Space Shipyard - Space Battles FTL's Style

[KSGuills]

Take in consideration that the following footage is made by a bunch of programmers doing our best as artist, it doesn't represent the final product we want to achieve, it is just a placeholder for what is to come.
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Hi! I'm Guillermo Andrade and since last year I have been developing Space Shipyard a game that combines the core mechanics of FTL but using them in new environments like multiplayer and different game modes, in a simpler way, a game highly inspired by FTL:Faster Than Light but with more features and content.

For those that do not know, FTL's mechanics comprehends the management of the ship crew to repair and assist your ship systems, handling the ship's energy distribution and weapon system while battling other ships.

The main functionality of Space Shipyard is to allow the players to fight each other in a Ranked or Casual Online Multiplayer in a one versus one setup while also letting them play with the ship they created using the Ship Assembly.

Space Shipyard - Play Test

Versus Screen

Space Shipyard - Ship Creation

Space Shipyard - Ship Build

Color Variation

But it doesn't end there.

We know the importance of having access to a singleplayer, we incorporated a Singleplayer Campaign inspired on Star Fox which will be dynamically generated each time you wish to play it, with different game modes and many boss fights.

Between the game modes we have:

• Standard Mode - Standard  FTL run.
• Origin Mode - Play our Story Arc. Build your ship as you progress through the story while increasing in size and capabilities.
• Boss Rush - Sequential fight of each race flagship.
• Co-op - WIP

What do we mean by size and capabilities?

In Space Shipyard you start with a ship you created given some limitations and in order to improve it, you would have to add structural nodes to it, this nodes increase the functionality of the system it is attached to while unlocking abilities and skills from a tech tree.
(Check the Ship Assembly - Build video for a better reference)

Basic Skill Tree

• Skill S.MBR.
• Skill Shield Overcharge
• Skill Cloak
• Skill Enhanced HUD

This nodes are used by your crew as pathway, structural planning is important, you want to interconnect everything otherwise your crew won't be able to reach the system and repair it, but at the same time you don't want to create a cluster of nodes because they are vulnerable to AOE attacks.

Cluster or Not? That is the question.

Redundancy is Always Best!

As you know, space is not a void, but instead it has many scenarios like hyper active suns, charged nebulous and many others cataclysmic events, some may overheat your ship, others may freeze it or even disrupt your electrical system, here are a few:

Nebulous

Fire & Ice

Most importantly, we want to create a Community Driven Game, we want to add more contents using community polls so we can develop a game made by and for the community, we could focus our resource expanding the singleplayer campaign if that's what the community looks for or we could invest our time in creating more weapons, skills or even races and ships. Your opinion is very important to us.
The idea of the Community Poll is to allow the players to weight their preferences and vote, this grants us the ability to create a priority queue which we can use to decided what to develop based on the community needs.

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TL;DR SUMMARY

Space Shipyard, a game that uses FTL's game mechanics in new environments.

* Online Multiplayer – Fight one versus one using the ship you built and the loadout you desire!
* Singleplayer Campaign - A procedurally generated singleplayer campaign inspired on Star Fox. Travel between sectors of different races, playing different games modes and battling many bosses to complete the story arc.
* Ship Assembly - Customize the creation of your ship by using different parts, setting weapons positions, handling what would be airlocks and what walls and also customize graphical aspects of your ship like weapon colors and hull colors.
* Fileless - There is no need to transfer ship files from on game to another in order to play online with a newly created ship.
* Dynamic Gameplay - Every match will be different, there are many possibilities for every match, everybody will create their own ship and use their own loadout and the battle environment constantly changes.
* Community Driven Game - Vote for what you want us to do next, we will create a priority queue and do our best to satisfy you all!

END - Early feedback is always the best, if you want to see more, check our social networks and if you wish to know more, don't hesitate to ask!!!

[Glaurung]

Welcome to Exilian, Guillermo! I'm not much of a gamer myself, but the game graphics already look pretty good to me. Best of luck with developing it.

[KSGuills]

Thank you! We are doing our best to show the style we want to achieve. On the other hand, this game is about 80% done from the code perspective, we are more into the asset development right now!

[Jubal]

Lovely stuff - welcome to Exilian and I hope you stick around

So do the heat/cold/nebula type effects just affect specific battles randomly? If not, how do they turn up/how are they decided on?

(Also, this appeared just in time for me to start writing our next monthly newsletter, good job!)

[KSGuills]

Hi Jubal!
When you are on the multiplayer aspect of the game, every match may have a random battle stage, instead on the singleplayer campaign, you travel by using a mini-map, so you decide which path to take, but each path has their pros and cons.

Depending on the battle stage, some may affect the player at random others have continuous effects, for example, freezing is a continuous effect while the nebulous will target the players at a known pattern, if you had the time to study the pattern while you were fighting you can exploit it for your benefit!

[Jubal]

Sounds good! How are the different races/bosses represented? Is that reflected in the tech tree somehow or is it mostly a visual difference?

Got a writeup done in the newsletter
http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5045.0

[KSGuills]

Thanks for mentioning Space Shipyard in the newsletter!

The tech tree is created depending on what systems your ship has, since every race have a unique system, they can unlock a special tree branch.

Right now we do not have more than 1 race, but the idea is that each race should have their own crew member, ship style, unique system and ability. Also they will have a unique behavior, some may focus on destroy you, while others will target your vital systems to suffocate your crew and steal your ship.

[Jubal]

No problem; we tend to put out newsletter content & social media stuff as we get updates in people's threads, we're always happy to signal-boost future updates, releases etc too:)

Sounds good - I look forward to hearing more! Do you have much idea about the sorts of timescales you're looking at with this in the next bit looking towards beta versions etc?

[KSGuills]

The beta is quite a problematic topic because since we are making our own assets, being programmers we are just turtles at it. We got enough assets to release a demo of the ship assembly but it is not the main gameplay, at least we can show some planned features!
Luckily FTL is a good reference for gameplay.
About the demo, in a week or two we should be releasing it !

[Jubal]

Ah, awesome - look forward to having a go with the demo

[KSGuills]

Hey guys!
Back with an update, this time bringing a demo of the Ship Assembly (Where you create your ships prior to fighting or to make in-game upgrades and modifications), check it out! Make as many ships as you want !
And please share your creations with us, we want to see what everybody can do!


This is not the main gameplay of Space Shipyard but it is a start!

[KSGuills]

[Jubal]

Excellent, I'll have a look soon and get some feedback to you

[KSGuills]

Awesome! and Thank You!

[Jubal]

Feedback!

Generally the system works well, I built four ships and enjoyed having a play around with it

I think some of the below is probably because I'm unfamiliar with the system, and of course so far I can't combat-test anything so I'm not sure if most of my designs are any good, but even so, some thoughts...

• Help page spellchecks: translate not traslate on the first one, inner doors "establish" rather than "established" the crew pathing, and at the end rollback "will delete" rather than "will deletes" current progress
• Some error messages have adyacent when you mean adjacent
• I don't know if you're going to want to keep the same error message style when e.g. placing rooms incorrectly, but if you do, ensure they give an english readout rather than just the codename for the error!
• It's not clear *why* you can't have multiple rooms of the same type, and it's not clear whether it's OK to require crew to move through a room (as opposed to a corridor) to reach parts of the ship.
• Not being able to put bulkhead doors within inside corridors seems odd.
• The game is unusually heavy on system resources for some reason on my laptop - my fan had to shift up several gears while I was playing.
• There are a few bits of the interface where I still don't know what they do, most obviously the vertical bar with three blobs on the first screen that's near to the help button.

I'll get some screenshots and post what I've made so far if that'd be helpful