So last week I got ahead of myself saying this thing was basically ready and all I needed to focus on going forward was content and media. Yeah, I was clearly blind or tired because there's still a lot missing.
I had a sort of crisis at the start of the week as while I was play testing it I realised the game just didn't feel right. The combat is wonky and unbalanced, the orbit mechanics aren't fun, the ring designing is confusing and boring, the resource management is too complicated and I genuinely thought this might just be a comlpete waste of time. But I do believe in my vision for this. And I believe my vision is fun.
So I'm sticking at it, I just need to go back to prototyping alternative systems and find the fun of my vision.
The first thing I'm doing is stripping out the ring design system and starting again. I've redesigned the supporting structure graphics so that the ring is now ring shaped.
Secondly I've got rid of "segments" and "modifiers" as this was confusing to explain to people. So now we just have parts. Rather than being limited to 5 segments and 4 modifier, you can now put as many parts as you can fit or afford on the ring.
The key word there is afford. When you start the game you will have a credit of design points - each part costs points to implement on your ring. This is to stop you just putting all the parts on the ring. Each time you play through - whether you die or complete the game - you will slightly increase your desig credit AND you will also unlock new parts to use.
Placing the parts is also more fun with the parts dropping into place around the edge of the ring - it's not ground breaking, but it makes the designing process nicer.
Appart from implementing this, I've been converting the existing segment and modifier images to the new system.
The next thing I want to re-tackle is the orbit physics but that'll be after my holiday.