Custom Map #1831: Next Steps. By: Gotha

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Author: Gotha
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[Lost at Sea #5] With the data processing factory gone our Hero Ticon has only one option left to find his ships blackbox and learn who he is and where hes from, The AI Construct he accquired in his last battle told him to seek out the King of the Golden Pirates, The only connection he has to that is Danu, Whos currently attempting to take some kind of Merc base. [Previous level: Boundless Knowledge] [First level: Lost at Sea] -Dev note: Its been a long while, i never intended on stepping away from particle

[Gotha]

Righto righto! been a long while since i last wrote a dev insight (or made a level for that matter)

Where did i go? Short and simple of it, i was dealing with getting ghosted by my GF at the time, not fun and decided i needed to destress, after a month or so i just felt bad for never picking the story back up and didn't touch particle fleet until now, not much else to it honestly

As for the actual dev troubles/funny bits for this time? Well i discovered if you give a ship negative energy generation then the shield texture will endlessly expand which is quite funny, Sadly negative innate energy gen will lead to negative values that cause freakouts and visual bugs, beyond that i knew the idea i wanted for the map (Friendly AI + attacking from multiple fronts) and the original was smaller in scale with you trying to take a highly powerful energy source to starve the enemy fleet + shipyard, that was changed to them defending the core and you having the shipyard as a third front to work with, the level likewise was redone from the ground up at that point so it was bigger

I also re-wrote basically all of the talking about 3-4 times in the process of making the level, somewhat because i tend to write all of it very late at night then proofread in the morning hah! But yeah there was details like the captured construct from the previous level talking actively during some parts but due to how much freedom the player has to get any pickup in any order i found it difficult to write in Danu actively reacting to the construct without either A: making the intro longer or B: having it basically reintroduce the guy like 4 times

Now how did i beat the level? Focus on getting the shipyard ships up as fast as possible and ABUSE OMNIS, they can reach quite a boatload of enemy structures early on, likewise friendly attack waves can be used to secure areas around their base, thus your HQ can make due with smaller ships and funnel the main might into your shipyard fleet, the level honestly is a lot easier than it looks so long as you play aggressively, thus the large number of energy pods, later levels will have more proper energy management, consider this an early level cheatcode of sorts, give the player a power trip before things get tighter