It’s been more than a month since our last post, so even if it’s not friday, it’s time for a dev-update!

During these last weeks we have been busy building the basic blocks of our gameplay. We started polishing and generally improving our first draft of “attribute” system.
Now almost every aspect of the game is defined by a numeric value or “attribute” that influences an object behaves in-game.

Having attributes in place, and after several design iterations, we finally implemented our perk system. Perks are all-purpose attributes modifiers that will be the basics of almost every game machanic in Syder.
We will use perks to define powerups and talent-like upgrades, but also to model the bahavoir of different weapons, temporary buffs and debuffs and other gameplay elements, like areas where we want to apply special rules.

For instance, let’s say you want to use a nebula to hide from other players, it’s a classic sci-fi manouver that every starfighter wants to do.
When you step inside the nebula you get a temporary “hidden inside the nebula” perk that dramatically reduces your starship visibility, making you extremely hard to spot by enemy sensors.
A perk can modify several attributes at once, and to balance things out “hinnen inside a nebula” could also reduce your sensor range to almost zero.

This perk system gives us a nice, granular way to create new, interesting game mechanics and to manage the existing ones.
Our goal was to implement a simple but consistent set of basic rules that enables us to keep the scripted content at minimum.
These basics should leave as much “creative freedom” to the player as possible, and hopefully this will bring up some nice emergent gameplay.

Refactoring our attribute system gave us the chance to improve a couple of things we had already prototyped, like movement and basic weapons.

We changed the movement mechanics in a way that’s less physically accurate but definitely more fun to play, and also added dashing (as in “to dash”).
The basic idea behind the unrealisic concept of dashing with a starship is to increase player mobility, providing more advanced fighting tricks.
Of course dashing comes at the price of energy (the “mana bar” of our starships) so you cannot dash all the time.

During week ends I took a rest form 3d modeling, and worked to get a better grasp on Syder game world and storyline.
Things are starting to shape up nicely as my writings actually begin to make sense.
I’m working on the Amgarr race now, these ugly sentient starships-dudes will play a major role in Syder and also will be one of the main “dangers” our heroes will have to face.
Here, have a slice of their capital ships :D

This last month has been intense also from a more tecnical standpoint.
Having to randomly position our game content in our large space environments proved to be quite callenging. Powerful “unity magic” together with some forum kung-fu and RTFM were required in order to build a space scenery thet was both visually interesting AND performing at a decent frame rate.

Speaking of magic; We’ve been experimenting with some retro post effects for a little Syder-related secondary project we will be announcing soon.

We also implemented a tactical map interface to help your travels in space and shops where you can buy upgrades and change your selected starship.
We’ll explain more about these game features as soon as we have them polished a little bit.

Stay tuned! And show your support on indiedb, facebook or twitter!