Cart (0)“Private.” The First Sergeant grimaced as the explosion rocked the narrow interior. “Medes once posited that if you discarded a single grain of sand for every dollar of bad debt created by this godsforsaken city, Canceron would run out of beaches within ten years.”
Walls groaned, and fine concrete dust fell in gentle spirals to the floor. Sandstone concrete creaked, but the church interior held firm.
The private was young, local, and shuffled uncomfortably. “Illumination has tagged toasters three blocks to the south. The trajectories match.”
“How many?” asked the Sergeant, not looking up from the map. He flicked to the left, causing the fuzzy 3D meshes of the city skyline to jolt sideways.
The private licked his lower lip. Nervous. “Eighty percent. We still can’t account for every fifth shell.”
“Then we don’t move.” The Sergeant tapped a confirmation notification that came through from Civ.Eng.14423B. They’d picked up a dozen civil workers four weeks ago, people who knew the underhive of cable tunnels and mouseholes that infested the subsurface of Psammos. They guided the engie units through the subterranean mazes, were handy with a spanner themselves, some even with a gun. This city was pockmarked with their work; fortifications in some places, sabotage in others.
The only thing that stopped the Sergeant from sending his unit to a building rigged to collapse from a single shell was this map, and their job notifications.
Another explosion, direct hit. The private picked himself up off the table, shook his head. The reinforcement work once more held the chapel walls up.
“You want to keep your hearing, private, I recommend you go tell illumination to find that last mortar crew. Until you have a tag, we continue to abuse the hospitality here of the Lord Apollo.”
“Sir.” The private ran out. The stone gazes of the Lords watched him retreat from their advantage above.
It’s been well over a month since the launch of Sin & Sacrifice and the Veterancy Update, and we hope you have been enjoying the new campaign, fleet chatter, crew veterancy system, and other new features.
You might have seen it mentioned that Sin & Sacrifice closed off Season One of Battlestar Galactica Deadlock. As we prepare for Season Two, the development team here Black Lab Games have been hard at work on more feature enhancements and improvements to the game. In this dev diary, we’ll talk about some of what we’ve been working on lately.
A common bit of feedback we’ve seen since launch is that for some users, the user interface for Battlestar Galactica Deadlock can be a barrier. Some players find it takes more time than they’d like to give orders to their ships.
When we started designing this game (over 3 years ago now!), we modelled it as a digital version of a tabletop miniatures game. The way units are controlled, and the way orders are given to your ships, were all designed with this paradigm in mind.
The game has changed a lot since those early days. Whilst the miniatures paradigm was a good starting point, it doesn’t completely reflect the game as it stands now.
With that in mind, we’ve taken a step back to look at what improvements we can make to the user experience, and how we can streamline the most common actions players use. Work is on-going, and we feel we are making some great improvements that will make commanding to your ships less work. We’ll share more details as these changes are further tested and developed.
Another change we are looking at is the handling of bullets at the end of the Simulation Phase. If you’ve ever watched a full battle replay, you’ve probably noticed that a ship’s guns will stop firing periodically. This happens because the combat model of the game doesn’t support having “live” bullets in play between rounds. That will change with the next major feature update.
We are overhauling the projectile system, and it will soon be able to handle bullets being “live” during the phase while you give your ships new orders. The result of this change is that there will be more bullets flying, and replays will look more natural as the periodic pause in firing will be eliminated.
These are just two of the upgrades we have in the works...we’ve got some really exciting additions to the game in the pipeline. Whether it’s delivering on long-time fan requests or new twists in the journey of the Galactica as the Cylon War progresses, we can’t wait to share them with you.
Until next time. So say we all!
