I made a fair amount of progress on the game since the last update!
First of all, the enemy frigate now has a beam weapon and a basic pursuit AI behavior; it’ll follow a target and fire at it until the target is destroyed. It’s simple, but it’s a start.
I’ve also started work on basic enemy torpedo behavior, where they’ll home in on a target and deal damage to whatever they impact. To go along with this, the players’ ships now can be told to switch to “defensive fire,” where they’ll forgo a specific target in favor of firing at the nearest enemy – including torpedoes.
This is exciting, because now the core gameplay loop is starting to emerge, and I can see how it can be fun. Positioning your fleet to defend your vulnerable civilian ships is exactly the sort of Battlestar Galactica-style space combat scenario I wanted to see emerge from this game, so it feels good to realize that the core gameplay loop will support it.
I’ve also set up a torpedo launcher for the frigate, to let it fire torpedoes periodically. The torpedoes subtract ammunition from the parent ship’s torpedo count, meaning even NPC ships can run out of torpedoes if a fight goes on long enough.
I also gave the ships regenerating shields. This is to help make beams less of a death sentence in fights of attrition; they’re perfectly accurate and deal reliable damage, so it’d be easy to experience a death of a thousand cuts after several beam range engagements. My thinking is that shields buy ships a few “free” beam hits, or one torpedo hit, before it starts dealing permanent damage that is harder to repair. I’ll need to set up some cool looking visual effects for shields; I don’t want to encase every ship in a bubble or film, but there should be some effects for shield impacts and when they recharge, in addition to the ships’ resource bars.
Next time, I’ll likely turn my attention to either the enemy fleet commander, or (more likely) start setting up some basic UI elements such as UI buttons and ship resource counter bars for hull, shields, etc.
Evan Parry 