SPL: Skilled Pilots Live News

• Added mines to some of the encounters.
  
• Mines will approach any target (you/enemy/friendly) and detonate on proximity.
  
• Use full shield to save yourself from the blast.
  
• You can lure enemies into mine fields.
  
• This is the first of upcoming encounter modifiers, more coming soon.
  

• Added key binding listing in the game settings screen.
  
• At least one item - weapon or upgrade - will now always drop in every fight.
  

• Fixed a rare bug where sometimes the enemy would use jump drive to jump into infinity, this trapped the player in the encounter forever.
  
• Fixed a bug where defeating the boss very far away from the it's starting scenery would sometimes reset the boss fight causing loss of progress.
  
• Fixed a bug where the music was interrupted by weapon fire and other SFX.
  
• Fixed stash expand tooltip showing not updating the expansion cost if the player kept the mouse over the button.
  

• New ability has been added to fabricator, it needs at least one weapon and one ship upgrade to activate. The wingman will benefit from up to three ship upgrades, exactly as your ship.
  
• The better equipment is used for wingman creation the more powerful and resistant to damage it will get.
  
• Spawning first wingman cost depends on number of active wingman, the first one costs 10 rift dust, second 20, third 30 etc. Currently there's no limit of wingman you can have.
  
• The game might get overall easier if you use wingman, on the other hand helping them stay alive in a big fight might be a different kind of challenge.
  
• The wingman will follow you using their jump drive and keep formation unless dodging or heavily engaged in a dog fight.
  
• The wingman have AI similar to silver enemies, quite able in combat but they will still make some mistakes.
  

• The screen gets a heavy red outline if you get damaged, it gets more visible on very low hp.
  
• Added a distinct siren warning if your structure heats below 40%.
  
• Last stand ability now shows a prompt to use the appropriate button to activate it.
  
• When overheated an on-screen message has been added that remind to tap the key to recover from overheat.
  

• The ship should steer much better when both you and the enemy have a high speed.
  
• Shooting at a enemy with high velocity/acceleration should be much easier, this is especially useful when the said enemy is engaged in combat with your wingman.
  
• Fixed incorrect cost calculation for fabricator abilities.
  

Hi.
It's been a while since last update. I had to recharge my creative batteries and take a few steps back to have a better look at the game.
The idea was to make a final decision on the course SPL should take and then commit to it - for good.

[h3]Looter shooter[/h3]

• The attribute based progression has been removed from the game.
  
• You can now equip up to 4 weapons and 3 ship upgrades.
  
• Items drop randomly from enemies with random tiers ranging from Damaged to Legendary.
  
• Any weapon combination can drop from any enemy, if you like your Trident Deathray it may just drop from the first enemy.
  
• Higher tiers have greater number of item modifiers.
  
• Items also have a level: for weapons it's power level, for ship upgrades it's resilience level.
  
• The higher the resilience level the more resistant to damage you are.
  
• The higher the is the weapons power level, the higher is it's damage
  
• To determine the ships resilience level average resilience level is taken from all ship upgrade slots. So if you have only a single ship modular with level 300, your ships resilience will be equal to 100.
  
• By beating tougher enemies the level of the loot drops will increase.
  
• You can earn a multipurpose resource - rift dust by defeating the enemies.
  
• You can scrap items to gain rift dust.
  
• You can fuse a selected item with some other items. The main items type and rarity is retained but the level is taken from average of all items. This way you can re-roll your Legendary items or fish for specific ship upgrades and weapons.
  

[h3]Death is not final[/h3]

• Dying doesn't end the game.
  
• All your ships equipment is lost with the ship's destruction.
  
• You can expand you subspace stash and store items there. These precious item slots are retained after death. Even if you die you can have good loot saved after you respawn.
  
• The enemies will still drop items with level as high as before death, so you can quickly bounce back even if you have no items left.
  

[h3]Encounters are no longer random[/h3]

• Each hostile encounter has been designed and is no longer random.
  
• Enemies can now use any one of 63 weapons.
  
• Enemy waves are designed with enemy tiers, weapons, upgrades, formations to provide a unique experience in each encounter.
  
• Boss fights are a fixed sequence: Forgotten Hero, Mother of Many, Nexus Zero. In the future this will mean three tiers of boss fights. So when new bosses are added Forgotten Hero will still only appear as first boss fight.
  

[h3]More varied combat[/h3]

• Flying quickly is as viable defense as dodging, the enemies will most often miss you if you keep moving. This promotes more aggressive tactics where you approach or rush the enemies instead of sniping from afar and dodging away from danger.
  
• Some weapon types have been reworked to provide unique gun-play.
  
• The boss fights are more deadly.
  

[h3]New direction[/h3]
SPL will focus in future updates on:

• Loot: Improving looting experience
  
• Loot: Adding completely new item types with new purpose
  
• Combat: Adding new encounters, enemy types and boss fights
  
• Combat: Adding interactive arena elements and environmental traps to enhance combat
  
• Combat: Adding synergies between enemies
  
• Visuals: Making the sceneries more varied in shape and colour
  

[h3]Score[/h3]
The in game score (fame) has not been perfected for the new gameplay. The leaderboard has been temporarily hidden and the score will likely get wiped soon.
I didn't want to hold the release for another week for the sake of this feature.

[h3]Other improvements[/h3]

• Added volumetric fog and lighting.
  
• Improved SFX.
  
• Greatly reduced save game size.
  
• Fixed numerous crashes.
  

Hi,

Dear new players. I might be working on the roadmap for SPL for the next few months, but firstly I need to make the game more approachable for you.

• Created a new tier of enemy - crippled. They can't move, or use jump drive.
  
• Added three new introduction encounters where the new players can get used to the enemy types and do some target practice. Also it might be a good intermediate step between the tutorials and the real fight.
  
• Each intro encounter starts with 6 crippled enemies, once these are cleared a fully active bronze enemy appears, as a tutorial 'mini boss' - the real deal to fight.
  
• Each intro has some brief description about effective strats to use against the specific enemies, their strengths and weakness.
  

• Wall of text popups now appear on the left side of the screen instead of center, should feel much less intrusive.
  

Thanks and enjoy!

Hi,

Have some very good news and a little bit of bad news:

• Bad news - The first big patch will be delayed for some (finite and not very long) time.
  
• Very good news - The next patches will follow a complete plan towards a milestone that will make the game much better.
  

I am working on a whole plan for the game, rather than trying figure out from update to update how to make the game incrementally better. Incremental changes are ok, but they're a bit like wandering in the dark.

The whole plan for the game - sounds big doesn't it ? The idea is pretty simple, take the most fundamental flaws of SPL and get rid of them while adding more gameplay.

Coming from the creator of the game:

[h3]This is the biggest criticism and my motivations for the 'whole plan'[/h3]

• SPL is predictable in the wrong way, monotonous instead of familiar.
  
• SPL is linear. Fight arenas, get upgrades, beat boss, repeat. Arena based action roguelikes are like this, but SPL is a space game with free, very fast movement. This contradicts the linear gameplay.
  Also I spent months of programming preparing the game to be more open. In the end I got scared and stuck with safe, linear play. It's time to get braver and finish what I started.
  
• SPL doesn't have a good hook for new players. The game doesn't suck you in initially, there should be much more easy gratification in early game.
  
• SPL doesn't challenge you anymore if you got good at the game.
  
• SPL doesn't reward you enough for the play. The upgrades are too easy to obtain and predictable.
  
• SPL confuses new players.
  
• SPL doesn't capitalize enough on the movement part of the gameplay, the speed, the realistic physics. More gameplay should revolve around it.
  
• SPL doesn't have roguelike replay-ability, no meta-gameplay.
  
• SPL offers arsenal limited to 'normal weapons', there's no special combat abilities, items etc.
  

So the plan in a nutshell is:



I hope this is something for you to look forward to. Keep in mind that I'm not the most patient person in the world and the first update will be pretty soon. I'll want to show some progress as soon as possible!

Best wishes in the New Year,
Paweł