New update! Azulgar 0.44
Hello Everyone !
After three long months we are finally releasing a new update. We have added a first type of mining mechanic into the game. That is: salvaging of debris. You will find salvageable debris scattered all around the spawn location as well as some derelict ships in Mars sector. You can start mining right from the spawn, since default ship starts with salvage laser instead of minigun.
Debris and derelict ships will drop various building parts and resources depending on their type. The drop is small and intended to give you some initial upgrades. Since there is no way to process resources into building parts yet and there is no other content you will still start with some building parts in your inventory for testing purposes. FTL jumping is also enabled by default and costs no fuel.
In this version we switched to unity’s universal rendering pipeline. Thanks to this, game runs much faster, especially on lower end hardware. We also polished the visual settings a little bit, hopefully progressing towards something better.
In April status report we hinted on making the world more alive. We were playing with battle scenes with aliens along with some simple quests. We rolled back on those changes for now. The battle scene was too much too soon. With quests, we tried to conflate tutorial with world background story, but this in the end served neither of those purposes. We will definitely be revisiting this in the near future.
Nevertheless we started on enriching the world content by adding carriers that serve as shipyards and derelict ships that can be salvaged. For now only Earth and Mars are available, but we started to make them look and feel different from each other. This will be ongoing process in future updates.
For the next update we will be working on adding factory stations into the world, so you can process salvaged resources into building parts for your ship. We also plan to start working on another mining mechanic, which is asteroid mining. This will give no building parts but a lot of resources that should serve as a platform for next stage of the game. Either player stations or capital ships, possibly both.
