Impact Damage

Ship's masses change so much, it was getting pretty difficult to have a statistic on projectiles that appropriately communicated impact - the force of a projectile hitting your ship. Simply adding a force wasn't enough - small ships would reach ridiculous speeds while large ones would quickly not receive any. I also wanted stats to be as separated from looks as possible.

So now impact damage is reduced based on your ship's category. This means larger ship categories might be completely immune to the impact of small weapons. Impact also decreases global control of your ship which slowly comes back - reducing your turn rate and drag control. Ships receive the force, start moving and will have a bit of trouble controlling themselves after an impact.

Since categories are so important now (they determine basic movement capabilities), there's a little helper bar to show you how far you are from reaching the next category.

Finals are over, too!

Writing on your ship

Unity's new UI is fantastic for creating interfaces, but it turns out it's also very useful for general text in 3D space. It only took a few hours but I have surface text on blocks, so you can write the name of your ship or anything really anywhere on a block.

Writing the name of the ship

It even supports rich text so you can change the color!

Just another fun little feature for personalizing your ship. It supports regular rectangular blocks and normal slopes (so no corners).

Finals are almost over, so these little bits and a lot of tweaking are the most I can do at the moment.

Asteroid fields and ship wrecks

Some battles are heavier than others - they will leave wreckage that a player can salvage. Of course, you have to get there before any other scavenger. Ship wrecks are based on the ships made by players.

I also made some improvements to the asteroid layouts - asteroids close together will have smaller asteroids in between them. Basically there's more asteroids and they're placed in a more artistic way in the sector.

Other upgrades this week are to ship damage effects - not done yet, but with Unity 5.3 I can do some more interesting effects on ships and other meshes.

New Shield Effect and World Map

Decided to put some time into a real shield impact effect, and here's the result.

Also made the world map a bit more pleasant to use. Definitely feels at least a little prettier too.

When in local sector mode...

... and when in world map mode.

General Update - Graphics, Bugfixes, Tutorial

This is a busy time, with lots of university projects and exams coming up followed by a move to California in January, so there are my excuses for updates.

That said, I did finally make the switch to Unity's deffered rendering - it allows me to use HDR and get some proper post-processing effects. It also means I simplified all the layers and simplified the whole process. I get fancy distortion effects in return as well.

I also took a lot more time than usual to playtest the game and managed to fix a lot of bugs, including a whole rewrite of the music system. I still need a major sound pass (something I know very little about) to make it all more satisfying.

The new lighting in action, along with a much easier to follow tutorial.

Ship physics have been slightly reworked so that ramming is a more effective tactic and "grinding" damage has been reduced. You'll need to really charge your enemy to attack them, and you'll probably need to disable their engine core to slow them down and do it. Ship speed is also detached from the number of engines you have, so your ship's visual design is no longer tied to stats. It makes movement more predictable.

Station - Visiting Actions

Made a new main menu background

Of course, there should be a reason to come back home and at least visit your station. As of right now you can add a shipyard to your station, allowing you to edit your ship while in your base but also order the construction of ships to add to your fleet. They're automatically stored in your base and unmanned and cost as much as building the ship yourself. If you ever find yourself with too many credits and not enough ships, that's one way to spend them. Keep in mind salvaging ships is not 100% effective!

Build-a-ship menu, much like the ship loading in the editor

You can now also send crew home from anywhere - boarding craft will undock from your main ship and warp to your home sector or dock with your station if you're already there. Taking out crew, however, is reserved for when the player is home.

Boarding craft going from your ship to your home station

I'm also still adding upgrades and encounters to the game, optimising and bugfixing. A lot of the goals I had for stations are complete, only a few features left to implement!

Station - Away Actions

When you're not near your station you can still do most of the actions - managing ships, calling them in for backup, starting research missions or exploration missions, sending crew home or just emergency warping your fleet home. The interface is all there and the features are almost all complete.

Station Management while away from home

Starting a research project

Managing missions and ships

Research projects simply take one ship and use it to research modules and upgrades. Larger ships speed up research since you can place more crew towards the project. So far the rewards are random, but you are guaranteed an item you haven't unlocked yet.

Exploration missions are a different beast, you essentially send a fleet to do what the player does. They might come back with additional crew, might lose or gain some ships, discover new technology, etc... It's essentially like simulating a second coop player. The risk is real but the rewards are much higher than the relatively safe research projects.

Calling in backup

Backup arrives

At some point you'll find your current fleet just isn't up to par, maybe you underestimated the enemy fleet - and you'll have to call backup. If your station has the crew to man the ship, it'll be sent on it's way and warp to your location ASAP.

Just a little update - there's a lot of UI building for missions and station management in the works - not quite ready to show it yet!

Giving the player a home - Mother Base

General Update

I've got a big semester and it's not going to get any easier, that said I still try to do the most I can on this project (which is why I haven't bothered making any kickstarter or Early Access campaigns). That said, there are other delays that I have to pass through that make the release of this game difficult.

I've made some art style changes that I'm as of yet unsure of - namely much more bloom and flares using HDR cameras. This unfortunately disables the near perfect antialiasing of forward rendering and the default Ambient Occlusion of Unity. Long story short - I'll need to buy a more advanced AA solution and a much better AO solution as the default one is downright awful.

The Main Title screen will randomly choose a background. It's nice to be welcomed by a different spacescape.

Mother Base

There's nothing quite as boring as mining in space sims. So why have the player do it in a game where you capture ships and add them to your fleet? What if you capture a ship but have no place in your fleet? What happens when you rescue willing crewmen but your ship is full? The answer is the player needs somewhere to call home, some place to store resources and allow him to manage a larger fleet.

Stations are already very easy to create - just pop open the station menu, spend some credits and there it is - the default station. They're already easy to edit - since you just use the normal ship editor anyway. The infrastructure to store ships is already in place, including their configuration (mining, combat or cargo). From there you'll be able to send ships on different missions - when you discover a profitable asteroid field or a planet with valuable resources, you can start a mining mission from the menu and if you have enough ships and crew to man them, they will be sent to that destination. Or you can start a research project that requires crew to dedicate themselves to it and will unlock an item. All of these are slowly completed over the course of sector jumps (just warping to another sector moves the missions along) and have various rewards.

It's already easy to edit the stations

I'm also planning emergency station services - calling in ships to bolster your fleet in your time of need, firing a superweapon from light years away, etc... there's a lot of possibilities here and it gives the player a nice money sink. It's also pretty easy to expand the system to do a lot of things or more complicated economics. You need more crew and ships to start missions, you need a bigger station to store more ships and crew, and you need credits to make a bigger station.

After these features, it'll be time for the final stretch - the game could use some balancing and testing.

Enhanced Encounters

Exploration is pretty key to to this game, so an overhaul of the encounter system was overdue - having a single random list of encounters won't cut it.

So I got to work - encounters now are based on a main/bonus pool system. Main encounters are selected from a list of possible encounters (and are finally weighted!) and occasionally bonus encounters that spice up the gameplay a little are thrown in, like anomalies or asteroid showers, etc... The nice part of this is that suns, planets and orbits can now contribute to the pool with their own specific encounters, so a specific type of planet might now have a colony you can invest in and get some passive income from it. Encounters can also be unique so that only one shows up per solar system. The result is a much more varied and balanced experience - neutral hubs are not so rare, some quests are much more difficult to find, etc... Entering a new system is like entering a new dungeon level.

Maybe someday there will be a system for overtaking entire sectors, but those mechanics are a bit beyond me when I'm trying to rush to a release build!

Another feature I've been working on is the ability to load ship schematics. When you capture a ship, not only do you get that ship added to your fleet, but you also have its schematics added to your ship library - which means you can build it at a shipyard. So if you see a design by another player you really like, you can load it and edit it.

Of course, to make it balanced, you won't automatically unlock all the ship's weapon schematics - if you don't have a turret unlocked but the ship you're trying to load does, it won't be added to the ship when loaded.

Drone Bays

I wanted to wait a while for Drones to be implemented, but damnit I wanted a new type of subsystem and it seemed like the perfect time.

So now I have three types of drones and a bunch of upgrades regarding drone bays. Drones can be shot down by EMP and anti-missile turrets and they only deal damage to the hull of a ship - very useful since you get to attack subsystems directly. If a Drone Bay is destroyed all the drones are destroyed.

I made a quick little video to show them off!

Visual improvements - Engine/Game preview

I took some time to make important optimisation and figured I might as well try and make the game a bit prettier.

First things first, the engines. I wasn't very comfortable with how I was handling engine glow, didn't fit in with the game's minimalist style and also didn't run particularly well. Some small vertex color tricks later and you get engine glow for a single draw call on any ship (since they're not moving anyway). It looks a lot better on larger, slower ships.

Second small improvement is the image preview of a game you're about to load. Witcher 3 had it and I figured it couldn't be that difficult to do it with Unity. Didn't take long to implement but it's totally worth it.

As always, the focus is on adding upgrades, items, any sort of content, and that's the sort of thing I don't want to spoil - I'll have to show them off on video.

Upgrades

Finally got a good round of gameplay testing in, so I think it's time I finally make some videos.

First one's about Upgrades. Upgrades can be really anything - they work like patches on your ship and can modify the behaviour of any component - turrets, subsystems, engines, etc... This particular one replaces your basic missiles with kinetic missiles that move faster, are more agile and deal additional kinetic damage.

Other upgrades include things like dealing more damage when attacking the back of a ship, modifying anti-missile turrets to redirect missiles instead of damaging them or even unlocking abilities for your basic subsystem.

All in all implementing it was easy and the system is very versatile. It also replaces the expertise system - makes upgrades much more satisfying to have instead of a linear stat upgrade.

Missions - and Tutorial!

Like I mentioned, the game is in the stage of finally adding content!

The most important part is a goal - someway to drive the player to explore, not just for the loot but for some sort of story. Had to finally step in and make a real Dialog System, tied to encounters. It took a while but it's very flexible and already supports a few decisions. Complex quests might be further away.

The simplest contract - "Kill this for me for X credits"

Responding to a simple distress call - careful, you might answer it too late!

I didn't know how much I needed quest markers until I added them. Being procedural, the galaxy map can be a bit disorienting.

You might notice I simplified the UI quite a bit. All these borders felt silly and Web 1.0, and I may have overcompensated on the sobriety. That said, I like it and it's unified across the game like this. Took some inspiration from Besiege - simple and clean is better for this sort of game.

A sample of the new UI.

With the new dialogue system, it seemed it was time to finally add a tutorial on how to play. Completely optional and skippable, but it introduces you to the basic controls and what you need to survive. The nice part is the tutorial is really just an encounter you find on the first sector that only plays once. No extra code needed!

With all this modal dialog and quests, I decided to add a tutorial.

In the next update I'll explain the new Upgrade system (it's really neat, I promise) and the small AI improvements I've made. Down the line is a "build me a ship" system - where you get to unlock certain ship blueprints that you can add to your fleet for the building cost, maybe even unlock them by quests.

Twitch Streams

Over the last month I've put as much time as I could into the project, however I tend to not show it much.

But I am close to a release! The key mechanics are working and I'm focusing on filling the game with content - different turrets, subsystems and abilities, polishing the graphics, fixing some code that was laying around and being lazy. I overhauled the lighting system to be dependent on the background nebula, making it all a bit cozier. I fixed up a lot of UI elements, noticeably the main menu and options menu. I even added in a crude conversation system so encounters could include choices.

New simple Main Menu

New fancy Options menu

I've begun streaming the game on my twitch channel (where you can also see the past broadcasts). The goal is to have some video to show off to make a trailer and start getting any sort of community feedback.

Soon enough I'll have to look for someone to do sound effects. I can manage cheap gunshots in Audacity but when you need audio and you don't want to learn how to do it for a few months, you get a professional!

So, in short, lots of content to be made with all the key systems in place and a lot of polishing to do!

First legitimate play session

I have an internship, so progress is quite a bit slower, but I'm still working on the project!

Also making pretty good progress - I played for a few hours and discovered some major bugs which were fixed in the latest build. The game is technically playable right now, but there is a lack of encounter diversity and weapon/subsystem variety. I had to redo the boarding system to make it much simpler - you can now only board a ship if it has 0 crew inside and you have enough extra crew to command it. Boarding craft also now never really miss - they will never block on a part of your ship. I realize this isn't realistic, but it makes for a much less frustrating experience when you don't have to manage the boarding party.

Also took ~10 minutes to add a quick combat music system. It's rudimentary but it serves its purpose for now - only requires a bit of smoothing out.

See those arrows on the edge of the screen that point to things? Like every other game? I didn't know how much I needed that before I added it. Helps with navigation so much.

Battles!

Enough about the Context Menus! I made some actual content this time - there's a new type of encounter where two fleets from different factions are already fighting. They won't target you initially as they're busy fighting each other.

I also added back in asteroids, although they're not quite up to par just yet. Definitely need a few new variations on their shape at the very least. I've also added the occasional Dyson Sphere around a star. In the future, certain stars will have environmental hazards, especially if you're very close to them - red giants should never be "safe".

I've also added a few abilities to the Warp Core and the Hull subsystems - a Tractor Beam and an Instant Repair system respectively.

They don't do much yet but they sure look pretty.

The Warp Core's ability is a handy tractor beam.

Context Menus

It really was time to make a context menu - there really is no other way to manage different controls based on different targets. The amount of time this saves in linking scripts and objects together is amazing too.

This way I can reduce clutter on the main screen too.

As for the flashier stuff - see those five subsystems at the bottom right? They're your 5 essential subsystems - Engine Core, Life Support, Warp Core, Targeting Computer and Hull. Other subsystems are optional and usually provide a special ability. Why not have an ability for the basic subsystems then?

• The Engine Core allows you to do a short instant warp to your target. Useful in clearing distances slow ships have problems with - nobody likes slowly crawling to a Warp Gate or shop with your cruiser.
• Life Support now has the "Board Ship" ability. So now any ship can send boarding craft.
• Warp Core I'm not sure yet what it'll have.
• Targeting Computer will probably allow you to instantly reload all your turrets.
• Hull allows you to boost your defenses for a few seconds.

The cooldown on these is pretty long, since they're very strong abilities.

I put the Fleet in Warfleet

Now the game actually lives up to the name - you can control a fleet of ships.

Ok so it's nothing fancy yet, but at least it's not called Warfleet for nothing.

Ships you capture will follow you around, try to position themselves correctly next to your ship, warp along with you and soon enough I'll have some decent AI for them.

How to capture a ship :

• Reduce its crew - by destroying life support systems or special weapons
• Cripple its engines - so your boarding craft can reach it
• Destroy its targeting computer - so your boarding craft doesn't get shot down
• Send enough boarding craft to pilot the ship - this splits your crew. As usual you need enough crew to use your ship AND the target ship.

Expertise or How to Unlock Items

By default, I had a rigorous inventory system where to place a turret you needed to spend an instance of that turret. While that's all realistic, and could have allowed some deeper management of inventory space, ultimately it got in the way of making the ship you want as quickly as possible and added a lot of farming just to find enough of one turret. The truth is, it's a lot more fun to just build 20 small missile turrets and watch your volley being fired than hunting 20 of those parts and hoping to find them.

The solution is an expertise system. You gain expertise with an item (turret, subsystem, etc...) by interacting with it - either by being damaged by it, killing a ship that has it equipped, dealing damage with it or purchasing a blueprint. In turn that item levels up with your expertise. Turrets do more damage, have more range, are more accurate, etc... while subsystems perform better, have more health, lower their cooldown, etc... Every item has a minimum expertise before you can build it yourself.

Now, how do you balance this? What's to stop a player from making a small frigate but adding 256 small missile launchers? Well, each turret has a few minimum requirements:

• Building a turret isn't free and is included in the total cost of your ship
• Each turret requires one or more crewmen to use it - it increases the mininum crew needed to use the ship
• Large weapons have massive recoil that can shift your ship and reduce accuracy of your volleys
• (Maybe, maybe not) turrets require a certain ship class before you can equip them. This feels arbitrary so it may not be present.

Not much has changed with the editor, so no build for this update - in fact, I probably won't have a release build until the actual game part of the game is polished and complete enough. This isn't just a game about making spaceships after all!

Star Map - An Introduction

The map has been relatively complete for a while now, but I haven't had the opportunity to show it off.

Already implemented:

• Warping to other sectors
• Warping to other solar systems
• Map Controls and Map View
• Dynamic description of the sector before warping to it

Left : viewing a solar system
Right : viewing the galaxy






What I actually implemented in the last few days is adding shipyards, shops and recruitment hubs to sectors. So now, when roaming the map, you might encounter an enemy fleet. Destroying them nets you some space bucks that you can then spend to hire more crewmembers, strengthen your ship or buy blueprints to unlock ship parts (like turrets or subsystems).

Hey, this is more than some kickstarted games have to offer, so it's pretty great. Technically this is "playable", we now have the basics for exploration and growth.

Shipyards always look the same - you want to be able to notice one and also fit your ship in it. Shops and recruitment stations however, are based on user-made ships - in fact, if you don't add engines to your ship, it will automatically be loaded as a station. In the future this would allow the player to place their own stations in sectors, maybe to mine gas or minerals and have a steady income.

I don't have a build for you this update, the world exploration mode needs to be much closer to completion before I feel like I can release it. That said, it's not as far off as it seems.

PS: It turns out the bug in the last version only happens if you use Anti-Aliasing with only Ambient Occlusion turned on. Unity's implementation of AO is nowhere near the quality I want in the final version, so this bug will definitely be fixed, most likely by buying another AO asset or just making my own.

The "Exam season is almost over" Update

EDIT: I've been told there's a bug where ships are completely invisible for certain people! This is strange, as I can't reproduce the bug on both of my machines, so it's probably a shader error on specific hardware, or missing meshes. I'll be sure to look into it as soon as I can. The last update is still available if you want to check it out.

Still alive! I'll have quite a bit more time to spend on this project over the summer so expect more updates starting in May. As for this update, I tried to cover the major criticisms of the ship editor - minimizing the UI, better camera controls, better display and a few bug fixes.

The Player Controls have been completely revamped - and some subsystems have been removed. As such, there are now only 5 basic subsystems:

• Hull : Protects the other subsystems from damage (although not entirely, when weakened, damage will still get through). The hull's health is based on the volume of your ship.
• Life Support : Heals your crew. If it is deactivated, your crew slowly suffocates and a ship with no crew can be captured to join your fleet! Your crew automatically repairs your subsystems (although you can deactivate the repair of a subsystem by right-clicking it).
• Warp Core : Allows your ship to function - destroying it destroys the entire ship.
• Targeting Computer : Allows your ship to use auto-targeting turrets (to defend against missiles) and enhances aiming/range of all turrets.
• Engine Core : Allows your ship to move.

The idea is that this is enough to manage in one game - you can add up to 5 additional subsystems that will have various abilities. It also means you can specifically target parts of a ship to allow for an easy capture.

I'm also working on using the Unity 5 assets better (read: fancier graphics), and overall world generation. I've added shipyards that allow you to edit your ship, pirate encounters and hostile fleet encounters - the most basic types, really. Up next is a major revamp of asteroid fields, shops and recruitment hubs to hire crew members.

As always, you can get the latest version here. See top of post - if you want to play, you may have to download an earlier version until this invisible ship bug is fixed!

Unity 5 Update!

You might notice the graphics got a big boost with this update, thanks to Unity 5 now offering all the engine's features. So that's the big update! Lots of stuff behind the scenes but nothing quite as interesting as post-process effects.

Download here.

PS: My game is on itch.io for AGDG Demo Day.

Editor Update and World Building

Not dead! Just busy with university! Still, I've had time to make progress on creating a world, loading/saving games and exploration. I'll be sure to make a video once it looks clean enough to show.

That said, I've also made some pretty major enhancements to the editor as presented in the last few posts.
- Made engines look a bit better.
- Replaced Unity's awful trail renderer with a custom one. It's not perfect just yet but it's already more versatile.
- Added help boxes.
- Finally made a clean single-animator editor system.
- Added a gizmo to move/scale/rotate selected parts, made it screen-space as well.
- Loading a ship should now be MUCH faster - some of that code was old and downright offensive.
- Ship info should be more accurate.
- Added more sounds to the game, but they don't seem to work 100% of the time, probably due to Unity.

So far, this would be a near-final version of the editor. I'll be focusing a lot more on creating exploration-related content in the future - the basic exploration mechanics are already in place!

You can download the latest build here. As usual, if you like the ship you made and want it included in the game by default as a random ship, feel free to send it by mail for now. Maybe one day this will have steam workshop support (can't be that hard, can it?).

Update for the weekend

Won't have much time this week for work on this project so here's a bunch of quick fixes and enhancements to the editor.

- Transform Gizmo now always the same size on screen
- Fixed stat bonus being applied twice - it's why other ships couldn't attack more than once every 3 minutes.
- An early attempt at custom physics.
- Fixed a lot of "expertise" numbers.

About expertise :
Items (Turrets and subsystems that cast abilities like Flares or Redirection Field) are unlocked by earning expertise which you get from being damaged by a turret, defeating a ship using that item or damaging a ship with that turret/using the ability. After unlocking, any additional expertise allows you to upgrade your performance with that item - turrets will have smaller reload times, will generate more heat, abilities will have shorter cooldowns, etc...

About the custom physics, we want to :
- Make sure no ship turns too fast - no fun flying a simple drone that turns on a dime.
- Make sure large ships can still turn at a reasonable rate (180 degrees over 30 seconds sounds fair)
- Allow the shape of to affect the rotation rate like PhysX intended

Download the latest build here.

Ship Editor v2.0

A lot of things needed fixing and a lot of things were fixed.

• Rewrote the code and UI that handles turret groups ingame. Right-clicking them now toggles autofire.
• Added Move/Rotate/Scale gizmo. Not quite perfect just yet but already better than the standard buttons.
• Fixed test ships not exploding in the ship editor test mode. They died but important particle effects were missing and the ship could not play its death animation.
• Fixed naming issues - mainly the ship editor wouldn't rename the ship on load and this caused save issues
• Fixed saving the ship if there are no engines, it's not entirely possible, just don't expect your ship to show up as anything but a station ingame.
• The Ship Editor is now a single portable prefab with one large animator. This simplifies the work of porting it over to different levels and should make it a much better experience to use.
• Added help boxes (that you can hide at any time).
• Fixed Options in the main menu not being useable and also fixed them not actually changing options. Currently I do not have access to post-FX due to Unity Pro, so some options will be missing.
• Modified the engines' look, they should look a bit more "lit-up" now.
• Messed with turret/projectile damage, force, expertise and cost values. Dual Cannons should no longer send your frigate spinning and throwing off the second shot.
• Added sound to most UI buttons.

I'm not quite ready to say I'm done with the editor, it needs a lot more field testing. That said, I should be able to start working on world generation/factions next week.

Download here. If you want your ship included in the final game as a default ship, feel free to send the .ship file by mail (saved ships are stored in Data/Ships/User) for now. Maybe someday there'll be Steam workshop integration, you never know.

Feedback on the editor:
- Camera controls are weird
- Manipulating parts is a pain
- It's not clear at all that placing regular blocks is a 2-click process (spreading them over a surface)
- Crashes on saving (failed to save, probably)
- Physics are weird - I'll probably switch to a more specialized solution where max speed and rotation speed is calculated manually for gameplay reasons. Nobody likes a ship that takes 10 minutes to align to a warp target and nobody wants to pilot a ship that turns way too fast.
- No tutorial on combat
- Somebody ran the game on a toaster at 2fps which should not be happening

So for now I've added a simple transform gizmo. It's not perfect but it's better than a million buttons on the right that don't really mean anything.

I've also got access to a second Unity Pro trial, so expect some pretty shaders and a lot of optimization.

Ship Editor

Here's the first release of the ship editor. There's no limitation on what you can build so go crazy if you want to. The only possible limit is the number of vertices in the ship (~65532), which clocks in at about 8000 blocks, the other limits are for gameplay reasons - MAXIMUM 10 turret groups. It's very important to take all the turrets you have and group them together - only identical turrets can be grouped.

Press "Done" to test your ship and how it handles in the current physics (which are subject to change). You can spawn a random enemy ship by pressing "+Enemy".

How combat works - click on a ship to set your target and then click on the subsystem you want to damage. The hull will naturally block either all the damage or part of it depending on its health. Different subsystems have different effects when damaged or destroyed - the warp core causing a complete meltdown and destroying the ship.

Right click on subsystem icons on the bottom right to set whether they should be repaired or not. Your repair rate is based on your crew percentage - crew can be lost to a broken life support subsystem (since there's no air).

This is the first release of anything ever I've done, so any bug reports or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Download here.

Obligatory first post

This blog will be dedicated to a single game project. I don't have a name just yet, so Project Warfleet will have to do.

It's an open-world procedural space exploration game with roguelike elements using Unity3D. This should hit enough buzzwords to be greenlit. The idea is to build your own capital ship and share it with other people so they can show up in their games. You can capture ships and add them to your personal fleet and eventually overtake entire systems. Think micro-M&B: Warband.

There's also support for faction creation where you can specify what ships are included and what ranks exist. These factions will show up randomly in games as owners of systems.

Here's the main menu for now. It'll spawn some random ships and have them warp in and out. Sometimes they'll attack each other, it's all just for show.

Expect the ship editor soon - most of it has been complete for months it just needs to be packaged correctly.