Its been a slow stretch lately, when it comes to visuals. I mostly have been making tweaks to the game so it flows smoother, looking into making a S-corp, as well as Finding Programmers and other artists. I also am finding ways to implement Flotilla attacks, but haven't found the best answer.
To clarify, the issue with the flotilla not attacking is that if two players are in battle, but no one has any vessels, or just one doesn't have any vessels, then how can you defend yourself? Since you cant deploy more vessels in a flotilla that is in battle you still need means to attack, until you can get some kind of upgrade or trap. The new implementation will allow flotilla to do something, but right now we aren't sure what it should do. We want to make each flotilla within each faction to do something different.
For example, Humans may shoot with their battle ship, draw cards with their resource ship and civilian ship. On the other hand Machines can deploy a 1/1 vessel with their civilian ship, shoot with their battleship and draw with their resource ship.
Obviously that is just an example and doesn't reflect our final decision, as we have not come up with an answer.
Once we figure that out it will make battles more engaging for the player, as they will always have multiple choices to choose from, while also not feeling overly weak.
What about finding programmers and Artists?
First off, I have been talking to various people and trying to get them to help out. I put a wanted ad on reddit and found two awesome guys. Both are programmers and expressed interest in helping the game reach its next stage in development. If all goes well we will have a playable version on our computers very shortly. More on this to come.
I also have talked to a few artists and asked if they would help out. Most of them declined as they currently have no stable jobs or are swamped with work. Since I can't pay them it would be crazy to assume they would just jump on board only because they liked the game idea. I have, however, found some people to do various things from modeling, texturing and particles. The thing they must first do, before helping me, is learn to use Blender, which is the 3D program I use to model all my stuff. It is a free program, for those of you who don't know it. It also, kicks ass. 3DS Max and Maya have nothing on blender, and the fact that blender is free already makes the idea of using any other program nearly unthinkable.
Lastly, I have been modeling a bunch so I could have something to show every one. The following are the Flotilla for the Machine faction.
Above is the Battle ship, which as has been shown prior. I just wanted to include it with the rest of the flotilla.
This is the Resource ship. The idea behind this ship was that a piece of the back part would slide back and forth on the rails. That would allow the machines to fix specific parts of the broken down ship.
Finally we have the Civilian ship. This holds the largest population of the machines.
As for whats to come, I plan on modeling several of the vessels for both the machine and Humans, so expect a Model dump in the near future.
Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.
