Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role-playing Game Update #35 – Demo Update, Part 2

The Iron Tower Studio team is busy working on a combat demo for their upcoming sci-fi Colony Ship RPG. We got a demo-related status update from them back in February, and now we get a new one that goes over all the latest demo improvements and balance updates, and also shares a heap of fresh screenshots. Here’s the text intro:

We made good progress with things that matter (but hard to show) like programming, balance, and scripting but poor progress with relatively minor but highly visible things like armor models and portraits. As (probably) mentioned previously, the demo is fully playable and has 14 fights, 2 of them optional. We’re still playing it on a daily basis, ironman-style as there’s no save/load system yet, so the demo has already received 2 balance updates as a result. The engine is great and very stable. I didn’t have a single crash yet (despite daily updates); there were some occasional freezes earlier (for example, if one enemy knocks you out and his helpful buddy shoots in the face, scoring a knockdown) but I didn’t have any in my last 2-hour long play session.

The feats are now working and two gadgets out of three are done (the energy shield and the distortion field). All gadget parts (each gadget consists of 3 upgradeable parts that increase its properties such as shield’s regen rate or damage resistance) are nicely modeled and textured. The main new addition is the targeting info (see the screens below). It gives you a full THC breakdown, which will help the player to understand how it’s calculated and helps us make sure that bonuses and penalties are implemented properly. RNG is working great, so far the balance between hits and misses is perfect.

So far the armor thing (the delay) is our biggest problem, which is a good indicator as I can think of worse things to screw up. It’s slowly moving forward, so I hope that we’ll have it done in 3 weeks. Similar to the weapons, the armor is split into 2 main categories: common Ship-made ballistic armor and rare Earth-made combat and anti-riot armor. You can expect 10 unique models for each category: helmet, body armor, jacket/coat, boots, goggles, mask/respirator. Right now we have about a third (talking about the models).