So a lot of things have changed since I started development of the alpha back in late December/early January. In fact, I’d hardly say this is the same game. It shares a name, and a lot of assets, but the play is vastly different than it used to be. Here’s a bullet list, with longer explanations below.

• Now first person

• No motherships (for now)

• cockpit with moving parts based on input

• 3D radar with targeting system

• level customization

• improved AI

• improved controls (altered towards mouse based rather than keyboard)

• mouse sensitivity can be altered on the fly

• increased ship speed

First and most obvious, the game is now in first person rather than third person. This decision was a reflection on the game’s new direction towards precision and intamacy. In other words, third person targeting was a bit finnicy and removed a lot of the intensity. It also solved a problem of camera AI which third person would have had to deal with eventually.

The next big thing is that I removed motherships entirely. They’re still in the files, and they actually work as intended even with all the other changes, but they are just not there until I’m comfortable with how they fit into the picture. Should they be a large objective in of themselves? Should they be a backdrop, an indicator of a spawnzone so to speak? I’m not sure. I’m going to be testing that in the coming months. They’ll almost certainly make a comeback in some form, so if you liked those big behemoths, don’t worry.

After that, the UI changed considerably, mainly to fit with the first person perspective. I added a cockpit, complete with moving parts, which helped get the impact of controls across. I also added the majorly important 3D radar, which was one of the few things in the game I didn’t make myself. It was created by ForceX here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/3d-radar.79163/. A lot of the game’s under the hood stuff was altered to fit this addition, because it added a lot of useful things. Honestly, development would have lasted until the Summer if I hadn’t found this library.

Another big thing I added in terms of UI was the addition of level customization. Don’t get super excited though; all I mean is that you can change how many agents there are per team. So, you can have up to 50 friendlies and 50 enemies duking it out alongside you, or drop it down to just you and one other ship. The possibilities are much more expanded, hopefully increasing replayability a bit.

The AI got a major boost as well, with new FSM-ish behaviours, and pseudo-flocking. The hardest part was honestly getting them to look realistic in how they turned, which I still haven’t perfected. The game is going to change a bit more in the coming months with respect to this as I tinker it a bit more. It’ll be interesting.

Finally, I altered the control scheme considerably, from a roll/pitch only model to a full control model. The most noticable change in this category is that most of the game is now controlled through the mouse, which gives higher precision AND higher agility with the introduction of the variant mouse sensitivity. What does that mean? It means that theres an in-game control for changing the mouse sensitivity, so that you can, in the middle of battle, change sensitivity without pausing. Just scroll the scrollwheel and you’ll be whipping around in no time.

There were a lot of under the hood changes as well, but I’ll just relegate those to “general optimizations” and the like.