Hey Folks,

Let the Game Begin! Yes that is right! We strayed from a haphazard combination of mechanics and implemented actual progression. The menu screens might be lacking, but the rest is all there: gather three friends and register your controllers with a press of a button, push once more and your adventure begins. Your journey is subdivided in a few phases, each of which have a different difficulty and time steps for events.

I will let you in on a little secret: we don't know what phases there will be yet. As of right now, each phase is fully customizable, duration of the phase, number of enemies spawned, wind force, frequency of gusts, etc. Which gives us the liberty to create whatever curve we want! So in theory, we're not limited to a straight difficulty curves ramping up from easy to super hard. The idea is that we can tone down challenges and create a focus for each stage. It would be interesting to have a few moments respite from the howling gale and have some extra marauders invade. Or we could have some very intense action packed moments alternate with peaceful ones, giving the delivery bots some time to make little castles with the cargo.

Whatever game experience we want to deliver, this is going to make it an absolute joy for us to tweak that experience in future development.

An other thing worth mentioning: during development we had encountered a few situations in which we had emergent behavior. Among other things the aforementioned building of castles. Well maybe not castles, but it is entirely possible to create little walls of cargo around barrels, to stop them from rolling away. A fun little exercise for players in between the waves of scrap-stealing bandits.

If building dams with cargo isn't to your liking, I can tell you that the shooting mechanics have come a long way. Off course with the ship tilting and bobbing as much as it does, it took us a while to wrap our minds around a coherent way to fend of enemy ships. Eventually we decided the gun's pitch axis would stay in place and the player would only need to aim horizontally. We can not promise the shooting will be available in the next build, but watch out for it for next week!

Lastly some news from our artist. While they both delivered some grade A props, we believed we could do better in terms of style coherence. Because we want to bedazzle all your senses, and not only gameplay-wise, we gave the player ship another pass. Just to get that grubby, clunky feeling just right!

Thank you for reading up on the progress of ShipIT!

See you next week, mateys!