Who would believe it? We are finally reaching a (quasi) playable version of Gangs of Space!

Visuals

Grouroux has completed the design of all the little special effects here and there. They don't seem much, but they allow the player to understand what's going on, so they are actually very important gameplay-wise! And... THEY ARE EVERYWHERE!!!

Here are a few examples, from dozens of them:

Resistron X3, a new active item which gives temporary resistances

The Nanobot item, ie. a heal

One of the 6 transmuter effects, here energy => shield

The Reboot subsystem, that reduces all other cooldowns

The level up effect that destroys enemies around

The impact effect on a Gemeter ship

The new bullets for the various Gemeter weapons, with some potential debuff effects of the Solid Weakening or Gluons subsystems

I'm not going over all the items, subsystems, debuff effects, the trails, the wrecks, the drops...

Grouroux has also updated some space structures that some of you already knew:

Gates

The Motherbase

Programming

On my side, I mostly followed Grouroux's work by implementing all the stuff that "does" these FX, including the emission, synchronization among the players, the modification depending on various gameplay settings, and so on.

I also started writing new IA blocks that will be used to implement the behaviours of the enemy variations. Grouroux fixed the game design of these variations a few months ago, but we decided to do a first pass of balance with only the basic enemies, before implementing the variations a bit later. Well, at least the code is ready for that!

Also, some final touches to a few interfaces, for example the small warp button that has been added among the other shortcuts:

And since I finished all that while Grouroux was still stuggling with his FX, I even implemented the Trophy system, which is a way to unlock subsystems for each ship class by performing various actions. This was supposed to be implemented in the next version, but wel... it's already done!

The UI, though, is not done AT ALL...

And while I was doing all that, Grouroux managed to steal commit #4000 from me. Damn! I was litteraly thinking about what special thing I could commit to celebrate the milestone, and I received this screenshot:

Finally, I spent a few days on the game servers to update all our scripts, clean the databases, test that all is working (at least in broad stokes...). Which leads us to:

Test sessions!

So, since the game is reaching playable state again, we will finally be able to resume alpha test sessions very soon!

As a starter, this Friday, June 10 during our Twitch devstream (probably around 10:00-ish GMT), we will do a first pre-session with the viewers of our channel. Don't expect a polished experience, this is in order to dig out the main issues. But if you have a gangsofspace.com account (create one, it's free!), feel free to come by and you'll be welcome on the server!

Depending on how this first try goes, we will announce a first "true" series of test sessions (over a few days at least) just afterward.

And finally, if you planned to spend your summer time at the beach, cancel all your plans! We announce today that we will do A TON of test sessions, devstreams, new versions and new content during the months of July and August. Mark the dates on your calendars!

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