Mission Planning

Evening all, thought I'd give you all a bit of a code update on what I've been up to, and what I'll be up to over the next couple months, now that I've had some time to actually put a bit of focus on mission functionality. If you're not interested in technical stuff, feel free to ignore this update.

My development goal with missions is to, rather than work on them for several months behind the scenes and then dump a fully completed feature, to get the bare minimum functional and then layer features on over time. We've already got a bit of that in with the mission selection UI, and this cycle I'm focusing on the core mission functionality, using Grunt's loyalty mission as a basis. In this upcoming release you should be able to proceed through the mission a bit and see what's there, even if a lot of functionality is missing. Additionally, I've been working on occasional text scenes for you guys, and I believe soon I'll switch over to focusing on Specialist's post-loyalty scenes for that content. This month'll be another random encounter type scene, but next month you can probably expect to see the Grunt relationship get hot and heavy (assuming you don't choose to keep it platonic).

I won't attach any specific dates to when features may be added, and the ordering may switch around a bit, but I wanted to give you guys an overview on what exactly the functionality 'layers' will be. So, roughly speaking:

• Mission/Team Selection UI - basically complete.
• Core Mission Functionality - essentially, being able to select an actual mission, select a team, go through the encounters, and complete the mission. Focus of this release and perhaps a bit into the next.
• Loyalty Mission Content - one mission per Specialist, based on the goals established during the relationship scenes. Completing these will unlock the final tier of Specialist relationships, which I'll be able to start writing some scenes for as we go.
• Exploration - The 'core' functionality will be literally straightforward - you'll proceed through a mission directly from one encounter to the next, checking them all off one by one. Eventually the goal is to have a minimap and path options, allowing some encounters to possibly be bypassed, or for you to go out of the way to hit bonus encounters.
• Rewards - Initially the only reward will be the loyalty of the given Specialist. As we go on however, other mission types will have other rewards, and specific encounters may have additional rewards based on your choices.
• Graphics - This will be a pretty experimental phase. In the past I've purchased a number of asset packs for various backgrounds, such as space stations and what not, but I haven't had much chance to assemble them into anything and see how they look integrated with the assets we already have. However it turns out, it is my goal to have something fancier to look at than the base UI which is there currently.
• Randomization - Other than the eight loyalty missions, there will be more generic missions planned allowing you to continue collecting various rewards, including possible bonus scenes. This will mostly be a writing task, with the requirement of creating a large enough pool of encounters to draw from to keep things interesting, but may also include things like randomized maps to explore.
• Mini-Encounters - At this point it starts getting more into the 'let's see how much time we spend working on Mission functionality before we really need to move on' phase of things, but there may be additional smaller random encounters that may pop up on a map, giving you things like temporary buffs/debuffs, rewards, short scenes, and so on. 

Additionally, to give you an idea on my goals for Specialist relationships, my current thinking is that most Specialists will probably have a couple of scenes in their final tier - the first time scene, the comfortable relationship scene, the threesome-with-another-Specialist scene (combos to be decided at a later date). You'll have the option of keeping relationships platonic, if a Specialist isn't your type, but as those already put us at 24 total Specialist scenes to write up, I can't promise that there'll be a platonic 'path' as far as scene content goes. I am of course open to feedback and suggestions on what you'd like to see as far as relationship content goes, and may do some polling later.

I think that pretty much covers how things look now, though you can expect more updates over the next few months as stuff actually happens. Feel free to let me know what you think, and I'll be back in a week or so with updates on this month's release!