It's been a while since the announcement, but I kept putting off posting an update until I felt I had something to show you all.
The Steam Store page for The Jovian System is now up. It's not 'coming soon' by any means, but at least you can wishlist it if you feel so inclined.
The Jovian System has seen a lot of progress in the last couple of months. The world map is pretty much done. All the moons orbit around Jupiter as they should. You can burn to travel within the system and choose to orbit a moon when you get near. The ship/station construction element is mostly complete, but doesn't have a lot of content yet.
After some helpful advice in the last thread, I decided to come up with a concept for a new interface first lest I got stuck transplanting things from Titan Outpost that didn't really work. Here's a screenshot of the new construction interface, for example:
It's not final, of course. Some of the skeuomorphic elements are WIP and the resource bar doesn't need to be shown twice.
World map. Text on the right is a debug dump.
Here is the timelapse screen. It's not just a cosmetic change from Titan Outpost. The 'days/hours/minutes' dials appear as a context widget if you hover over the clock and it has more room for relevant stats.
Of course, the biggest hurdle to take is the combat system.
The primary unique feature is momentum-based movement in three dimensions.
A character has action points and movement/orientation points. Action points are used for attacks or skill application, while orientation points are used to initiate movement.
If you’re in a gravity environment or wearing magnetic boots on suitable tiles in zero G, movement is pretty traditional. Moving a certain amount of tiles costs a certain amount of movement points. In this screenshot, the tiles visible in the grid stick to your magnetic boots and can be traversed by walking.
If you’re not stuck to something, you can push off against a surface to gain momentum in the opposite direction. Each turn, you will move x points in this direction until you hit another surface, you use a tether to stop and pull back, or you use a thruster to alter your momentum. If a character pushes off in space without a tether or a thruster or somebody helping, it can fly off into the void without means of getting back. If the character runs out of oxygen this way, it dies. Exploiting this to kill others is one of the primary ways to kill people.
The stack of tiles rising up indicate a vertical 'push off' direction. You can toggle this grid per level and per tile with the buttons on the lower right. In the bottom-right corner is a gizmo that tells you what this character's current momentum is and in which direction.
I'll definitely implement a UI context wheel for pushing off after the mechanics of the system are finalized. I want navigation to feel intuitive despite its complexity.
Attacking works as follows:
You select a weapon from your inventory and place it in your hands, just like most RPGs. There are ranged weapons and melee weapons, including unarmed.
Ranged weapons include harpoons and various CLGG guns/firearms with oxidizers. The latter are rare. Some weapons have enough recoil to create significant inverse momentum.
Destructible terrain is already in and works, but not all terrain can be demolished. There will be explosives.
Damage is split into two categories: Personal damage and suit integrity.
Personal damage is a straightforward hit point system. There is a hard damage resistance mechanic in place where your suit can soak up most of the damage. The fleshy bits of characters won’t be able to weather a lot of damage and hit points are limited.
Suit integrity determines how much your suit has been breached. If it’s depressurized, you have one or two turns to respond or you die. You usually never run out of oxygen within a combat session by itself, but after your suit has been depressurized you can get to critically low levels where you have to act.
You can upgrade a suit with more protection, integrated thrusters, ballistic panels and things like that. You can also don different suits. Right now, starting a fight in pressurized environments that you can't finish in a single turn means you have to scramble towards a suit because the whole combat arena is one big environmental hazard if you don't.
Stats & Skills
Physicality determines your movement points, awareness determines your base to hit chance, intelligence cancels out some of the momentum penalty in aiming. Charisma reduces a delay in orders. You will be able to gather a small party but you can only indirectly control NPC’s unless your charisma is maxed out. This may change if direct control just turns out to be more fun.
There are two combat skills: Ranged and melee. They increase THC modifiers and that’s it. Perks, gated partly by those skills, will do the heavy lifting in terms of character customization.
If you have questions I’ll be happy to answer them, but a lot of the system is still very much in flux so going into a lot of detail right now would be mostly spitballing.
Development Challenges:
A fully 3D grid to play on is a tough cookie to crack. The common pathfinding algorithms are based on 2D vectors. Even games like JA or X-Com or nuXcom, even Silent Storm, have 2D grids with height values. Moving to another plane on the z axis in those games requires a predetermined path upwards, like stairs. Even the jetpacks and grappling hooks in nuxcom aren’t incorporated in the pathfinding. Truly having six degrees of movement means I have to innovate. Testing it PvP was fun, but getting an AI working is proving difficult because there is so little to fall back on. After banging my head for a few months, I have a foundation to build upon. I want to finalize the system itself first before I start iterating it.
Making a combat area is a chore right now, because every tile is hand-placed and every tile has a lot of values besides its position. Health for destructible terrain, ferromagnetic or not, connected to a pressure area, 'special' function tiles, etc. etc.. I apply the art to the abstract 3D grid after the fact. Even for this small example, that’s 32x32x32 tiles whereas in most games it would be 32x32 or 32x32x(3 or 6) at most. I’m working on some tools for myself to facilitate easier mapmaking.
Animating all this is something I dread. Having transitions for six cardinal directions and setting up realistic blendtrees for pushing off seems like a nightmare. In abstraction it's an easy concept to grasp, but for animation I'd have to consider when/if a character pushes off with his hands or his feet, or nudges with the body, etc. It's something I'm trying to accommodate in the back of my mind, but I don't want to go down this rabbit hole until I finalize the system. Odds are it'll remain abstracted visually. I don't think most lovers of turn-based combat would mind.
Meanwhile I’m working on content, which is chugging along nicely. Here’s a screenshot of the intro sequence.
I’m also working on what I think will be the last major update for Titan Outpost, in which the timeline will be compressed. That's pretty much done, but will be spending more time on the test branch first.
Hope you like what you see. I'll try to keep updates on development a bit more frequent and in-depth now that the game is past its embryonic state.
The Steam Store page for The Jovian System is now up. It's not 'coming soon' by any means, but at least you can wishlist it if you feel so inclined.
The Jovian System has seen a lot of progress in the last couple of months. The world map is pretty much done. All the moons orbit around Jupiter as they should. You can burn to travel within the system and choose to orbit a moon when you get near. The ship/station construction element is mostly complete, but doesn't have a lot of content yet.
After some helpful advice in the last thread, I decided to come up with a concept for a new interface first lest I got stuck transplanting things from Titan Outpost that didn't really work. Here's a screenshot of the new construction interface, for example:
It's not final, of course. Some of the skeuomorphic elements are WIP and the resource bar doesn't need to be shown twice.
World map. Text on the right is a debug dump.
Here is the timelapse screen. It's not just a cosmetic change from Titan Outpost. The 'days/hours/minutes' dials appear as a context widget if you hover over the clock and it has more room for relevant stats.
Of course, the biggest hurdle to take is the combat system.
The primary unique feature is momentum-based movement in three dimensions.
A character has action points and movement/orientation points. Action points are used for attacks or skill application, while orientation points are used to initiate movement.
If you’re in a gravity environment or wearing magnetic boots on suitable tiles in zero G, movement is pretty traditional. Moving a certain amount of tiles costs a certain amount of movement points. In this screenshot, the tiles visible in the grid stick to your magnetic boots and can be traversed by walking.
If you’re not stuck to something, you can push off against a surface to gain momentum in the opposite direction. Each turn, you will move x points in this direction until you hit another surface, you use a tether to stop and pull back, or you use a thruster to alter your momentum. If a character pushes off in space without a tether or a thruster or somebody helping, it can fly off into the void without means of getting back. If the character runs out of oxygen this way, it dies. Exploiting this to kill others is one of the primary ways to kill people.
The stack of tiles rising up indicate a vertical 'push off' direction. You can toggle this grid per level and per tile with the buttons on the lower right. In the bottom-right corner is a gizmo that tells you what this character's current momentum is and in which direction.
I'll definitely implement a UI context wheel for pushing off after the mechanics of the system are finalized. I want navigation to feel intuitive despite its complexity.
Attacking works as follows:
You select a weapon from your inventory and place it in your hands, just like most RPGs. There are ranged weapons and melee weapons, including unarmed.
Ranged weapons include harpoons and various CLGG guns/firearms with oxidizers. The latter are rare. Some weapons have enough recoil to create significant inverse momentum.
Destructible terrain is already in and works, but not all terrain can be demolished. There will be explosives.
Damage is split into two categories: Personal damage and suit integrity.
Personal damage is a straightforward hit point system. There is a hard damage resistance mechanic in place where your suit can soak up most of the damage. The fleshy bits of characters won’t be able to weather a lot of damage and hit points are limited.
Suit integrity determines how much your suit has been breached. If it’s depressurized, you have one or two turns to respond or you die. You usually never run out of oxygen within a combat session by itself, but after your suit has been depressurized you can get to critically low levels where you have to act.
You can upgrade a suit with more protection, integrated thrusters, ballistic panels and things like that. You can also don different suits. Right now, starting a fight in pressurized environments that you can't finish in a single turn means you have to scramble towards a suit because the whole combat arena is one big environmental hazard if you don't.
Stats & Skills
Physicality determines your movement points, awareness determines your base to hit chance, intelligence cancels out some of the momentum penalty in aiming. Charisma reduces a delay in orders. You will be able to gather a small party but you can only indirectly control NPC’s unless your charisma is maxed out. This may change if direct control just turns out to be more fun.
There are two combat skills: Ranged and melee. They increase THC modifiers and that’s it. Perks, gated partly by those skills, will do the heavy lifting in terms of character customization.
If you have questions I’ll be happy to answer them, but a lot of the system is still very much in flux so going into a lot of detail right now would be mostly spitballing.
Development Challenges:
A fully 3D grid to play on is a tough cookie to crack. The common pathfinding algorithms are based on 2D vectors. Even games like JA or X-Com or nuXcom, even Silent Storm, have 2D grids with height values. Moving to another plane on the z axis in those games requires a predetermined path upwards, like stairs. Even the jetpacks and grappling hooks in nuxcom aren’t incorporated in the pathfinding. Truly having six degrees of movement means I have to innovate. Testing it PvP was fun, but getting an AI working is proving difficult because there is so little to fall back on. After banging my head for a few months, I have a foundation to build upon. I want to finalize the system itself first before I start iterating it.
Making a combat area is a chore right now, because every tile is hand-placed and every tile has a lot of values besides its position. Health for destructible terrain, ferromagnetic or not, connected to a pressure area, 'special' function tiles, etc. etc.. I apply the art to the abstract 3D grid after the fact. Even for this small example, that’s 32x32x32 tiles whereas in most games it would be 32x32 or 32x32x(3 or 6) at most. I’m working on some tools for myself to facilitate easier mapmaking.
Animating all this is something I dread. Having transitions for six cardinal directions and setting up realistic blendtrees for pushing off seems like a nightmare. In abstraction it's an easy concept to grasp, but for animation I'd have to consider when/if a character pushes off with his hands or his feet, or nudges with the body, etc. It's something I'm trying to accommodate in the back of my mind, but I don't want to go down this rabbit hole until I finalize the system. Odds are it'll remain abstracted visually. I don't think most lovers of turn-based combat would mind.
Meanwhile I’m working on content, which is chugging along nicely. Here’s a screenshot of the intro sequence.
I’m also working on what I think will be the last major update for Titan Outpost, in which the timeline will be compressed. That's pretty much done, but will be spending more time on the test branch first.
Hope you like what you see. I'll try to keep updates on development a bit more frequent and in-depth now that the game is past its embryonic state.
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