Greetings Pilots! First phase of polish is underway, delivering improvements and fixes to longer-standing issues and reworking some of the UI elements to have a better kick to them. Due to the nature of these updates, showcases will be a bit drier. To combat this, I have made the decision to supplement these devlogs with my thoughts on how well the project is moving along and a more detailed look at what to expect in future additions. So without further ado, let's get started!

The very first topic I would like to direct your attention to is a certain byproduct created by unstable reactor systems on ships, motivated by continuous projectile impacts. Explosions have always been a feature I wanted to implement just right, especially for larger craft to really give them that sense of a large, powerful lumbering mass going down in a final blaze of glory. I am happy to announce that I am getting very close to achieving this, as shown in the video below:

Do bear in mind that I have made a few more corrections in time of 0.2.2's release, so those  excessive amount of shockwave effects in the first example have been curbed. Another thing of note is the fact that these blasts are rather harmless at the moment, but don't expect that to be the case forever.

Heck, don't expect 'engine wash' to not be a thing either...

Moving on, key AI capital ships are once again back in action, thanks to a round of bugfixes. This includes the previously mentioned issue where in missions they did not show up at all, leaving nothing but a trail of smaller ships confusingly defending something that didn't exist. Actually, let me rephrase that: missions actually did spawn them as intended, however whenever the player made a jump, said craft were assigned to a non-persistent table, where a script deleted them. Other corrections include oddities with space traffic after jumping in and pilotable capital ships not displaying cargo bays properly (which currently can mostly be used for trading). Full changelog is displayed below.

Although the free play mode of the game is far from bug-free, I feel that I have to sooner, rather than later address the elephant in the room regarding how the game presents itself. Namely the user interface, which I must admit, is something I have been struggling with for a better part of this project's development. Simply put, it's quite messy, rather unintuitive and is something a player would have to deal with at the very beginning of the game which is not a good way to leave with a decent first impression.
Therefore I have come up with a plan to redo the entire ship store and loadout. The two will be merged and will retain both functions in one place. Drag-and-drop functionality will play a bigger part in the management of ships, and that will hopefully make wing editing smooth. There will be way less text (which will be reserved for stats) and the help menu will be less invasive when the tutorial is enabled. Adding saveable loadouts is another idea I came up with, but is not the focus right now. Ultimately for this month's work, everything about the old system will be phased out and will be replaced by something visual, which I am sure will be way more helpful with introducing the preparation phase of the game.

Beyond that, the free play mode in its current shape is perhaps too broad and will need something narrower to showcase the game's core systems. Adding a simple "instant action" featuring dogfighting would fit as a start and further scenarios would help. In either case, it's an idea for a later release.

Finally, the current changelog:

04.02.2019 - Prototype ver. 0.2.2:
Additions:
⦁    Added freighter and frigate as pilotable ships
⦁    Replaced older explosion effects
⦁    Capital ships properly break apart when destroyed
Fixes/Corrections:
⦁    Menu buttons now have more feedback
⦁    Main menu is now navigable with movement keys/d-pad
⦁    Delete option in saved profile's list no longer separated in a horribly clumsy fashion
⦁    Fixed capital ships not showing up in missions
⦁    Fixed space traffic not jumping in properly
⦁    Fixed bindable keys not showing up in main menu's settings
⦁    Fixed initial stutter when selecting capital ships in store
⦁    Fixed cargo bays not showing up on capital craft
⦁    Fixed out-of-sector combat from attacking and brutally disintegrating player fleet

Thank you for reading! See you next month!