Last week has been somewhat difficult productivity wise. We’ve all been preoccupied with other projects, and so creation has somewhat been slow. That doesn’t mean we’re empty handed though!

New Shields

Lane introduced you to augments last time. The bulk of our work has been in making augments, but we’ve also introduced a new mechanism that ships can use.

Shields protect a player (or miniboss/boss, possibly) from damage for a duration. They also have a set amount of damage, shown on your health bar, that they can take. Once its damage limit has been reached, the shield breaks and your ship takes regular damage again. Think of a shield from a game like League of Legends; that’s pretty much how shields work here.

Augments and Other Parts

With this addition, we’ve added a few tentative parts as experiments. These may not be in the final game, but they’re definitely proofs of concept.

Panic Button – Augment
• -25 health
• Large, long lasting shield is deployed when the player reaches 20% of their total health.
• Useful for beginner players, or those player who like to take large risks.

Energy Chalice – Augment
• Energy regeneration is increased based on the amount of energy your ship is missing.
• Regeneration scales based on the amount of missing health, not a percentage (missing 200 energy will increase regen twice as much as missing 100 energy).

Shell Shot – Cannon
• Provides the player with a shield when the player stops shooting after a period of time.
• Lower rate of fire and range, but damaging bullets

Bloodlust – Augment
• Ship is healed a very small amount each time the player hits a target.

As you can see, adding in the ability to make an augment or add a shield to players gives us more design space to work with. Shields in particular are very useful effects for tanks. Keep in mind, a player can add as many augments as his/her ship has room for, so feel free to experiment!