Trapped in the Sky - Weekly update 24th July blog - Ched80

So this week was another good week of development, focused mainly on adding the next explorable section - the bridge and medical wing.

Here's a summary:

Added the bridge and medical section and eight items (beds, plants, sinks, hobs, etc.) to furnish it out with. This section is a little different from the previous sections in that you can't access the whole section, you can only access the bridge from the right doors and the medical wing from the left. Introducing this has required a bit of a change to the A.I. so that they don't try and target players on the 'wrong' half of the map, but other than that, it works quite well and forces the player to keep more sections fully operational and it acts as a dead end forcing the players to take alternative routes through the map.

Added the 'omni tool' hack which fully repairs a whole section. Which may sound too powerful, but the hack is expensive to produce requiring at least 5 items so I think it's got the right balance. That and the fact that not all the hacks will be available to the player so the omni tool won't be available in each play-through.

Added the Robbery crime which enables you to unlock any door without a key or lock-pick. To unlock this crime you need to have escaped the craft and unlocked 100 doors using lock-picks (cumulatively, not just in a single session).

Adjusted the blur shader to be faster and actually produce a nicer blurred shadow effect. I originally picked a number of points in the x and y axes away from the target pixel, covered these points into an angle around the player and tested to see if it was in shadow or not. It was quite intensive and although my dedicated GPU could handle it, my integrated GPU struggled and the resulting blurring for both set ups wasn't anything to write home about. This modification, performs the in-shadow test directly on the angle and the result is a much smoother, consistent blurring effect with improved performance. So I'm chuffed!

Adjusted the oozing blood from recently shot NPCs to ooze in a time based system, rather than a frame based system so that the blood oozes at the same rate on all set ups.

Adjusted normal maps for the galley tables and added gun-racks, cooker and sink to crew quarters section.

Fixed the cargo-bay doors from being open allowing the player to wander off the map.

Fixed cargo-bay section from causing A.I. pathfinding crash.

Fixed user data not loading correctly, so now all player settings and stats are recorded properly.

So I'm definitely near the end of this beta cycle now and August 14th looks like the date I will be releasing it. Just a few more features to add, which I'm hoping to complete next week.

Here's a loooooong vid of how it all currently looks - I apologise for how long it is, that's mainly because I die so many times. I am so bad I am at my own game!


Trapped in the Sky - beta three preview - Indie DB

Before I go, just the usual cheeky reminder that beta two is currently available for whatever you wish to pay for it via itch.io.