It’s been a few weeks since an update, but I have some definitely interesting things to talk about! This update covers a few new mission and spawner options I’ve created for some new content I will also be discussing! Keep reading to find out more!
A few weeks ago there was what I thought was a rather good suggestion about how it makes a lot of sense to move some tutorial elements into the low level custom dungeons like Arctia and Vulcan. I really liked this idea. It really does make sense to not over-stuff the Nexus with EVERYTHING like slaves, drones, classes, et cetra, and I think places like Arctia and Vulcan really could use fleshed out a bit. Yes, they’re both excellent custom dungeon zones to help acclimate the player to the kill minion -> kill boss -> scoop loot -> repeat flow a lot of content in the game has, but I felt they could do a bit more depth and character.
So, I came hit upon the idea of doing a small expansion to Arctia focused on bringing a few tutorial elements into play to not only further establish the lore and character of the zone, but to help explain one of the most interesting and exciting features of Star Sonata; ship capture.
We have a bit of a ship capture tutorial already in place in the Blue Empire of the Prism Color Empires zone, but I really thought we could use a more involved tutorial utilizing all the new features we added for Nexus 3.0. However, even with the bounty of new mission options, I was still missing a few to make this tutorial really work. There were a few missing things.
Firstly, I wanted to make sure the ship the player captures for the tutorial was easy to capture. I wanted it to be a derelict that couldn’t move, couldn’t fight back. It would just sit there and let the player capture it. Currently, players are unable to capture an AI without an engine, and if they could, it would be stuck, dead in space. So to remedy this, I’ve added a new spawner option called “Spawn Derelict”. When this flag is turned on it will mark the ship as a ‘derelict’. When it’s time for capture, any ship flagged as a derelict will override the controlbots engine check and if the capture is successful, it will add a Coalfurnance engine to the captured ship. That solved the first problem I had.
The second problem was with how I would actually have a tutorial mission verify the capture. Currently, missions like the Merchant Trader Goods or the ones in the Blue Empire have the player return an item that can only be obtained via capturing a ship. This is an obvious work around for the fact that we didn’t have an actual mission goal to capture a ship. So, I’ve added one. It works almost identically to the Kill mission goal currently in game, with the exception that it tracks when you successfully capture a ship with a conversion device.
Finally, in order to make the tutorial missions as straightforward as possible, I knew I needed one additional feature. I’ve expanded the Kill mission goal so it now includes an option to specify the damage type of the kill. Obviously, in the context I am initially using it, I am instructing the player to kill the ship they are to capture with Radiation damage. However, going forward I can see many different uses for this!
With all of these new mission features in play, I’ve been able to create a brief, but very involved tutorial mission chain to Arctia that supplies the player with a Prismatic Conversion and instructs them on how to properly use it. At the latest, you should see it implemented with the next universe reset, but I’ll see about getting it in sooner!
That’s it for this update, feel free to post feedback to the forums! I’ll be back again when I have something else new and exciting to share! Until then!
