I sometimes tend to forget that from its essence, Avaruustaistelupeli is a local multiplayer party game. As a reminder, we started having testing workshops more regularly. They help find issues that are hard to detect when playing/developing alone, and when properly organized, can also be one of the funniest moments of the development process.

But they are also surprisingly hard to prepare: list of design goals should be clear, all previous issues should be fixed and everything should be bug-free and stabilized. As drinking and coding don’t mix, I usually avoid modifying the game during the workshop. This means that preparations may easily take a day or two.

In the 11.3.2020 workshop there were four participants, a table full of pizza and a fridge filled with beer (workshops can get quite expensive). And of course, something new to play with.

The first version of cooperation mode is now added. Up to three human players can battle together against one AI ship. Currently the AI is far too selfish to cooperate with anyone, but I might add team-vs-team -game at some point. Below is a video of the very first cooperative game, and a collection of some other matches we played.

We also held the first four-player tournament where every player had a gamepad. Input system recognized all four controllers (two XBox-controllers and two Logitechs) without any problems. No calibration issues either. Nobody had difficulties to tell one’s own ship, crosshair or even lock icon anymore, so all the recent changes seem to be improvements.

I made three new ships to replace the old pre-built ones. Each of them has only three special modules, so they should be easier to handle. For the cooperative game, there’s also a stationary ship with immense firepower and strategic points that detach large parts when destroyed.

Naturally, some room for improvement was also found .

• Energy consumption and reactor overheating are still quite hard concepts for new players to grasp. I have no real solutions to this. Suggestions are welcome.
• Players often blew energy balls on their own ship without realizing what happened. Also, launching missiles too rapidly may cause them to collide with each other and cause damage to the launching ship. I try to figure out some kind of better visualization for these mishaps.
• AI struggles turning off the secondary modules (especially shields and beams). It also has something against bonus objects as it tends to shoot them before collecting.
• The tutorial relies too much on states, and the player can easily get stuck without a chance to finish it. Fixing this will take some planning.
• Some smaller issues: energy overflow warning should be turned off when the ship gets destroyed, bonus objects shouldn’t have negative effects on teammates, AI opponent should be clearly distinguished from humans in coop etc.

There are already more features added to 0.5.1 than I intended. The following weeks I'll probably concentrate on polishing and releasing the next version.