This week’s update is going to be a little shorter and will cover some more upgrades and changes coming with the improved Nexus.
One of the main goals in reworking the Nexus was to improve flow and really give a new player a much better handle on the game. Recently, I just finished up two more mission goals to further augment the starting experience. The first of these is the use item goal. This mission goal is rather self-explanatory; it lets us specify an item the player has to use. The primary reason I added it was to showcase the starting super item on a new player’s Zebucart. Super items are extremely powerful for the low level player and can make their life easier so we felt it was definitely important to introduce them early. With the new use item mission goal we can easily do that now.
Secondly, I’ve added a docking goal so we can explicitly state to a player where they need to go. We can tell the player to dock places in mission text, but having a goal means we can plant a giant mission indicator over the base for the player to make a it a bit more obvious. We’ve been trying to remove as much docking as possible from the Nexus, but when we do want them to dock, we want to make sure a new player knows it and more importantly, where!
Other improvements have been made again with the UI functionality. Currently when you complete a mission that rewards an item, the game automatically opens up your main ship inventory. During our testing we noticed that it was a little annoying to always have to close your inventory when undocking, so the game also takes care of that for you now. This will only happen if the dialog was opened up by a mission though (so it won’t automatically close the inventory dialogs you open up yourself!).
That’s it for this week’s update! I’ll be back again with another update next week. Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!
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