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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