I’m back from my post-release vacation and excited to get back to work on Reassembly! These are the things I plan to focus on in the coming month.
New Features
Modding/Workshop support
Reassembly already supports a form of “User Generated Content” through the fleet sharing wormhole/agent system, and many users have had fun with the sandbox or by modifying cvars that control game behavior. I know for a fact that many Reassembly players are significantly better at building spaceships than I am. As a first pass at modding support, I want to expose and document the existing config files and let people publish their changes to the steam workshop, making it easy for other players to enjoy them. The initial mod workflow would be something like this:
- In game, convert an existing save slot containing ship designs into a “mod” for new-faction mods, or create an empty “mod”. A mod consists essentially of a number of text config files and spaceship files.
- Edit text files to define the mod. This includes adding new blocks or modifying existing blocks, adding or modifying spaceships, changing one of nearly 300 cvars that control various game behaviors, modifying the world generator config file, tutorial or message text, shaders, etc. You will be able to reload config files in-game and view relevant syntax errors.
- In game, upload the mod to the steam workshop.
Players will be able to download mods through the steam workshop and then turn them on or off and select precedence (if mods conflict) in-game. I’m excited to see what people come up with! I expect modding support to go through several iterations as we work with modders to expose more functionality and improve the workflow.
Modding support should allow the community to experiment with tons of new content much faster that I would be able to support myself.
Better Fleet AI controls
Better control over AI, both in tournament mode and in the main game, is probably the #1 requested feature. There is already a system in place for generating AI programs based on ship design and faction personality, so most of the work is in UI design. I’m planning to have per-design (this ship should only attack from long range, this ship should always rush, etc.) AI policy plus global fleet policy (everybody stop shooting, attack anything that moves, etc.).
Other Stuff
Localization
A significant fraction of our players are not native English speakers and translating the relatively small amount of in-game text and providing better default keybindings should improve their experience. The game already uses Unicode internally so code changes should be minimal. If anyone is interested in helping translate the game into their native language and/or setting up keybindings, please contact me.
Complete Gamepad Support
Likewise, adding gamepad support to the editor and menus would not be a huge amount of work and would be cool.
Wormhole server / feed
I recently added a search feature to the wormhole feed – there used to be a giant list of users at the bottom of the page but it was getting out of hand. I’ll continue to improve this system as well as the game server which processes wormhole uploads decides which agents populate new worlds.
Bugs / Polish
I’ve received several reports of black screen issues on certain just-barely-supported video cards. There are a few lingering general crashes, and glitches like agents spawning inside of asteroids. The tutorials, as always, need polishing. Some players are reporting trouble downloading agents when starting new games. There are always thousands of little changes that significantly improve gameplay but aren’t worth writing about individually.
Conclusion
I expect this work to take up most of April. Game development is an iterative, community-driven process and we’ll take another hard look at the game for June and see what needs to be done.
