Your ship finally looks like something

From this build on you recognise your ship at a glance. Every part you equip shows up on the silhouette, the wing, the pod, the cockpit, the engine, instead of being one more grey cube. And a big chassis visibly takes up more room than a small one, because it IS bigger rather than just scaled up.

Nine chassis drawn, 15 part shapes

Your ship used to be a cluster of grey cubes that got stretched or shrunk depending on size. Basically an XL was an M with a scale factor. Now each chassis has its own shape and each slot has one too.

I would rather tell you straight away: this is IN PROGRESS. The nine chassis are in, the 15 part shapes too, but they are shared across 48 equippable parts, so two different wings can still look alike. There are seams you can see and proportions I’m going to redo. You will find ugly bits. So do I.

Ten Supports, ten ways of moving

The Support class is the mobs that heal, that repair, that hand out shields. There were ten of them and they all moved the same way: six shared the same movement routine and two pairs were impossible to tell apart. Their only real difference was their aura.

So they each have their own gait now. The Armurier turns towards you as it closes in, so its front plate becomes readable and you know where to hit. The Galvaniseur circles its target, the Guérisseur weaves, the Ancre plants itself mid field, the Séraphin kamikaze charges. They all keep the same speed, that one’s on purpose: I wanted to separate the manner, not the clock.

The Chercheuse is a real missile

The slowest round in the catalogue used to be a ball. It’s now a missile with a faceted nose, fins and a nozzle, rolling slowly on itself while it flies.

There is a launch sequence on top of the model. It leaves the barrel dead straight, drops its rear stage in a puff of debris, then lights its engine and turns towards its target. The smoke comes out of the nozzle instead of the middle of the missile.

What I would rather tell you before you find out

The Chercheuse misses anything too close. It flies straight for its first two and a half units before it can steer, so a mob glued to your nose just gets missed. Its damage of 2 already made it depend on the number of hits. This delay penalises it further up close. That’s on purpose. If it turns out unusable in play, I come back to it.

What has not changed

The rest of the game is still grey cubes and that’s deliberate: I go through the shapes one at a time when I have time, the mobs wait their turn. The run loop has not changed either. And the hangar ship is better finished than what you meet in game, well… that happens.

Go play

The demo is up to date. Take a Chercheuse, fire from far out, tell me whether the launch sequence reads or whether it goes by too fast to notice. That’s the bit I’m least sure about.