More on Scout Ships

Enemy Scout Ship (Unity scene view screenshot)

Last week I posted some gameplay design options for how Enemy Scout Ships operate in Star Jet Alpha. Didn’t receive any feedback on the post, but I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about this topic. Here’s the current approach -

• Scout Ships will launched periodically from an enemy base

  • A Scout Ship launch will be triggered only if an enemy base cannot “see” the player

• The Scout Ship will pick a destination point to travel to

• The destination point will be a location furthest away from the launch point (this will give the Scout Ship a decent travel length)

• Once the Scout Ship reaches the destination point, it will reverse course and return to the launch point

• If the player enters the Scout Ship’s radar range (ping ring), the Scout Ship will reverse course and return to the enemy base it launched from

• If the player destroys the Scout Ship before returning to the enemy base, points are awarded

• If the Scout Ship returns safely to the enemy base, a guided missile will be launched from the base

  • The rationale here is that the Scout Ship found the player and now the base can target the player even though it may not be able to see the player

• No more than one Scout Ship will be active on the map at a time

It occurred to me that the launch location was important since the Scout Ship shows up on the player’s mini-map. Initially, the Scout Ship was being launched from a spawn point at an edge of the map furthest away from the player’s current position. This was to ensure that that the Scout Ship did not spawn within the player’s view. With the introduction of the mini-map, that no longer made sense.

The Scout Ship functionality is the last game feature to implement before finalizing the demo. The next bulk of work will be to build in a way for demo players and testers to log bugs and provide feedback. The plan is to make a menu item from the Options menu that will link directly the feedback site page. Since the game will initially only be released on PC, launching a browser window from within the game should be a smooth way to capture the info from players.

Let me know what you think about the new Scout Ship approach in the comments section below!