Hey folks!

It was long coming, the gun is added in, and our bots are ready to deliver a certain dead unto every big bad bandit on their way. But a gun in itself is a bit unorthodox in a game about babysitting cargo. So how do we justify this instrument of doom aboard the ship (beside the satisfaction of firing a deck mounted weapon)? The idea is that the ammo must be moved from behind the ship to the front. So here is hoping your buddies have been careful in handling the cargo, and didn't make a maze from front to back with it! Add in some bandits already on the ship and the occasional gust of wind, and loading that cannon seems a lot more hazardous then it was before. Is it still worth it? Well, we'll let you make your mind up about that when there are twenty of those mean metal men on your ship.

With the gun added the way the bandits boarded you ship was no longer going to work. And so, we decided to change things up. Now when an invading ship arrives it doesn't just drop off the bandits and leave. It now stays by the side of the ship and until you deal enough damage to it with the mounted gun. While it is next to your ship bandits will keep boarding so you better work together and get rid of it as fast as possible while making sure your cargo is safe.

But the real work has not been adding some new flashy elements. There was a lot of optimization and bugfixing necessary. The physics were giving us a headache, and most systems weren't tweaked to perfection. So we rolled up our sleeves and got into the nitty gritty of the systems we build up in a few weeks time, and patch up all possible oversights.

In doing this we had to make some decisions with impact on the game. Some of the mechanics we thought of early, seem to brake more then they do good. So we had to revise some earlier choices. The sliding mechanics have been toned down, to make tweaking the wind more feasible, since they always work as a trade-off. The random scaling and mass of cargo have been removed. Since we are using different models now, we still have variation, but one we have more control over. Next to that, the way our delivery men pick things up has had a complete overhaul. We now use joints, which can break when picked up goods experience faulty conditions. Instead of breaking the game, delivery man will now simply drop what they are holding. While this vastly increases the stability of the game, it had its repercussions on a few other systems, most pickups and the way players move.

When our game evolves, it is nice to see this being reflected visually. So the latest build will have the new ship model, partially colored and some quality of life upgrades, such as a visible player color and outlines on objects in range.

We are also busy spicing up the visuals by creating textures for the ship's large surfaces and creating the particle effects. Right now we have a gunshot particle for the cannon and we are busy finding a way to create nice clouds for the background of the game and now that all models are done, we started preparing everything for animations, we are currently rigging all characters and moving elements on the ship so we can later properly animate them.

As always, thanks for reading!

See ya later mateys!