I’ve rewritten the spawning system, so now you find other ships at particular locations. Previously (as some of you figured out) I just flung them in from off screen to maintain a population and present an appropriate level of challenge. Now you have to go find it. This change is interesting, it’s had a pretty big impact on the game, and I think it’s nearly finished… but it makes for a terrible screenshot.

Something else I did, which I’m hoping will excuse this image, was build a little air timer app for my phone. Accelerometers are affected by gravity, so using them to read anything other than the orientation of a static or constantly moving object is quite difficult. Luckily this means they’ll only ever read 0 when in freefall, and as a snowboarder this is something I’m quite interested in. Now, thanks to the Android Scripting Environment, I can throw my phone up in the air, catch it, then hear a robotic voice report how long my phone was airborne. In a couple of weeks I’ll stuff my phone into my jacket pocket, and it will tell me how long I am airborne. I’m tempted to have it also reports impacts, but if I land on my head I’m not sure I’ll want to hear about it from a robotic voice in my pocket.

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My w finger got tired

This is a good example of how I work. Once upon a time people made games by writing a giant document describing every aspect of a game, then handing that document over to a team to implement. I don’t do that. Instead I start with a vague idea of how a game should work, then get the core features running as soon as possible. Once I’m able to play something I’m much better able to judge what works, what doesn’t work, and what might work. Case in point: Cruise control. Exploring is interesting, but it means moving forwards a lot more than in previous episodes. My forwards finger started to hurt, so I added what in most MMOs would be called autorun. I probably wouldn’t have covered that within the deep dark depths of a design document.

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TONK TONK

Captain Barada taps the top left corner of her VDU.

Hmm. I should restock oxygen while I’m here. No good exploring without a full tank. I’ll jot down this station’s coordinates too, so I can cut back when I need another breath.

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I didn’t put this station here. This station put itself here. I shut the game down and started again, and it was still here.

For the technically inclined: I added a seeded pseudo random number generator to the project, since the standard flash random function isn’t seeded. This allows me to randomly generate a world, then later generate the same world just by feeding the random functions the same seed value. I can also generate a completely different world by starting from a different seed value. This has some pretty cool potential.
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On the left is the first ever sketch of a command module (which was later revised). The middle sheet shows a few iterations of Captain Successor modules, and on the right are some thoughts on how stations might anchor themseleves in space. These usually change once I get them in game, especially in regards to animation. Still, nothing beats a pad of graph paper and a felt tip pen for testing ideas.

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