Annoucing the official Loadstar Discord server - https://discord.gg/bGPab7CXxp
Before I could add crew, I wanted the interior of the ship to be made up of individual rooms with doors rather than a grid of individual parts. This means the game has to be smart enough to group similar parts together into a single room and surround it with walls. It also ensures that there are enough doors so that the crew can reach every point on the ship, and adds a console to each room that needs one so that the crew can operate it.
Automatically adjusting the layout as parts are added
The existing ship layouts gave me a problem because some classes of ship had several separate islands of part slots - no good for the crew to walk between unless they want to do a space walk! I also realised that there wasn't a bridge, a room where the captain can boldly go. I solved both at once by adding a new ship part, the helm. Each ship class comes with a single helm part preinstalled and which cannot be removed. I added this where the canopy was on all the ship art and this "bridges" the gap between the different islands at the same time!
The new helm part unites separate parts of the ship
Of course, the main event, I added crew manipulation to Loadstar and along the way I had to figure out path finding and animation. Rooms which contain a console can be worked on by a crew member in order to give a boost to that room's performance.
Helm and Thrusters -> improves evasion
Shields, Weapons and Point Defence -> improves recharge speed.
Early prototyping of crew pathfinding and room editing
Alternatively, crew members can repair damaged systems. This also meant it no longer made sense to make the player pay for systems to be repaired in space dock so now parts auto repair after combat. Crew members gain skills as they work, levelling up and gaining better bonuses as they progress so you can have an elite pilot or a weapons expert on board.
Piloting the ship and fixing some damage
I want to recreate the feel you have in games like Elite or Sid Meier's Pirates! that you are the captain of the ship rather than a disembodied observer controlling the crew like pawns. To achieve this I decided that at the start of the game you will have a crew of one, yourself. You can choose your character's name and appearance and off you go into the black. If your character dies, the game ends.
But as you progress, you can take on extra crew by adding Crew Quarters parts to your ship. You can then recruit new crew from a local Tavern while in spacedock. Recruits have randomly generated names and apprearances along with a set of skills and an expected wage.
As the career aspects of Loadstar develop I'm planning to find new ways to incorporate the crew into the setting, like rumours, backstories, homeworlds, vendettas to bring the world to life.
With crew manipulation in the game, combat is really starting to feel interesting with plenty of decision points and strategies to discover. I think it's time to turn my focus away from combat and crew and look at the context in which combat happens. So next up I'm going to get hyperspace working and look at adding traffic to the solar system to replace the current, Final Fantasy like random encounters.
Thanks for reading and see you in the next devlog!
