I thought I would share with you guys a little bit of what I'm working on.

There is a reason that I picked the name Artificer for this game, as a little history lesson: The game was originally a demo called Eclipse I built in my spare time using C++ & DirectX 9. It was more arcade back then and used very badly traced art assets from another space game.

[attachment=3393:ss1.png]

The reason for the name is that the intended hook for the game is that the player builds their ships, either from a starter ship or from scratch. When you destroy an asteroid or ship you have debris that you may collect and this can be recycled to build ships.

[attachment=3392:shipeditor.png]

Ships within Artificer are not single entities like most games, they are instead base objects that house multiple entities - ranging from hull pieces to engines and rotors. ShipData as is stored by the game is a blueprint for ship generators to construct these objects. Using this structure I can create tools (as shown above) that allow the player to connect these pieces together using sockets. Sockets are effectively responsible for snapping objects together within a ship, but they can also be used for criteria; is this socket optional? or will it be compulsory where it must have a connection for the ship to be valid. Another example is what type of component can be connected to the socket? a hull piece or only a weapon or engine.

All this aside however this current tool is only able to display the head of a ship piece and you can't really interact with anything. However, within the Unity editor I have created an editor window which functions just like how I plan to make the player interface work (minus the restrictions) as I use this window to build all the ships within the game.

[attachment=3394:Newshipeditor.png]

As you can see the sockets have small circles over them, green means they are connected and orange means they are not. Each component can be rotated and each component that is intractable or does something may have a key assigned to it that 'triggers' its action. e.g. an engine would be assigned to 'moveUp' or 'moveDown' is facing downwards.

This is just a little that happens behind the scenes that I hope you find interesting!

Thanks!