Crucible XIX 02/05/2014

A maths-intensive week this week, highly enjoyable. Still working on the theory side of the game, so there will be a lot of super good gameplay changes coming up soon (I'll talk a bit about them later). Also done a new video to make up for no blog last week. I finish work in 9 weeks, so I expect to be working much faster for the summer months. Also I'll hopefully be finishing off my Steam page soon, so I can get that live and looking good.

State of the Game (Build 1.08):

• System rotation. This is a big deal. All systems now rotate slowly about the galactic centre. Systems rotate at slightly different speeds. This means that the map changes shape slowly throughout the game, and as a result the connections between systems can change. This is intended to add an extra layer of strategy to the game, as some systems may become cut off from the main empire over time, or new routes to enemy systems may open up. This is designed to be unnoticeable in the short term, but create large changes over the course of a match.
• Randomised systems. The majority of systems (non-lore related systems) have randomised planet types in order to add more variation to each match. The number of planets in these systems is constant, however.
• Improved Pathfinding. Heroes now use an A* pathfinding algorithm to move. This takes into account the distances between systems (the previous algorithm only calculated the number of connections).

Upcoming Changes

• Empire technology tree. This will be divided into 4 tiers. Each tier contains technology that costs progressively more (eg. 10 for T1, 20 for T2, and so on). All technology within a tier costs the same amount, but every time a technology is research, all other technologies in that tier double their research cost. The idea behind this is to force the player to choose route through the tree carefully since the technology gets expensive quickly.
• Hero upgrades. This will become more of a skill tree similar to it's original state in the game. All heroes share a common tree with upgrades like armour, movement speed etc. Hero specific upgrades are also available depending on the hero type. Certain empire techs can even open up upgrades previously available for other hero classes.
• Expansion penalty and improvement penalty. Colonising new systems or planets creates and empire wide resource penalty for a certain amount of time. If colonisation is too fast, this penalty becomes very large. There will also be an upkeep cost on system improvement slots.
• Finalised the system screen and main menu designs. These are likely to take a lot of time to implement because there is a lot of trial and error involved. It does look snazzy however.

That's it for this week. Remember to check out my new video, and I'll (probably) be back next week.