New arival

So it's been a long time since I posted a devlog and since then my family has grown by one.

Little William Isaac arried at 00:06 on 10th May and took away my sleep and most of my free time :)  Some development stopped for a few weeks while we all got used to having a new born to look after again.

Anyway, I got back in the Gamedev saddle in early June and started changing how I was going to do the spacecraft design part again.  So originally I had these individual elements that cost and generated different resources and you had to combine different elements to optimise how your spacecraft used those resources.  I still like that idea, but my original implementation just wasn't inspiring or fun. Some of the elements were just a bit dull and only a hand full of elements really made a difference to the game play.  So I stripped out some of the dependancies and made the more boring itemsmore interesting.  So, for example, Farm's no longer produce food - they provide oxygen (needed to allow long-distace travel) and increase the contract length of crew.  Factory's don't produce products, they boost repair speed. 

I've also been adding at least one new item a week and I want to keep this pace up until the first playable version is available so that there is a good amount and a varied amount of stuff to mount onto your ship to change how you play through the game.

I've also changed the "probe" jammer to a probe "hacker" - I felt being able to capture probes to use in battle was more fun and simply stopping them firing at you.

Apart from adjusting the ship parts, I've been re-integrating the battle mechnics and as of today I'd fixed the ability for the play to fire their weapons and for the world to register hits.  Next thing is imlpementing how to harvest items from defeated ships before I start allowing the AI to fight back.

I've also been tweaking a lot of things such as the time acceleration, some of the HUDs, changing some of the sounds, removing some old debug code that is no longer needed.

I really need to start making a list of thing still to be implemented so that I can prioritise my work, but generally I'm happy with progress and the feel f the game.  As this is now the third time working through this game,it definately feels closer to the original vision I had for this game.  It's not quite there, but I feel I'm moving closer with each play-test.