Week #3 is here! We keep making good progress towards the private beta. Currently, the plan is to have a playable version of the game for folks to test by November 12.
Fog of War
We really doubled down on adding improvements to various aspects of the fog of war mechanic.

First, we added partial fog to areas that have been previously explored by the player. For example, if you used to control a star that was later re-taken by the enemy, you'll still see that region of the star system with the star in it. The region will be translucent and it won't show any upgrades to the star structures that the new owner made.
Second, we added a new type of star structurea space radarthat allows you to increase uncovered fog of war area around the star. Consequently, we reduced the initial fog of war radius for all stars.
Star Details UI
We added several major improvements to the star details panel:
- Whenever the resource or energy limit is reached, the corresponding number is highlighted in red.
- A new notification system was added across the whole game with some actions generating messages above player's stars. You'll see those messages when a structure is built or upgraded, when the enemy captures your star, and when your attack succeeds or fails.
- When the player zooms in on a star the panel scales correctly without looking huge at maximum zoom.

These changes turned out to be disproportionally beneficial to how the gameplay feels. For the first time ever, I was truly sucked into the process of playing the game during one of the playtesting session :).
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to work on:
- Improving the supernova mechanics and new star generation.
- Random map generator UI.
- AI improvements.
- Balancing more game mechanics.
Originally published on Vasinov Games.[ 2018-10-22 18:04:13 CET ] [ Original post ]