You know that feeling where you take on a million things, start all of them, but finish only a few of them? Some would identify this as a symptom of an attention deficit disorder. The Bur-zuj would call this “strategically cultivating multiple long-horizon investments”. We’re biased towards the latter definition. This month of VERZ was sort of like that. We had really productive discussion and have started on many key foundational concepts of the game; namely equipment classes, diplomacy/relations, and talent trees. Slowly grinding towards systems which will pay great dividends in the future.
In the meanwhile, allow us to regale you with a brief tale on one such investment and some curated highlights from our changelog.
The Programmers’ Revolt
At a point in our history, we had the clever idea to intertwine Talents and Equipment. The reasoning was relatively straightforward: as a spacefaring pilot, you can’t very well do anything separate from your ship.; hard vacuum is just like that. This makes obvious sense in navigation and combat contexts. Want to go from point A to point B? Yeah, you’ll need some sort of propulsion equipment and the savvy to not explode while operating it. Want to shoot that scavenger that has been tailgating you on the space lanes? Of course you need a weapon and the ability to fire it (and the accuracy skill to hit it, but that’s a different story). Naturally, it would be a bit silly to have a discrete sort of talent or ability for such basic things, and we could wave this away by making it an “always on” or “innate” talent. More advanced things like “expert pathfinding” or “run quiet” that you might activate could function as modifiers on your drive, so still no problem. Even with concepts that weren’t inherently shipbound, we had no problem explaining them away.
But trouble was brewing beneath the surface.
If memory serves, it really came to a boiling point when were discussing possible combat-based skills and how they might apply across different ships and different sets of equipment. We kept running into wall after wall of our creation, and our exceptions list was growing unwieldy. It was becoming like all the “rules” in the English language that really have more exceptions than cases which follow the rule. This sort of thing is obviously a developer’s nightmare. Fortunately, unlike English, we have the ability to tear down a bit and go a different direction! I won’t tire you (or spoil you) with technical details at this point, but stay tuned for more on that later.
Selections from the Changelog
- Planetary production in Aleph sector now produces outputs aligned to its’ planetary industry. This is something Zac touched on in last month’s post. We are aiming to bring a bit more richness to the diversity of planets and what each variety does; industries is one angle on that. This is still very much a testing feature.
- Owned buildings now populate on your sector map. If you were a responsible proprietor, you would know where they are by heart!
- Also on the map, you can set waypoints. This will show up as a highlighted green trail showing the best path from here to there on your navigation.
- You can now attack Neutral entities in combat. Gosh I hope nobody uses this feature to shift blame for someone’s untimely demise!
- Removed pirate embargo to Velox. Suffice to say it was not peaceful.
- Completely unrelated, all pilots now start at “Hated” reputation with the pirate faction. Uh oh
