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Game News Colony Ship Update #33: State of the Game - Combat Demo Screenshots

Infinitron

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Tags: Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game; Iron Tower Studio; Vince D. Weller

This year's first Colony Ship development update delivered the game's first official screenshots. The final update of the year comes with...more screenshots, but now with fully functional systems and UI. They're all from the combat demo, which is now scheduled for release early next year. The demo takes place in the "Courthouse", the arena that was described in the update about The Pit from last April. The "Chief Justice" looks to be quite a character:




After nearly 2 years of work we finally have a playable build, which is very exciting. First, we finally get to see how things work in-game, not on paper, and second, it's great to see the game rapidly changing with every daily update. It's very rough, of course, as it's the First Iteration: a promise of things to come rather than an actual game, but the promise IS there and it's a good thing. Right now you can talk to people, fight, loot bodies, increase skills and equip new gear. The dialogue scripts are working like a charm, so you can go through all the fights and get one of 5 endings. The AI is doing a pretty good job seeking cover, flanking, and using different attacks. Collapsible textbox, pop-up attack icons with tooltips, status icons that tell you which enemies your character has a line of sight on, if the enemies are in cover, and most importantly, if you're still in cover when the enemies are flanking you; the cover provides the highest bonus when the cover is between you and the enemy; less when the enemy is at an angle), etc.

The only feature that's not done yet is the gadgets (energy shield and such), which gives us time to focus on the basic mechanics, iron them out, then introduce the gadgets. The armor sets are almost done, waiting to be textured. Plus tons of small things like various GUI improvements, proper textbox messages that show rolls Battle Brothers style (it's much easier to accept missing 3 times in a row when you see what you're rolling), blood splatters, a balance pass or two (changed AP from DEX+10 to DEX*1.5+5, working on the attack and weapon stats now), the cursor, etc. All in all, I'd say we need 2 months to get the combat system into shape before we start beta-testing, then another month before we release it.

It's longer than we expected but late is always better than never. In comparison, it took us over 5 years to reach this point with AoD (due to working part-time and being inexperienced), so overall the game is progressing nicely.

Anyway, here are some screens. Keep in mind, that's it's work in progress, as rough as the very first build can be.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your families.
By historical Iron Tower standards, a three month delay is practically ahead of schedule. I can't wait to see this in action.
 

Kem0sabe

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Looking very good. A quick sugestion, I think it's easier to read if the descriptions in the text are a diferent color than the dialogue, Grey for example.
 

Shin

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Looks very good! Hope this gets released before Bannerlord 2.
 

Bocian

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The "Chief Justice" looks to be quite a character
latest
 

Bohr

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Nice update, looking great.

And can somehow see a new avatar in DU's future...


gHQKwaBi_o.png
 

Vault Dweller

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Seeing those filled and half-filled shields disturbs me because it reminds me of nuXCOM and Wasteland 2 combat. Hopefully combat is not as snore inducing as those.
Does cover automatically make combat boring for you?
 

Grotesque

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Seeing those filled and half-filled shields disturbs me because it reminds me of nuXCOM and Wasteland 2 combat. Hopefully combat is not as snore inducing as those.
Does cover automatically make combat boring for you?
You could make that shield icons for cover appear only when keeping pressed a certain button
Also don't show the 3D character in the inventory UI.
 

Vault Dweller

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Seeing those filled and half-filled shields disturbs me because it reminds me of nuXCOM and Wasteland 2 combat. Hopefully combat is not as snore inducing as those.
Does cover automatically make combat boring for you?
You could make that shield icons for cover appear only when keeping pressed a certain button
We can make them appear only when selecting a place to move (whether this particular tile has a cover or not).

Also don't show the 3D character in the inventory UI.
The character looks crappy because we didn't spend much time working on it. I believe we can make the character model look much better. If not, we'll remove it.
 

hilfazer

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Does cover always* protect me if it is between me and my enemy or do i need to park myself on a tile with shield icon to benefit from it?
Let's say i'm positioned diagonally to some cover providing object and enemy is positioned at the opposite side of that object (and a few tiles away). Do i benefit from cover?


*except when enemy is right next to it and i'm not
 

garren

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Also don't show the 3D character in the inventory UI.
The character looks crappy because we didn't spend much time working on it. I believe we can make the character model look much better. If not, we'll remove it.
Usually 3d models look like crap in inventory screens in top down games where the character detail isn't as high, I prefer 2d models or paper dolls honestly.
 

Vault Dweller

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Does cover always* protect me if it is between me and my enemy or do i need to park myself on a tile with shield icon to benefit from it?
Let's say i'm positioned diagonally to some cover providing object and enemy is positioned at the opposite side of that object (and a few tiles away). Do i benefit from cover?
No.

Also don't show the 3D character in the inventory UI.
The character looks crappy because we didn't spend much time working on it. I believe we can make the character model look much better. If not, we'll remove it.
Usually 3d models look like crap in inventory screens in top down games where the character detail isn't as high, I prefer 2d models or paper dolls honestly.
What Ivan did to see what's possible looked pretty good, very impressive even, but that model had custom sculpted face and hair. The one in the screenshot is generic and has no hair, so it's a placeholder. Ivan's current priorities are wearable items (vest, jackets, coats, boots, goggles, masks, helmets) and animations, not fucking around with faces and hair.
 

Vault Dweller

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btw camera will be rotatable just like in aod right?
Fixed camera. First, it's easier (and faster) to make better looking levels when you have a fixed viewpoint instead of going 360 degree. Same goes for setting up lighting and particle effects, doing paintovers, etc. Second, rotatable camera has always been a pain, it didn't work well in NWN, KOTOR, WL2, AoD, DOS, etc. It adds very little but causes a lot of frustration. You'll be able to see through objects that block your character and see other characters' silhouettes.
 

hivemind

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Yeah, I absolutely love the freedom of being able to spin the view in and around however I please or even just scrolling through the map to see and look around different parts of town. It´s just extremely fun and satisfying to me for some reason. It was especially good during like dramatic moments of some like clutch fights where I´d just zoom in and circle around to relish in the tension. The ability to see stuff from different perspectives as I pleased also made me feel very "immersed" in the game world and I never minded the textures or models or whatever not being up to maximum graphical fidelity because of this feature. Additionally I think since I played the game(counting back from teron demo) for perhaps like an upwards of 400 hours just being able to change the angle I was looking at the same fights over and over again made them never start feeling stale.

Like I§m not memeing here, this reveal made me unironically sad. I was genuinely emotionally invested in you guys sticking to free camera because no other good game really does it these days anymore. Especially not with as much control as the AoD one offered.
 

Strange Fellow

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Does cover always* protect me if it is between me and my enemy or do i need to park myself on a tile with shield icon to benefit from it?
Let's say i'm positioned diagonally to some cover providing object and enemy is positioned at the opposite side of that object (and a few tiles away). Do i benefit from cover?
No.
Why not? I can see the benefits of cover giving a flat ThC-reduction, but why do this? Seems to me like you give up a bit of "realism," as well as more freedom of positioning, for no benefit.
 

Grotesque

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Capture546453.png


I hope for a game that will have Bloodnet's "paperdoll" where the clothes equipped are displayed in detail on the UI like being on a mannequin (in Bloodnet's case, an invisible mannequin)

Thus showing the face of the character is not necessary and time is saved from not making the head in high quality for rendering purposes.

 
Last edited:

Vault Dweller

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Why not? I can see the benefits of cover giving a flat ThC-reduction, but why do this? Seems to me like you give up a bit of "realism," as well as more freedom of positioning, for no benefit.
Mainly because due to the tile system your character would look wide open.

Yeah, I absolutely love the freedom of being able to spin the view in and around however I please or even just scrolling through the map to see and look around different parts of town. It´s just extremely fun and satisfying to me for some reason. It was especially good during like dramatic moments of some like clutch fights where I´d just zoom in and circle around to relish in the tension. The ability to see stuff from different perspectives as I pleased also made me feel very "immersed" in the game world and I never minded the textures or models or whatever not being up to maximum graphical fidelity because of this feature. Additionally I think since I played the game(counting back from teron demo) for perhaps like an upwards of 400 hours just being able to change the angle I was looking at the same fights over and over again made them never start feeling stale.

Like I§m not memeing here, this reveal made me unironically sad. I was genuinely emotionally invested in you guys sticking to free camera because no other good game really does it these days anymore. Especially not with as much control as the AoD one offered.
Well, the camera was never the game's defining or key feature, so it's not something we felt strongly about. I agree that a 360-world you can fully explore is better, but it takes more time and manpower. So we're talking about a feature that most people either struggled with or didn't really like and that increases our workload by at least 25%. We'd rather spend the extra time on quests and branching.
 

hivemind

Guest
Yeah, man, I mean I 100 percent get that it§s not a priority feature in any way, I just felt that it at least deserved a small eulogy.
 

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