Finish Line on the Horizon: BRS v0.3 Release Prep

 

I'm back in the flow and working steadily to knock off the dozens of remaining items on the release prep to-do list. In addition to a final round of bug squashing and play testing, I've added a handful of gameplay features that I felt were worth taking the time to implement.

Added NavBall Functionality

The player can now manually rotate the navball into any orientation, then easily reset it to its home position. This is a feature that is not needed very often, but it's super useful in certain circumstances, particularly in making correction burns on interplanetary transfers. I have some other Big Ideas for easing the pain of interplanetary travel, which is still at least as tedious as it is engaging, but this was one easy-to-implement feature toward that goal.

Ship Ownership

You now begin the game without a ship, and kick things off by buying one and taking on the debt which is the backbone of Black Road Sky's engaging storyline of paying off debt. I thought about starting the game, just for now, with a little block of text like "You just a bought a ship, you're in debt, have fun", but I think that letting the player spend the money might give them a more meaningful connection to the ship. Probably overthinking it. But also, it's just a hilariously boring way to start a video game. How you gonna start your space game, an engaging cinematic cutscene of flashy lasers cutting down alien spaceships? Nope, let's make everyone apply for a loan via a cumbersome text-based banking terminal.

Cumbersome text-based banking terminal. Admit it, you're hooked!

These kinds of features typically only take a few hours to implement, but considering that I only have an hour or two each day to work on the game, I'm trying to be very careful about what I'm choosing to invest time in. To this end, I've also decided to push a bunch of less critical things up to be dealt with in a future update, such as refining the keybinding system and diving down an optimization rabbithole. The game works great with keyboard & mouse and it runs fine on my mediocre 5 year old PC, so I'll save those tasks for later.

Bigger picture, I'm still in a sloggy part of development, but it feels better now that I can see a finish line. Still gunning for a release sometime in July!