Week of Optimization, A New Member and Design

Voidsinger

The week I continued my attempts at optimizing ships so that they could be built to larger sizes. Also, someone decided to join my team and I spent time briefing them on the state of the game and getting them set up so that they could work. There were also several design meetings mostly focusing on creating a vague roadmap for the progression of the game as well as several core mechanics. Some time was also spent reworking the player movement input system. I also started work on a building/blueprint/healing system.

Optimization

I finished the creation of a sorted Part Grid map that utilized binary searches. This however had a minimal effect so I spent a lot of time gutting my code to figure out where the large was coming from. It seemed that the creation of a large number of part objects may have been the problem so I worked on making it so that certain parts would merge into a single object when adjacent. This also had a minimal effect and I ran out of optimization ideas, so I decided to move on to creating a building/blueprint/healing system.

Design Meeting

Here is a summary of one of the design meetings that occurred this week:

Each faction would have 3 Voidsongs associated with them, 2 verbs, and their name which allows you to affect their ships using Voidsongs. The first verb would be unlocked when you first encounter a faction and cross their border. (Border systems would be unique and have a Voidsong effect indicating the beginning of their space that would match the particle effect of the Voidsong the player would unlock). The 2nd Voidsong would be unlocked when you find the factions “capital” which the player would discover the location of through hints highlighted using Voidsong particles. (These would be things like satellite dishes pointed in the direction of the capital and the hints would vary by faction). And the third Voidsong would be unlocked by using both Voidsongs in a challenge of some sort located either in or near the capital.

For the final boss, we decided that it would be this blackness around the edges of the galaxy. It would slowly creep in towards the center of the galaxy every time the player moved star systems or died. This creeping would be stopped by the factions of the galaxy; however, as the player steals Voidsongs from the factions they are weakened and thus are less able to defend themselves in front of the darkness. This would balance the creep so that as the player grew stronger the darkness would be able to get closer to the center of the galaxy.

As for how the final boss fight would actually happen is that as you get closer to the edge of the darkness you would see twisted wreckages covered in black Voidsong effect. When you reach a border star system you would see this wall of darkness and if you flew into it deeply enough for the screen to go completely black except the player the boss would fade in around them and would be a large dark donut-shaped amalgamation of all the ships it devoured and you would be in the middle of it. Once you defeat the boss the player would unlock the chaos Voidsong which would be the opposite of healing and thus be a kind of OP final weapon for the player.