February 2023 Game Update

As planned, this update was relatively light on actual content. The primary focus was enhancing the dialogue code and systems directly related to it, but I was able to sneak in some other things towards the end which will bleed into next month's update.

More importantly, this marks the first anniversary of Drifter's development. The repository was created roughly on Jan 30th of 2022, and was just a little tech demo where you controlled a steering-behavior ship by clicking. Of course, things have come very far since then. Game development is a very slow and at times demoralizing process, so I find it's important to celebrate successes and milestones where one can. Here's to many more years of Drifters!

Dialogue Improvements

I reworked the dialogue system to be able to seamlessly handle multiple dialogue files on top of each other. This backend improvement was central to a lot of features this update.

Building onto that, I've added in a dialogue module for selecting crew members. Paired with the above you can be prompted to select a crew member, then dynamically load a new conversation using that crew member's given dialogue files. This will be super useful for anything involving talking to NPCs outside of your fleet's crew.

Arena System

As promised I've added in an arena system. It works about as you'd expect. You go to a station's arena and fight using premade fleets in simulated fights to earn credits and reputation. Most arena fights will only give rewards once, but the fights themselves can be repeated as many times as you want.

Crew Improvements

Crew Recruitment    

Crew can be recruited at stations now. Each month a station will generate 0-3 crew members. These crew can be hired for a sign on fee. In the future they will also have a monthly cost to keep them. Both the sign on fee and the monthly cost scale with their level. They also have the chance to contain unique crew members, see below.

Faction Random Crew Generation and Unique Crew

Factions have been expanded on to be able to produce their own faction specific crew. Each can have their own name and portrait pools to choose from, further adding flavor to each faction.

I've added support for developer made unique crew members as well. Marked by a gold outline, only one instance of these crew should exist at a time per save. They can support their own special skills, portraits, and dialogue as defined by unique_crew files. Each faction has their own pool of unique crew members, once again giving a reason to interact with each faction on a regular basis.

Crew Portraits

I finally got around to adding in some proper placeholder portraits for crew. I spent a lot of time setting up and wrangling AI generators for the main faces, before smoothing out blemishes, adding secondary features and recoloring in post. By down-scaling into a more pixel art resolution, I was able to remove what what otherwise be very unattractive artifacts as a result of the AI generation and my shoddy craftsmanship. I found it also just fit well with the aesthetic I was going for, though the exact resolution(currently 32x32 in a 128x128 file) is yet to be determined.

Pictured Above: Marrock, Kleptocracy, and AFG crew members

There's only around a dozen or so right now, but with this process I can cheaply churn out many more in the future as I continue to refine the look of the game. Which also frees up a lot of time and resources that can be spent building out the core functionality. Once the project is more mature I intend to recruit an actual artist, but for now this is a huge step up for my content pipeline as a solo programmer with minimal art skills and a small budget.

Also no more creepy thispersondoesnotexist people, yay! Bob was staring into my soul every time I worked on anything crew related. Now he's only in our nightmares, where he belongs.

Goodbye, my sweet prince.

Loot Tables and Industries

Alongside the dialogue system, a significant back-end overhaul was done for how the game handles item generation. As alluded to last month, I've added in loot tables. They simply define a set of buckets, each bucket containing an item, a weighted probability, and a min and max amount. From there you pass it an inventory and how many buckets you want to generate and it handles the nitty gritty details. I've already refactored derelict stations and markets to use them, and they can be applied to many other aspects of the game.

I've also added in the very basic groundwork for industries. Similar to starsector, these can be attached to planet and station markets. Each industry currently has a loot table and 3 levels of input quality (bad/neutral/good). Higher input quality will result in more rolls for items, and vice versa. Currently I'm using a crafting system of sorts where fleets will physically simulate items and bring them back to stations where hardcoded functions at those stations convert the items. I quickly realized that I disliked such a mechanic and will be moving away from it, though I suspect this will take many iterations to get right.

The plan is to eventually have it handled in a more abstract sense, where say killing a mining fleet attached to a station will temporarily lower the mining related industry qualities for that system and possibly adjacent ones. One of my design philosophies is to favor easily understood abstractions over highly complex and obtuse simulation, and the economics of Drifters factors heavily into that.

Random Events

...Didn't get done. Upon attempting to work on them I was reminded why they were put off for so long. Still need some other things before I can give them a proper pass, so for now they're shelved again.

Jump Points

I got a little bit ahead of myself and worked on some of next month's features. Oops :)

Jump points are located on the edge of star systems, allowing your fleet to do an FTL jump between adjacent systems. To compare them to relays: Relays use credits, are instantaneous across a medium distance, are rarer and exist only in civilized areas, require good faction standing, and don't care about fleet composition. Jump points on the other hand consume fuel, take time to traverse a short distance, exist in all systems, don't factor in faction rep, and take into account fuel economy.

The main design difference I'm trying to invoke with the two is that relays make traveling friendly areas with slow bulky fleets highly favorable, and can also save a ton of time if you need to get somewhere quickly. On the other hand jump points are great for neutral or enemy territory, and favor nimble efficient fleets, but require more planning to move about the sector. A good captain will use a mix of both to get the job done.

FYI I was channeling a bit of Sins of a Solar Empire mixed with FTL: Faster than Light on this one. Both excellent space games.