September was a prolifically productive month for us! Lots of hard hitting updates so right into it.
Profile and Milestones
Two really cool features to bring your character to life and distinguish yourself in the universe. There are now public profiles for each character, currently accessible by clicking on one’s name in the news or in chat. Here you can show off your kill count, buildings, and more. You can view your own personal stats on the Roster tab.
Graphics Updates
We’ve taken some great feedback for visual clarity and efficiency, making small but mighty updates to our nav and combat screens. Within the nav screen (left side), we moved the coordinates into the nav itself. This gives us precious more space for more important things to view. You can also turn off coordinates with the little “5” button the lower left. Within combat (right side), we’ve added friend/foe targeting color coding. This was a great piece of Alpha tester feedback; we hope it makes combat readouts more understandable in the heat of battle.
Events
We’ve created a mechanic to introduce limited-time events to the universe. We’re referring to these generally as anomalies. Today there are three anomalies you may encounter: Erratic Aether, Solar Flares, and Space Fly Swarm. We’ll leave it to you to discover what effects these have! Small hint, you may see a swarm in the above Nav screenshot. Long term, we plan to have anomalies with various scopes (universe-wide down to one planet) with both beneficial and detrimental effects.
Combat Mechanics and Balance
We’ve done our first pass of combat balance changes and introduced the prototype of a new mechanic. We’re calling it “Conditional Action Chains”. The current limited implementation of it is a secret for our NPC’s at the moment, but here’s the gist of it. Any given action can have a different effect based on whether the action (or the underlying skill check) succeeds or fails. This is more than “Yeah obviously my shooting action has no damage if it misses”. As an example, say you fire a penetrating munition. The first check can be simply accuracy vs manouvre, and you do damage if you succeed this check. The conditional is that, if you pass the first, you can now check engineering vs engineering to do additional damage. We’ll use this mechanic to introduce interesting and meaningful choices throughout different combat engagements.
The balance changes are little less exciting to detail. In summary, we made it so that you don’t get oneshot against scavenger beetles and killing easy enemies is… a bit easier.
That’s everything for September. Enjoy the start of autumn and stay tuned for our next exciting annoucements!
