The last thing that I did before setting Black Road Sky aside for way too long was to finally implement some actual space trucking gameplay. But before I started on that, I decided that now was the time to completely redesign the ship's interior and exterior. That turned out to be a dumb idea, and I spent a lot of time not getting very far before eventually giving up, but here are some screenshots anyway. None of this will actually be implemented in the playable build of v0.3, but it gives some idea of where things are headed.
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| Starting on the cockpit redesign. |
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| Detail of main control panel. |
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| Figuring out the engine room. |
The ship design is 100% placeholder, so yeah, a redesign needs to happen at some point. But I was really just replacing the placeholders with more elaborate placeholders and was spending way too much time on it with very little to show. I finally realized that it was completely unnecessary for the release of v0.3, so I abandoned the idea and got to work on gameplay stuff instead.
This gameplay stuff is also mostly placeholder, but at least there's something to do now in the game. The previously inactive terminals found in space stations are now functional (with the exception of the 'Body Shop' terminal found on city stations).
The bank terminal is used for taking out loans and will have additional functions added later. The first thing you'll need to do in the game is buy a ship, which will require that you take out a loan, and the only real objective of the game (for now, at least) will be to get out of debt by completing trucking contracts and eventually paying off your loan. You don't get to be a successful spacefaring civilization without a healthy dose of fiscal responsibility.
The contracts terminal offers up these trucking jobs. You can only take one at a time. Eventually, the plan is that you'll need to actually tow shipping containers much like real life semi trucks, but for now the cargo is just magically loaded into some mysterious cargo hold on your ship. The contracts are randomly generated and wildly unbalanced, but the core system works and finally provides some real motivation for flying from point A to point B.
Finally, the garage terminal provides refueling and repair services for your ship. I'm not sure if repairs will make it into v0.3, but I have refueling working.
That's all the makings of a GAMEPLAY LOOP, BABY! Cool. However, at this point I was forced to confront all of the bugs and loose ends that stood between me and a version release, and it was fucking overwhelming so I just gave up for a while.
Anyway, I'm back in a groove now and things are actually going pretty smoothly. Gonna take longer than the "month or two" that I estimated last month, but things are looking good. Bugs are being fixed, loose ends are being tied, and I'm confident that BRS v0.3 will be the breakout hit of Spring 2022. Maybe Summer 2022. Probably 2022.
