Stellar Warfare News

This week I have worked on adding new weapons and fixing bugs, since the campaign is pretty much done. I just have to have the voice lines recorded and implemented.

There are now 48 ships, 47 weapons, 23 modules. Ship module slots range from 1 to 5 per ship, and weapon slots from 1 to 5 per ship. Someone can probably use that data to calculate all possible configurations



Weapons, modules & ships

• Fixed weapons not firing
  
• Fixed Lasershield
  
• Nerfed Gauss Cannon
  
• Nerfed Gauss Repeater
  
• Reduced harvester cost
  
• Nerfed refinery costs
  
• Made several defense buildings cheaper
  
• Fixed fish moving weirdly
  
• Added Gauss Shotcannon
  
• Added Plasma Shotcannon
  
• Reduced camera lag
  
• Changed Corvette tooltip
  
• Made Emperor ship cheaper
  
• Made Longback ship cheaper
  
• Added a Heavy Corvette
  
• Made the Heavy Frigate tankier
  
• Added the Dageria heavy ship (fast, cheap, fragile)
  
• Added light frigate
  
• Added Heat Sinks module
  
• Added Weapon Booster module
  
• Added the MissileDef cannon
  

Bugfixes

• Removed stealth icon bug
  
• Improved wave defense boss weaponry
  
• When you win or lose you will no longer automatically leave the game. Instead you will get a leave button.
  
• After win/lose your HUD / GUI will dissapear apart from the minimap
  
• 5 seconds after win/lose your win/lose message will dissapear and the Leave button will move to the bottom left
  
• Cinematic camera can now be used after losing
  
• All other options apart from building new things will stay available after losing
  
• All of the above basically boils down to that you can keep watching after losing
  
• Made weapon tester into a neutral building + camera smoothness is now different for cinematic cam and follow cam, and regular camera smoothness is more instant
  
• I've moved the check to see what units can jump elsewhere (excludes buildings and AI units). Then checks if the selected unit is a friendly or not. It makes a new list from this then uses that list to jump. That should exclude any errors caused by 'wrong units' being selected for jumps. This seems to have solved the jump issue.
  
• Transports now spawn more randomly
  
• Rewards for killing transports is now between 250 and 350 per destroyed transport in multiplayer and between 250 and 750 of each resource in singleplayer
  
• In BR now 3 transports spawn at random positions instead of 1, making it easier for players to get them
  
• Made transports easier to target
  
• Zabu beacons in multiplayer are now spread out more
  
• Battle royale jump cooldown is now 1/3 of regular jump time. I have also set the jump cooldown very low temporarily to test it
  
• Added check that unit must have more than 0 health before being allowed to jump
  
• Added an extra check that won't even send the network command to jump a unit if its health is lower than 0
  
• Made all blue and green projectiles less bright by setting the transperancy from 255 to 70. Also changed projectiles visual
  
• Tweaked recoil
  
• Fixed neutral transports needing to be dead to win in BR
  
• Testing neutral transports needing to be dead to win in BR fix (success)
  
• Added a check to see if unit references were still set when seeing if player should lose in br
  
• Noticed that when you win the win in br the win screen almost instantly dissapears. Just checked it, same goes for the lose screen. Has to do with screen sizes, fixing now.
  
• Increased time that the victory or lose message stays to 10 seconds
  
• Improved leavegame positioning
  
• transports in BR now give between 150 and 300 of each resource
  
• Repair stations in BR work again
  
• Decreased jump delay by 1 second (will take 3-4 seconds to jump now instead of 4-5)
  
• Fixed Reinforcement beacon (+ build speed increaser) from applying benefits to allies
  
• Removed 'music playing double' until it can be reproduced
  
• Might have fixed the population bug. Can't really test, almost impossible to reproduce. But I suspect its because the owner of the units of the ally that died were counted as friendly units, reducing your own population below 0. I've added an extra check that checks if those objects are owned by the local player to hopefully fix this issue
  
• Added the same check to populationCap
  
• Increased loot drop chance in all singleplayer game modes by 30%
  
• Added some checks that if selected units are null that they get removed from the selected units list in the formation helper. Might fix move issues
  
• Cleaned up shipyard death
  
• Repositioned leave button
  
• Increased height indicator display distance while placing buildings
  
• Changed height from "xx Meters" to "Height: xx"
  

Thats it for this week. Next week I will probably do more similar fixes. I've also fixed most game breaking bugs so far, so thats good :)

This week I've mostly worked on campaign mission 7 and 8. I had to:

• Flesh out the script
  
• Write all voice over lines
  
• Time all the events
  
• Check win conditions
  
• Check lose conditions
  
• Analyse the gameplay aspect
  
• Make sure the whole lore is consistent enough
  
• Test if all objectives could be achieved and the missions could be completed
  

Apart from that we've also worked on Fighters and Bombers. Those are not an absolute requirement for game release, but it would be very cool to have!



Each week I also play at least two games with patrons. One is a multiplayer game and the other is a battle royale game. Patrons on https://patreon.com/TenseGames also get to design ships based on which tier they choose and their name will be included on a transport ship. Without people supporting me via patreon I would have had to quit this project a long time ago, so I'm forever thankful for those who continue to help me with it.

General, balance, weapons

• Added the Toad light ship frame
  
• Added the Veloci light ship frame
  
• Added the Discus light ship frame
  
• Added Magma repeater weapon blueprint
  
• Fleshed out campaign mission 5
  
• Fleshed out campaign mission 6
  
• Wrote global lore events for campaign mission 7
  
• Wrote global lore events for campaign mission 8
  
• Started implementation of campaign mission 5
  
• Changed Auto Repeater weapons fire sound
  
• Changed default cannon sounds
  
• Fixed audio popping for cannon sounds
  
• Played game with patreons + coreyloses
  
• Added an extra check for sounds to only play if they are within 250 units distance of the camera
  
• Tweaked all projectile lifetimes so that they detonate right behind max range
  
• Added weapon recoil
  

Campaign mission 5

• Added custom buildings
  
• Added 8 objectives
  
• Did several test games in
  
• Created a special damaged ship for
  
• Added new radar pings pod
  
• Added escape pod
  

Campaign mission 6

• Added custom buildings
  
• Added effects
  
• Added enemies
  
• Added 9 objectives
  
• Added win/lose conditions
  
• Added radar pings
  
• Tested win and lose conditions
  
• Rewrote part of the script
  

That's it for this week. See you next week!

Ships

• Added Patroller ship frame
  
• Added Heavy frigate ship frame
  
• Added Blade ship frame
  
• Added Hammerer ship frame
  
• Fixed Patroller shield
  
• Fixed Heavy frigate shield
  
• Fixed Blade shield
  
• Fixed Hammerer shield
  
• Reduced Longback cost
  

And I've made some ship stats cards:


Campaign

• Started campaign mission 4
  
• Wrote out campaign mission 4
  
• Added objectives and text to campaign mission 4
  
• Added objective 1, 2, 3, 4,5 for campaign mission 4
  
• Written the text for the voice over
  
• Photoshopped radar ping
  
• Animated radar ping
  
• Implemented radar ping system
  
• Added objective radar pings to mission 2
  
• Added objective radar pings to mission 4
  
• Completed campaign mission 4
  
• Increased time until first objective trigger in campaign mission 4 + changed the tooltip
  
• Refined campaign story, currently 8 missions planned and 4 of them done
  

I also implemented this for the campaign, but I won't tell you what it is:


We also did a bunch of performance tests. If we don't use any of those new techniques right now then at least we'll have them ready for later versions of the game.

And finally the Brachio and Destroyer MKII in action:


See you next week!

This week I've completed campaign mission 2 and 3! There is also a bunch of things related to the project that are not relevant to this list so I've left them out. Oh yeah and I worked on expanding the lore this week as well!

To do that I've done the following things:

• Made script for campaign mission 2
  
• Wrote out the events of campaign mission 2
  
• Made a comms station
  
• Added comms dead lose condition
  
• Changed comms station selection circle
  
• Set up system for proper info text coloring
  
• Hidden wave timer in mission 2
  
• Made text color white
  
• Tweaked objective texts
  
• Increased the amount of objectives for mission 2 for more smooth storytelling
  
• Fixed object rotation speed
  
• Added comms sound
  
• Wrote mission 2 script
  
• Added objectives mission 3
  
• Completed mission 3
  
• Reworked the victory conditions a little bit so we need to test those in each game mode again
  

Support
This projected is funded by myself and I'm losing money on it every month. Sometimes I'm struggling to pay rent as well because of it. Therefore I've set up a patreon called TenseGames and I'm fortunate that a lot of people already decided to help me out. To do something back I'm giving them the following:

• Their name on transport ships
  
• Access to all work in progress versions of the game
  
• Depending on the tier they get to name a ship, weapon or module
  
• Every week I play a game of Battle Royale and regular Multiplayer with them
  

So if you can spare it, and only if you can miss it, please consider supporting the project that way as well.

Future plans
Next week I hope to complete campaign mission 4 and 5. And perhaps implement some new ships as well!