Part two of three of the overworld revamp is now out!

Random Events

Spawning

As stated in the roadmap, the big focus on this update was overhauling random events. Random events will now spawn in throughout the world, with a limit of one per system at a time. Like the rest of my game, I've designed things so that it's relatively easy to add random events by copying and pasting JSON files and have them automatically populate. To get things rolling, I added roughly 15 or so random events with corresponding dialogue files. I tried to get a good mix of different tones ranging from serious to silly since I want random events to represent a wide range of adventurous things one might find in the sector in an easily digestible format. These can include both combat encounters and dialogue only encounters, with various skill and reputation checks thrown in. Some of them still need work on the dialogue scripting side of things, but nothing too serious.

Events can also have a flag to indicate if they're one time use or not, so that you don't see some of the more "climactic" events happening over and over. Selecting which random event to use for a star system is also pretty extensible, and I can easily include more criteria over time such as the system's faction. I still need to make a significant number of events for each faction before a more complex spawner can meaningfully come into play, but that's less of a technical bottleneck and more of a content one, which I'm not as concerned with right now.

Signal Interference Static

I ended up going with a very subtle static effect, as it turns out it becomes mildly nauseating to do anything more visible than that.

Dialogue improvements

This update also included several improvements to the dialogue system.

Dynamic Object Generation and Context Switching

Generating fleets and destroyed fleets through dialogue is a lot less awkward now and I have more parameters for the generation including faction and size of fleet, with an additional flag for generating specific ships. It will also switch the currently spoken to object over to the newly created object, which was a small but very important step towards making random events more seamless to the player. Before this you were speaking to the random event rather than the things generated by it, so it was impossible to switch to speak to and fight a hostile fleet, which led to some silliness in the initial test random events where you'd run into a pirate fleet and nothing would happen.

The same functionality above also applies to crew generation. I can dynamically generate both random and unique crew during dialogue, which then allows for recruiting them or simply displaying a unique portrait. This is evident in the cryosleeper and sketchy merchant events.

Text Injections and Loot Through Dialogue

I've added the ability to add loot to the player's inventory directly using a loot table. I can also display this in the dialogue with the <last_loot> flag so the player knows what they got. It was already possible to add specific items to a player's inventory, but this allows for a random element.

Alongside the <last_loot> flag, I added in some other dialogue text injections. There's <day/month/year>, pretty self explanatory. There's also <crew_info> which displays a formatted text that includes the name, title, level, and perks of the currently spoken to crew member. Good for recruitment dialogues.

Global Dialogue Flags

Global dialogue flags can be set and checked, which will be good for any kind of dialogue choices I want to preserve, for instance during quest chains, crew interactions, or story stuff.

Fleet Skill Stuff

Added icons for fleet skills. Looks a lot nicer now imo

While working on that I also adjusted hullmods that provide fleet skills to add them based on ship size rather than a flat rate, which would otherwise overwhelming favor smaller ships.

More Crew Portraits

Added over a dozen new crew portraits. Mostly related to the mining guild faction, but there's a handful of others. I also reworked the naming convention of portraits to portrait_<faction>_<m/f/nb>_## as opposed to simply portrait_##. Makes it a lot less confusing to keep track of.

Misc Content

This wasn't meant to be a content heavy update aside from the promised fleet skill icons and various crew portraits, but I decided to sneak in some combat related stuff towards the end.

More weapons

I added in a handful of new weapons for the Marrock Ascendancy. While none of the weapons ingame are remotely balanced right now, they're intended to be heavy variants that pack a punch but have poor uptime either through ammo or heat inefficiencies. As a reminder, the Ascendancy likes to field large heavily armored ships with chonky weapons either for slow moving artillery boats or frontline brawlers. Being space knights, all the weapons are themed around medieval weaponry and castles.

Watchtower and Barbican Autocannons

Large and medium anti armor autocannons, respectively. Generate a ton of heat but will do serious damage to armor on unshielded ships.

Flail and Mace Heavy Burst Lasers

While I plan to have most lasers in Drifters be balanced by a mix of bad heat, range, or turn rate, the heavy lasers emphasize that even more. The flail and mace have a downright glacial turn rate, and are restricted by poor ammo capacity and ammo regen rates, which limit them to only a handful of opening volleys before needing to back off. This should play on the marrock's weakness of being slow moving with a ton of armor but poor uptime. I suspect these weapons will fare much better on ships with the mobility to properly utilize them as hit and run weapons, but that's up to the player to decide.

Ballista missile launcher

Pretty basic small slot launcher, only fires one slow missile at a time and doesn't replenish ammo.

Repair Platform and Repair Drones

Added in the humble repair platform ship as part of the mining guild faction. Comes with a unique built in repair drone hangar, which will slowly repair allied ships in battle. In return it has only a single weapon mount for missiles, with the expectation you'll use it for either back line support LRMs or anti fighter SRMs. The repair rate isn't super great, but being frigates they don't cost a ton to deploy. The repair platform also boosts fleet wide repair skill, naturally.

Closing

While certainly not perfect, overall I'm happy with the progress that this month brought. For the last 6-8 months random events have been sitting in the code and my design docs with a lot of technical requirements before I could make them into a proper game mechanic. Getting them to the state that they're in now has been a long string of "Nope can't do that yet. Gotta do this first" which was somewhat frustrating to keep running into. It's a good reminder to not get discouraged just because something isn't immediately feasible, and by carefully developing other parts of your game first you can eventually make those things achievable without compromising the overall pace of development.