Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role-playing Game Update #40

Around the time of the previous development update for Iron Tower Studio’s Colony Ship RPG, we learned of the unfortunate passing of Iron Tower’s lead animator Ivan Soloviov. Understandably, this resulted in a fairly considerable setback for the team. Still, we now have this new update that shares some additional details and lets us know that the game’s combat demo should be launching early next year.

Be sure to check out the update itself for some screenshots and concept art, and here are the text bits:

Why the silence?

As you probably know, Ivan Soloviov, our animator, the guy we worked with for 14 years, died on Sep 5 after being ill for months. It’s a hard thing to deal with, so I didn’t post any updates since his death (it just didn’t seem important). Ivan handled animations, creatures, and everything that goes onto the character model, from weapons and armor to facial hair. The armor system is a lot more complex than the one in AoD which had only body armor and helmets. In Colony Ship we have boots & leggings, combat vests, jackets and coats, armguards, helmets, goggles, and breathing masks. When Ivan got ill, our progress in these two high-visibility areas had slowed down to a crawl and what we expected to wrap up in early 2019 was pushed back over and over again. We’re making progress now but we’re way off schedule, of course.

What’s done: vests, boots & leggings, armguards, helmets, goggles, respirators, weapons; energy armor, implants, most ranged and melee animations for male characters.

What’s not done: combat stimulants, jackets and coats (we have the “prototypes” that have been much improved and optimized; so we need to make variations which is relatively easy but like everything else it takes time), female animations (won’t take long once all male animations are done), and hair styles. Jackets are being work on right now; should be done by the end of the month.

We have enough to start beta testing the combat demo and this time around we fully expect to finish the rest in 2-3 months. We will start the first round in mid Jan (closed beta with new participants added each week) with public release around mid or end of Feb. Better late than never and all that.

Implants:

Implants offer another way to improve your character and give you yet another reason to explore abandoned decks and places of ill repute. There are seven implants with two modal upgrades each:

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Perception +1

Upgrades:

This handy piece of military surplus kit will upgrade your sluggish and dimwitted retail security guard into a trigger-happy killer. Point Zero instantaneously responds to sudden movement in the user’s vicinity and sends a reaction impulse directly to the motor cortex, bypassing the clumsy and unreliable decision-making process. [Currently outlawed in the European Federation.]

Snap THC +10, Reaction + 15, Stagger +10, Aimed -20

A cost-effective alternative to actual highly trained (and therefore greedy and entitled) snipers, NoScope 360 reprograms the subject’s ocular system to reproduce the enhanced accuracy of a high-powered scope, boosting precision shooting at any range but negating the ability to quickly zero-in on targets.

Aimed THC +10, Critical Strike + 5, Critical Damage +25%, aimed attacks only (all other attacks are disabled)

Combat stimulants:

Regen – 5HP/turn for 4 turns; the strain on the body results in -2 penalty to all stats for the duration of combat. The regen effect isn’t stackable (so you can’t use two stimulants in one turn to boost regen to 10HP per turn) but the side effect is, so if you use two stimulants per fight, you’ll severely cripple your character. Still worth a shot if you have 2HP left.

Super Soldier – 2-4 Extra Melee Damage, +4 AP, +10 Evasion for 4 turns; same side effects as above.

Lockdown – neural resistance is maxed for 4 turns; best defense against mental attacks, especially for solo characters.

Other areas:

On other fronts the work continues: we’re almost done with the Armory, working on the Factory (the biggest, most open Mad Maxian level) and Hydroponics[…]

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your families. Thanks for stopping by.