Crucible XXI 23/05/2014

Still no exciting things to show- it's turning out to be quite complicated and there are various moving parts what with dealing with time zones etc. So in light of that, I will be mostly discussing things and showing off what I have done.

I made some more adjustments to the UI so that it shows less, more useful, information. Specific details on the active effects of each improvement on a system is accessible by highlighting the improvement, rather than listed in a huge text box. Along with this are some more general quality of life improvements, such as buttons remaining highlighted after selection, ensuring all buttons follow the same rules (orange when active, bright orange when selected, grey when inactive). I also made some slight changes to the way that the boxes are laid out- hopefully simplifying it.

Over the past few days I have been re-writing and re-naming all the system improvements. Originally there were 5 generic and 3 defence improvements per tier (32 total) available to all races, with only 2 race-specific improvements (8 per race)- that's 56 improvements total. Now, however, there are 3 generic and 2 defence improvements per tier for all races, with 5 race-specific improvements per tier- bringing the total up to 80 (or 140 when I include the other races)! This has meant that I have much more flexibility creating improvements that utilise each races unique resources and play style, and so hopefully the improvements are both more meaningful with regards to the gameplay, and also more interesting mechanically. Below is a picture of all the improvements available to humans (each box is one tier).

Next week I'll be primarily working on improving and expanding the military side of gameplay- so primarily invasions from heroes, and also a new missile system I have not previously mentioned in which systems can build and store missiles to be fired upon other systems. The main issue with these mechanics is not implementing them, but making sure that they are easy and logical to use, which at the moment they are not. I've included a picture of the targeting system to give you an idea of how the missiles will work. The background image is just a large Hubble deep field image I pulled off the internet (and is rather bright!).

And here is a little taster of what will be coming soon...