Ship of Heroes updates players on leveling up, powersets to show off, and staffing
Leveling up feels easy enough in games; you get enough experience, there’s a flash of light, your level goes up by one. But Ship of Heroes is hard at work making it work because as it turns out there’s a lot going on at once from an engine standpoint when you level up. You immediately restore health and resources, your stats improve, you can access to new abilities at the trainer… it’s a lot of stuff at once. So there’s careful work to be done in balance terms.
And that’s only one of the things the development team is hard at work with; both the super speed and spear powersets are being developed, with the former due for a video in the near future (the latter needs more work done before its cinematic debut). The team has also offered a new staff position to an experienced artist, although at the time of writing it’s not yet certain if the offer will be accepted. In short, SoH is hard at work through the start of February.
It seems like we gave a summary at the end of January of what we have going on. I thought I would add some details to it since today is Monday (in my time zone anyway), and Monday mornings are a good time to review the plan for the week.
1. We're hoping to begin recording the superspeed video today or tomorrow. This video has some other stuff in it too, so it is not simple to record. Still we have a decent shot at publishing a video before next weekend.
2. We're reviewing some additional animations for the spear powerset. The rate at which powers and powersets are developed is mostly determined by the production and polishing rates for their animations. So we are not on the verge of showing this one off, but all of this work has to go on for months before we can show it. We like where we are with this one. Many western MMOs neglect a spear power, so this is another fun feature of SoH.
3. We are continuing to work on the level-up process. You might think this is easy -- just a flash of light and some text on the screen saying you have leveled up...but it is actually a fundamental system. Level up changes hit points and other ststs instantly, heals and recovers a player instantly even if they are in combat. And it makes changes to their other stats, allowing them to go to a trainer and get either a new power or some augmentation slots. Augmentation slots are particularly tricky. Coding all of this is really complex. We are not done with this, but again, we like our current situation. We definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel.
4. We offerred a postion to an experienced artist to add to our team, and we hope he takes the spot. We'll keep the community informed on this, but probably we'll wait until we can show some of his work in a newsletter.
Anyway, that's most of my Monday morning. I hope that is not too dull, as a report.
