I've finally got around to getting the mission system that was demoed for Release something XIII into the game, proper! I've given the game another test, just to be on the safe side, and it works pretty well! As a side-note, since players can accept missions from anywhere, the communications from Alice are triggered from having a certain number of missions complete. I've also given thought to giving prices on bases a bit more fluctuation, and the request of mission payouts being dependent on how far players would have to travel.

Though, even if I do everything that I just mentioned, and even if Ebeth submits additional ship sprites, there is one thing that makes me queasy about doing another release: the utter lack of actual combat that the game has. We've been pretty under-the-wraps about how we would like combat to function so far, so let me tell you a bit about that.

The question about how we would even go about combat first came up back when this was being first developed for the McBacon Jam #1. Personally speaking, I would probably have been happy with using the standard combat engine, and doing touch-based encounters because I am lame. However, Jeroen_Sol's idea was to do tactical combat. Whither he was going off the energy from his then-newly-revived Fire Emblem thread, had illusions of grandeur, or whatever, we sorta rolled with it, very much hinging on Glasses' scripting abilities to pull through. Glasses did suggest an action battle system to supplement his movement script, but didn't seem to mind trying for the tactical system.

To be honest, I have no idea how far Glasses has gotten with this, if at all. His last point of contact with us is a post on the team's Quick Topic in February. There's also Jeroen_Sol, who I have not spoken to since Release Something XIII. If memory serves, he said that the event timing did not agree with his schedule very well, but would try his best anyway. I was aware that there was a time when Jeroen was in the process of moving during the jam (or maybe it was during Release Something XIII? I forget.), so, his lack of participation could be linked to issues that are still being resolved from that.


I dunno. Maybe I should not worry about the combat engine for a while longer, and just get out what we can, given our situation. In that case, I would really like to have something out for the 7th of May because that happens to be my five-year anniversary of being on RMN. If I can't make that date, somehow,well, there's always the 20th of May?