DevBlog #17 - Let's expand our ship!

We've been working on furthering our building mechanisms this first month of 2018. As we have started to get a better feel for the different systems in our game we have also started to think more about the real core of the game. One thing we knew we wanted to have was the expansion of a ship, being able to expand your base and get more room for new buildings is essential for any good building game! We thought about different approaches to this, but in the end we wanted to try to have it as free as possible and let the player design his own ship from the hull up.



We ran into a pretty tricky problem since being in space means the hull walls should be kept intact when expanding, otherwise very important gases like oxygen and temperature will leak out and kill the crew! Also, in its current state our game differs from Spacebase DF-9 by not having the inner walls be the same as the outer hull walls. Because of this we had some issues but fortunately we managed to solve them. The screenshot above has a small "possible size of ship" - limit, so don't worry about that.

Check out the short video above of how a ship hull is expanded by its crew! (Might take a little while for the video to start playing, or try clicking on video)

Expansion of hull now works like this:

• You are free to expand your ship hull as you wish by using a tile based view mode.
  
• You can drag a new area to be hull.
  
• Your crew members will take a building block with them and go through the air lock with space suits and jet packs to build the new hull block by block.
  
• The hull wall is expanded outward as enough blocks are completed to create a new space.
  
• Your crew members will finish by cleaning up the scaffolding boxes placed when building the new hull section.
  
• You are now free to build new facilities in the new space!
  

All of this means that you will be able to build ships of all kinds of shapes and forms, making them as wonky as you might want or as realistic to a real space ship as you want. It's up to you. Obviously we have in mind that a lot of building decisions would come from the mechanics happening inside the ship, the gas/temperature etc. simulations and how facilities need certain conditions to operate optimally.

Graphics, animations and functionality is still a bit unpolished so expect it to become even better! We haven't yet had time to make some type of building tool for the characters, so now they are simply tinkering with their hands in the air to build something.

Above is some bonus footage. We have also started to work on some animations for our facilities. Just some small animations to make the insides of the ship look more alive!

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Have the spaceships just one floor?

@Ailab.

Multiple floors would be cool but there is a problem related to that. Namely, when you want to know what is going on at all times switching between floors becomes a hassle. For example: If you have a fire going on at one floor, a crew combat going on at another, and an accident going on at a third floor it would be really cumbersome to manage all those situation switching between floors.

This looks beautiful!! great job. Can't wait to try it out.

I couldn't find any forums talking about your stack. What engine are you using? Programming languages? Dev environment... Please if you could let us know. I am a developer my self but yet never tried anything with video games. I am tho, especially interested in the isometric graphics just like yours. So would love to hear about your stack.

Would appreciate any input. and hey! best of luck can't wait for this game to be out

@MachbooSS.

Space Haven is developed using the LibGDX game engine, although you could say that we have built our own engine on top of it during the years. It's based on Java. Additionally, we use Blender to render sprites from models our graphic artist creates. We then have our own development platform that we have built to allow us to make animations and other content.

The setting we use is probably quite far from being the easiest to learn and develop with, but since it was the one we started with and our main programmer has become so prominent with it, it makes sense for us. For you, I would recommend Unity, unless Java is something you really want to use as well.

@Ailab.

Multiple floors would be cool but there is a problem related to that. Namely, when you want to know what is going on at all times switching between floors becomes a hassle. For example: If you have a fire going on at one floor, a crew combat going on at another, and an accident going on at a third floor it would be really cumbersome to manage all those situation switching between floors.

One way to combat that is have a quick alarm button on the side of the screen alerting you to those situations. I recall that one or more games have done that in the past, although I can't remember which one(s) (actually, Fallout 4 notified the user of a settlement being attacked. If you don't want them to be clickable, you could also just have a banner or flashing icon notifying the event.

Unless, you are just saying this would be too cumbersome to manage all at once. Which would make sense because I, for one, am a horrible multi-tasker!

Wow. This looks incredible.

This is looking so awesome! I love that how I feel is what I can do. That is, do I feel like commanding a space port today, I pull up BattleVoid. Do I feel like commanding a fleet? Harbinger. How about more detailed Sector Warfare!? Sector Siege.

And now, to be able to be a captain of a ship itself, managing all the resources!? I'm so excited!

I quickly poked around, but did not see this question answered recently. Is this still planned to be cross platform as your other games? I've got my finger over my Google Play BUY button!! I'm really excited!

@ironhead65.

Yes, we are developing and striving to have it cross-platform. The biggest issue is the screen size of the device and therefore phones are a bit of a question mark at the moment. Since we do not have the whole game clear yet (As in how big the ship can be in the end etc.) it's hard to say how things will go. Obviously we would like to support everything but we will see. PC is obviously fine and tablets should be fine as well.

Lol "as realistic to a real space as you want"...cause, you know, there are so many real spaceships...
Kidding aside love how the development is going. I look forward to some possible alpha/beta testing