Airships: Lost Flotilla News

[p]Airships: Lost Flotilla is part of the Steam Summer Sale, and you can currently get it for 25% off.

If you’ve been thinking about picking it up, now’s a really good time:
This will be the last time the game is this cheap for a long while.
Once the sale ends on July 10, I’ll be raising the price to better reflect the scope of the upcoming major update.

You might remember I announced the update a little while ago:
[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]I’m still hard at work on it, and it’s turning into something substantial.
Expect more content, improvements across the board, and a shiny set of Steam achievements to aim for.

So if you want to get Airships: Lost Flotilla at its lowest price, now’s the time.
And if you already have it: thank you! I can’t wait to show you what’s next.


[/p][p][/p]

Here's a quick update before the big content update. I wanted to make the game more accessible, especially to colorblind players. The big problem was that enemy shots are red and a lot of the background is green, which made them near-invisible if you can't distinguish red/green.


For example, try to spot the grenade in this picture.

To improve on this, I've added a dark outline to enemy shots, and I've also added two optional highlighting modes.



These reduce the saturation of most of the graphics but color enemies and shots red, and wreckage either blue or green.


Comparison of standard graphics with highlighting mode.

This should help a variety of players who want clearer visuals. You can also combine this with reduced background visibility and deactivate particles, etc to get visuals that are easier to see.

Full list of updates:

• Enemy shots now have a dark outline.
  
• Added color highlighting mode.
  
• Background is darker when you set background visibility to zero.
  
• Hitting escape during end of level summary now shows pause menu correctly.
  
• Game no longer selects exit button by default when you come back to the main menu.
  
• Fixed layout of captain selectors when you have a lot of captains.
  
• Fixed a number of rare audio-related crashes.
  

Now that the most pressing bugs have been fixed, I've started work on a large content update for Lost Flotilla. This is basically all the stuff I wanted to put into the game but ran out of time for, plus some new ideas that have come up.

The main addition will be several new enemy types, which you can see being constructed and destructed here:


Apart from that, I'm also planning to add a few new weapons and modules, achievements, as well as variant versions for player ships. As always, all of this will also be moddable.

When that update hits later this year, I also plan to increase the game's price from $5.99 to $8.99. But conveniently for you, dear reader, the game is currently off 25%...

Fixes and Adjustments

• Fixed plink damage being unable to kill players, which means getting enough armor no longer makes you invulnerable.
  
• Grenades and flak guns now have fuses, which means that they will explode once they've reached the distance to their intended target.
  
• Increased reload time of flak gun from 0.6 to 0.8 seconds.
  
• If you restart a wave after dying, empty weapon slots are no longer refilled with weapons from the starting version of your ship.
  
• Damage dealt is now added up correctly in post-wave stats.
  
• Shot speed changes no longer affect range.
  
• Added mods screen translations.
  

Modding

• Manual entries can now unlock multiple things. Use e.g. unlockWeapons instead of unlockWeapon with a list of weapons to unlock.
  
• Added fuse flag to WeaponType.
  
• Added levelStartScrap and playerShotSpeedPc to EquipmentType.
  
• The game now uploads the correct English name and description for mods even if your game is not currently set to English.
  
• Mods now default to using non-premultiplied alpha for images, which means translucency effects work the way you'd expect them to.
  

You can look up the details of all of these in the modding documentation.

Mods are here!
With this update, you can now create mods for the game and subscribe to them via the Steam Workshop. There are already a number of example mods and some first mods made by beta testers.

How to get mods

• Go to the workshop
• Subscribe to the mods you want
  
• Launch Airships: Lost Flotilla
  
• Go into the mods screen
  
• Enable the mods you want to use
  
• Hit Apply
  

How to make mods

• Consult the extensive modding documentation
• Join the discord to get help and community
  

Bugfixes
This update also fixes some minor bugs:

• Selecting Brother Zinn and then hitting escape in the difficulty selection now resets the ship selector properly.
  
• Remaining time in On Dragons research is now shown correctly.
  
• There is now an upper limit to the number of Shellflies the Shellfloater spawns.
  
• You can no longer have more than one monocoque upgrade. That would be a uh, polycoque, which makes no sense.
  

What's next?

• I'm heading over to Airships: Conquer the Skies to do a bugfix update there.
  
• Then, I'll be working on a bigger update for Lost Flotilla with some more content and achievements.
  
• I'm also starting to think about what my next project should be - more on that later.