[DEVBLOG#320] Vanilla Gravships Expanded - MVP infographics

Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand-new development blog!

Today, I want to take you behind the scenes and walk you through our overarching approach to developing Vanilla Gravships Expanded - Chapter 2: The Battle. When tackling massive, ambitious projects like this one, our development philosophy always revolves around reaching a crucial milestone first: the MVP.

Since you are so closely involved in our development journey, I want to take a moment to explain exactly what that means and why it's such a massive step forward for the mod.

In game design and software development, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product.

It represents a fully functional, baseline version of the project that ticks all the core mechanical boxes we set out to achieve. It is not about cutting corners or releasing something unfinished; rather, it is the foundational build that contains the bare minimum content required to successfully deliver our core idea and prove that the gameplay loop works.

Think of it like building a house: the MVP is the stage where the foundation is poured, the walls are framed, the plumbing works, and the roof is on. It might not have fancy wallpaper, carpets, or furniture yet, but it is a structurally sound, fully functioning building.

For Gravships Chapter 2, aiming for an MVP first was absolutely essential. To reach this stage, the mod needed to have all of its major, complex mechanics fully implemented. Because this chapter introduces so many interconnected systems, getting to the MVP actually meant that the vast majority of the heavy lifting and fundamental coding had to be completed.

Reaching the MVP stage is always an incredibly exciting moment for the team, and primarily, for me. It is the critical turning point in the project's lifecycle. We can now focus on 'fun' new content, and I absolutely love it.

I am incredibly proud to announce that we have successfully reached the MVP stage for Vanilla Gravships Expanded - Chapter 2!

We have successfully ticked off all the core requirements and mechanics we wanted to implement in this baseline version. The engine is running perfectly, which means our entire focus now shifts to the creative side. Over the coming weeks, we will be packing this solid foundation full of new things for you to find, unique elements to interact with, and fresh content to explore.

Lets take a look at what is a part of the MVP of Vanilla Gravships Expanded - Chapter 2:

Minimum viable product is the first testing version of Vanilla Gravships Expanded - Chapter 2, offering majority of the mechanics but with little content. Content exploration will be done once these basic mechanics are established.

That being said, the minimum viable product will offer majority of player-facing gravship content. The mod already offers the research projects that allow further progression through gravtech:

🟢Gravship defenses research project - Unlocks new gravship defenses.

🟢Advanced gravship weaponry research project - Unlocks the new offensive solutions.

🟢Advanced orbital tech research project - Gives access to new orbital technologies meant to help with survival and living on the gravship.

When it comes to new offensive solutions, players have access to:

🟢New small gravship turrets - essentially the compact autocannon, uranium slug turret and a minigun turret, to help repel any invaders.

🟢New large gravship artillery pieces - gravship howitzers, gravship beam emitters and gravship javelin launchers.

🟢New gravship turret targeting solutions - a gravship targeting console which can link with not one but three gravship artillery pieces, as well as gravship bombardment targeter, which can be equipped on a colonist but has limited range.

🟢Warpods - Buildable just like cargo pods, and launchable from cargo pod launchers, warpods deliver devastating payload to enemy at extreme speed. Additionally, a hellpod style warpod allows players to carry boarding crews in the same way.

🟢Gravmines - special mines that can only be placed on space terrain, gravmines detect enemy entering it and release a devastating detonation.

We also need to introduce new defensive measures to allow players to have prolonged fights over long range. This means the following content is now available:

🟢Gravship subarmor - a special substructure which can’t be destroyed by enemy gravship artillery, and also absorbs all the damage caused by crashlanding on that tile.

🟢Gravship armor - a heavily fortified gravship hull wall, capable of taking severe beating. It also intercepts any gravship artillery projectiles fired by the enemy, which means they won’t explode in the middle of the ship.

🟢Buildable gravship shield generator and a new 🟢large gravship shield generator - These shield generators are changed to generate heat as they absorb damage, giving them a chance to overheat if they absorb too much. Because of that drawback, we have made them buildable.

Crew security is also a big focus point in the Battle chapter of Vanilla Gravships Expanded. For that, we have prepared some new devices that are meant to improve the safety of the crew:

🟢Vacuum warning light - A special light fixture that detects vacuum in the room and immediately orders everyone without sufficient vacuum resistance to leave the room.

🟢Escape pod - Special, pre-fueled, floor-mounted escape pod that can be used to rapidly evacuate crewmembers in the event of gravship destruction. It can be used to trigger ship-wide evacuation.

🟢Combat vacsuits and 🟢combat vacsuit helmets - Special, reinforced, military vacsuits with improved protection.

🟢Astrorigs - Accessory in a form of a backpack which not only acts as an oxygen pack, providing the user with vacuum resistance, but it also allows fast traversal through space terrain, as well as performing oxygen-fueled jumps over long distance. Only works in orbit.

We also want to add some general technology that players mind find useful as they progress with research project. As such, following new structures can be built on a gravship:

🟢Astrofuel pod launcher - A compact, 1x1 pod launcher which uses astrofuel instead of chemfuel. It offers the same maximum flight distance as a normal pod launcher, but only takes up half the space and connects to the astrofuel network.

🟢Airlock doors - Resilient doors that act as a vacuum checkpoint, vac barrier and autodoor in one, offering excellent insulation and giving that epic science-fiction look.

Gravship combat features a structure destruction system. Each structure that takes enough damage to be destroyed now has a chance to turn into a destroyed variant. Not only it makes the beating gravship takes look more impressive, it also allows the player to deconstruct these destroyed structures to get the normal deconstruct cost back. It’s very useful during repairs.

A crucial part of the gravship combat system is 🟢visibility, which is generated during gravship launches, but also when players use gravship scanners or gravship artillery. There are, however, several things that reduce visibility gained:

🟢Signal jammer - New functionality is added to the signal jammer. It lowers visibility gained across the board, but it also comes with a unique ability that delays enemy gravship bombardment when an enemy gravship threat becomes present.

🟢Gravlaunch cloaker - A new quest reward item that lowers visibility significantly.

🟢Electric thruster, large electric thruster and giant electric thruster - Three new thruster types that greatly reduce visibility gained during gravship launches. As a drawback, however, they do not increase the maximum substructure count like the astrofuel ones do.

When the gravship becomes detected, a special 🟢fight event is triggered. For minimum viable product, the only possible fight is the 🟢enemy warplatform.

This is a multi-stage event. Player receives an apt warning that an enemy warplatform is running targeting scans on player gravship, giving some time to prepare for the combat encounter. Once the timer runs out, the warplatform location spawns near player gravship. This warplatform immediately begins bombarding the player gravship across the world map.

Warplatform uses gravship 🟢gauss bombards artillery pieces, which are unique to warplatforms. They have two barrels, but fire weak, slow moving, easy to intercept projectiles that are not as devastating as the usuall gauss artillery.

Player can either defend against it and destroy it, or run away. The warplatform is operated by an 🟢enemy warcomputer, which can be either destroyed or 🟢hacked to yield valuable gravdata and an orbital bombardment targeter. Destroying or hacking the warcomputer ends the threat of the warplatform completely.

Since we see gravship combat as this ‘wide umbrella’ of combat encounters in space, we’re also adding a new type of insectoid geneline that exists in space. All of those insectoids are completely immune to the vacuum of space. Exoinsectoids come with following content:

🟢Exoworm - A small, weird and puny worm that deals low damage. 

🟢Exopede - A small variant of a megapede, exopedes are a little bit more tanky and fill out the role of a spelopede, but in space.

🟢Exoleech - A large warrior worm of the exoinsectoids, exoleeches deal high damage and are difficult to take down, but they are relatively a rare sight.

🟢Exoworm knot - If enough exoworms get together, they form an exoworm knot. It’s an incredibly tanky adversary, which when damaged, ejects the exoworms as single enemies. Upon dealing damage, it has a chance to infect the target with an exoworm infestation, which will have an exoworm eject from them when it matures inside their body. Ejection itself is not lethal.

🟢Exohive - The hives of the exoinsectoids. When they take damage, the exoworms inside awaken and move the entire hive. It’s a slow-moving combatant, but tanky and dangerous.

🟢Subcreep - A special type of substructure that exists around the exoinsectoids.

🟢Giant wormspitter - A large insectoid turret that represents a huge worm that spits out exoworms over the local area. When ignored, these turrets will quickly fill player gravship with dangerous exoworms.

🟢Infested asteroid - A new orbital location that can be found via orbital scanner. Infested asteroid is filled with subcreep, giant wormspitters and exohives, but it also features large amounts of valuable resources in the form of twisted steel, twisted gravlite and twisted components.

🟢Space infestation - We want infestations to also be a threat in space, but they work slightly differently. Several infested rock chunks come flying in from the side of the map in a tight cluster. Upon crashing into the gravship, they create exohives, glowpods and exoinsectoids. They can be shot down using point defense turrets, but the amount of rocks flying in is quite daunting.

We’re also aiming to add some new locations that will populate the world, using some of the assets and prefabs we have already prepared for this mod:

🟢Gravship husk - This location just appears in orbit when the world is initially generated, and can be explored whenever. It features some chunks of old gravships, now completely battered and destroyed. Some resources can be salvaged from them.

🟢Dormant warplatform - A new orbital location that can be found via orbital scanner, it’s a dormant warplatform - identical to the one that attacks the player when visibility exceeds the threshold. It is, however, dormant, and activates only when the player arrives at the map. It also features a warcomputer which can be salvaged.

🟢Vacstone meteor - Vacstone is a resource normally only obtainable from the orbit, but we want to allow for rare situations where you can obtain it from the planet surface. This rare quest will spawn a location of a vacstone meteor somewhere on the planet where you can go and mine it.

Now, with the existence of gravship combat, we want to double-down on gravship combat content, and aim to add some new gravcore quests that appear when the player progresses sufficiently in the base game gravcore quests. For minimum viable product, we have the following plan:

🟢Gravship graveyard - A massive graveyard of derelict gravships and destroyed, battered husks. Somewhere inside is a signal jammer powered by a gravcore that needs to be extracted if you want to leave the area. The problem is that the area if a minefield, with dozens of gravmines everywhere the eye can see, making it incredibly dangerous to traverse the empty space between chunks of twisted steel.

We also have some mechanical changes planned that will make gravship playthroughs a bit more engaging:

🔴Prison breaks can now occur in space - if some means of escape from the gravship exist, prisoners may try their luck and run towards them. This creates a new challenge players will need to keep in mind when having prisoners in space.

🔴Astropurifier, astrofuel optimizer, oxygen reclaimer and gravlift are now buildable - Previously quest-reward exclusive, with the new progression these structures become buildable.

🔴Raids in space now spawn with oxygen packs, and sometimes astrorigs - This ensures the enemy raiders can’t just be ‘waited out’. These oxygen packs do not drop from raiders - they turn into oxygen instead, which means raids are a potential renewable source of oxygen.

Lastly, we want to make some new quest rewards a thing - especially quest rewards related to combat and overall continued progression.

🟢Warcomputer - Player-obtainable warcomputer which greatly improves all combat and defensive capabilities of the gravship.

🟢Gravfield dilutor - A brand new gravship extender which actually lowers the maximum amount of substructure that can be obtained, but offers unparalleled gravship substructure range.

🟢Astrofire launcher - A unique missile launcher firing incendiary missiles that explode into devastating astrofire.

Things marked with red emojis we simply didn't implement yet, but we are working on them!

I'm attaching infographics as images for this post so you can actually see how everything looks!