Here's some screens of the UI. From my devblog: https://halfgeekstudios.wordpress.com/2 ... irst-look/
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I’ll be the first to admit, I am terrible at making good looking & functional UI. Functional yes, but not functional & good looking. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile"> So I will keep it simplistic, minimal and hope that the ease of function will work for most players.
Upon landing on a planet, you proceed directly to the Mercenary & Merchants Guild HQ at that location. It’s often a more seedy spot, where anything goes.
Here, you can access the trade menu to sell/buy goods, hangar menus to buy/sell/store modules as well as ships.
For Modules, each ship share 5 main categories for upgrades: Energy, Armor, Shields, Engines & an Active Slot. Each slot, there's many options, but players have to pick & choose. There's definitely trade-offs with module choices.
The weapon slot & size depends on the ship itself. If the ship has secondary weapons, such as launchers or drone bays, it’ll be displayed.
I’ve made the launcher/drone bays universal, of different sizes, from S to L-Class. Missiles, Torpedos & Drones have sizes accordingly.
The idea is a S-Class bay can hold X/Y/Z of S/M/L-size armaments. This means smaller ships with S-Launchers can still pack a bunch of high-powered Torpedos or they can pack a lot more smaller S-size missiles.
Its flexible to allow players to pick & choose what best suits their playstyle.
There’s also storage for modules on your ship, with larger ships having a larger capacity storage. It’s useful not only for storing loot from battles, but also extra-modules in case the situation changes and you need to re-configure your ship.
For ships, there’s a wide range, with each ship focused for a particular niche within its class, of which at launch there will be three: Corvettes, Frigates, Cruisers.
Corvettes are the fast, agile & evasive. They have an innate 50% evasion against weapons of M-Class or above, this means Frigates & Cruisers have trouble 1) tracking such a fast agile target and 2) even when they fire, it may simply miss completely.
The goal is to make them good as entry ships, but also the later Faction Corvettes or advanced prototypes can be used as an end-game ship by players who love the fast & furious gameplay (ie. with good flying, Corvettes can dodge ALL enemy missiles!).
Frigates sacrifice some speed & evasion for a lot of firepower, as they can equip multiple M-Class Turrets as well as often packing bigger Launcher & Drone bays. They still have an innate 25% evasion bonus against larger turrets, so its a good trade-off vessel.
Cruisers lack speed and have no evasion, but have higher armor that defeats smaller weapons, and more weapons options, as well as access to L-Class Turrets which have by far the most firepower.