What’s changed?

This update brings a range of minor but significant changes. The focus of this last update was more along the lines of tying up various loose ends rather than implementing new core features. With all that out of the way, here’s the list of relevant changes:

• Fixed various bugs with how the enemy detects the player’s proximity.
• Made the enemy spawn in later in the game to help enhance pacing (this is subject to change).
• Fixed an audio issue with the enemy.
• Finished up adding code to support the current roster of score types.
• Added a sound effect for when the ship hits micro meteor clouds, though this effect will likely be updated in the future.

I hope these changes enhance the experience of playing the game. Let me know what you think! As always, please feel free to report bugs in the bug thread if you find any.

What’s on the horizon?

I’m gearing up to begin work on more significant game mechanics such as implementing the story or reworking the maintenance system in the near future. That said, there are a number of smaller changes that could come earlier and may have a relatively outsized impact on the gameplay experience.

For example, I can probably relatively easily change the way that imbalanced ship systems cause the run to fail such that it is substantially less frustrating and surprising when they fail. I may also be able to rebalance the maintenance system to reduce the ease of cheesing it and make it more engaging. That said, I think the maintenance system needs to be overhauled before it is truly interesting. Let me know what you think about these easy changes.

The big changes that I’m starting to look at are these:

• Beginning to implement the story of the game.
• Rebuilding the maintenance system to make it more interesting.

I’m inclined to start with the story of the game first because I think it will be a little easier to implement and will go a long way towards improving the game’s replayability. On the other hand, the maintenance system is in my experience truly boring and in dire need of significant upgrades. The downside of this is that making the maintenance system interesting will require a lot of trial and error and a lot of fiddling with various settings, so it will likely take quite a bit of time to get right. What do you think of all these changes? Which would you like to see as soon as possible? Let me know what you think.