Weapons

All parts that I want to be in for the initial alpha release are now done.

Since last week, I finished the Medium Laser:

Yeah it’s kinda boxy, but I think it’s OK sometimes to sacrifice a bit of visual appeal for practicality. Like with the Medium Cannon, it’s nice having some weapons where you can snap stuff other parts around it. Here’s a vehicle with four lasers shooting an AI:

Everyone who pledged $35NZD or more on the Scraps Kickstarter was also promised a special exclusive weapon. Enter the Tesla Device:

The Tesla Device is a short-range tesla coil. It auto-aims at anything nearby that has health and zaps it until it’s dead or the power runs out (…or the player gets too far away, or stops firing). It can also zap multiple targets at once (with reduced damage to each).

Part Stats

I wrote some code to export stats for all the parts in the game to a spreadsheet, and import them back again. Now I can concoct formulas to help balance stats and costs for parts, and I’ve been doing some of that. Real-world testing is still needed as well since there are lots of little factors that don’t necessarily show up in stats: For instance the Small Machine Gun is hard to aim, so it deserves to do a bit more damage relative to its cost.

Builder Demo

I’m just fixing some bugs and cleaning things up at the moment in preparation for an update to the Builder Demo. I’ll do a mini-update when that comes out sometime between now and the next news update in two weeks.