Dev Diary by Evan Hahn
With my last post I experimented with using propellers defensively. I was able to setup up propellers on the ground that prevented enemy artillery shells from being able to hit me.
For my next test I wanted to figure out how practical it would be to do this on ships. This would be great since you are much more likely to encounter enemy ships while you are also flying a ship. The challenging thing about this though, is that you actually need them for flying too. This means that every time you change direction on your ship, your propellers will suck or blow in the opposite direction that you are accelerating. To make things worse, if you the propellers are turning in the wrong direction, they will actually suck the shells into your ship, instead of defending you.
To test things out, I made a giant wall of propellers on the side of my ship. Then I spawned an enemy ship to see what I can do. After playing around a little bit I was able to figure out a technique that would allow me to push away the enemies artillery shells. Not only that, I was also able to deflect the artillery shells back into their own ship quite often. Check out a screenshot of this in action below.
Like I was saying, this whole thing requires a bit of technique from the player. Every time you want to deflect an artillery shell, you must be moving away from it. This isn’t so bad since you reflexively try to move away when you want to get away from danger. I just had to be really conscious of the fact that I didn’t try to get closer when there were enemy artillery shells around.
Also, I ran into a bunch of cases where the enemy shells were getting sucked into my top propellers. This was happening because they constantly need to be sucking downwards in order to keep the ship in the air. I haven’t really experimented with this yet, but you might be able to use this fact to your advantage in combat if you are having trouble hitting your target. All you need to do is aim for the region where air will be sucked in and, you will likely hit the ship.
Is this technique practical? Maybe? If your aim is to attack a ship, it will be a lot faster and easier to just directly shoot it. That said, if you are out of ammo, want to conserve ammo, have broken turrets, or just looking for a challenge, this technique might be for you. I’m just happy that you can do it :)I feel like there are still a lot of cool things you can do with propellers. If you find other cool uses for them, let me know!
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Interesting! I don't know how realistic it is, but I think it fits into the world of Windforge and creates an interesting tactical consideration.
Can't wait to play the game!