upgrade.
But about the game.
One particular issue has been troubling me during the final testing: as the game has gotten more complex, the number of ways to screw things up has increased steadily. I actually gave mishaps a whole new statistics page for future expansions:
With all the hassle, it is often hard to tell if incidents are bugs or just unfortunate mishaps. This can become frustrating, and too much of the player’s concentration is now wasted on being careful. Even the best AI pilots aren’t immune to accidents. In fact, various collision fixes resulted in cases where AI opponents blew themselves up at the start. They should be more careful now.
Many of the incidents are somehow related to energy, and it looks like notifications about destroyed energy sources are not enough to clarify them. In the future, I will probably add a mode, where overheating no longer destroys the energy sources. Instead, all functions would just be disabled until energy sources have cooled down.
Another common mishap are cases where the colliding projectiles damage the ship that just launched them. These are double as harmful as normal hits, since projectiles cause damage simultaneously. Cannons can also blow up projectiles; these cases became more common after I fixed various collision bugs from the previous versions. Both projectile-projectile and cannon-projectile collisions are usually (but not always) due to aggressive spam-clicking.
Players can also get direct hits from their own projectiles. These cases are easier to detect, but one curious corner case has risen: the best AI pilots are pretty good with pressor beams, and constantly push projectiles back towards the launchers. So when you see mishap info about a direct hit, it might be because of this. Be careful when shooting missiles from a close range.
As a summary: it is hard to explain complex events in an arcade game’s feedback loop. In typical simulations, tempo is slower, making it possible to open up the causality; in arcade games, there’s no possibility to do so without interfering with the game flow. Text notifications are quite bad, as no one reads the messages during the battle. An icon flash etc. on the crosshair would probably be better. I will try to improve this in the upcoming versions. As always, feedback is welcome.
Thanks.