As you may have noticed, there was no Friday-night release, this evening. We have several major projects working in parallel, most notably the Station Conquest system (hopefully in early testing next week) and the re-working of NPC behaviours (improving the static bots). Neither project is ready for release yet.
In times like this, it usually falls to me to generate something new to release towards the end of the week. A new item drop or other bit of content, something that can be added on short notice. This week, however, I was kept busy creating the
new company website, which publicly debuted a few minutes ago. It does not have much content that was not already present on the old site, but has a bit more updated design, and there are plans for a lot more relevant content there in the future. It isn't really "finished" yet (is anything? ever?), but it was good enough for me to put online and drop in to replace the old website. I could understand if people would think my time would be better spent in other areas than doing a website redesign (like improving the game), but for the moment I'll just say that it is important to future plans. Plus, all of our other development resources
are being applied directly to significant gameplay improvements, which should hopefully bear fruit within the not-too-distant future.
We are still shooting for our
station conquest during the month of January goal, and it still appears realistic at this time. We'll see how things shake out next week when we get into first-generation development testing. A few tidbits about the implementation:
* You can expect to see several new conquest-specific stations added in grayspace.
* Defeating the defenses of these stations (disabling all the turrets, for now) will allow the first person to dock to take control of the station, initiating the
key system for authentication and access control.
Other features will come along in due course. We're mostly trying to make things fundamentally
work for now, and handle all the unusual edge cases (like "what happens when someone is disconnected after they conquer a station and dock, but before they define a key?" Answer: a key is auto-generated for them.. so on and so forth).
That's all for now. Have a great weekend, everyone!
-Incarnate