Keep Your Ship

2026-03-17

When I started working on eXoSpace, I had a vision that boiled down to "let's mix Reassembly with Nova Drift!"

Having a roguelike shipbuilder would be unique and cool: instead of choosing mods you'd get new modules and add them to your ship. Well, turns out that does not mix well, no matter what I tried. Luckily I am not infinitely stubborn and I got plans to let you keep your ship!

Lesson Learnt: Do Not Make Players Sad

First let's read some typical feedback and reviews I got about the game:

"[..] I don't see the point of saving the design of ships if you lose all blueprints and metals after every mission. [..]"

"And the bounty hunt feels not really rewarding - it doesn't matter if you rush through or if you spent your time exploring and building a massive ship - you only get some credits to unlock some perks or prebuilds but what you did to reach that goal is practically meaningless and gone. [..]"

"I really liked the game, however after i completed my bounty i lost all my unlocked blocks. and my uniques. also my ship i spent hours designing...."

"Bounty's hunts main detracting factor is that you start "at scratch" in each new hunt."

Ok, looking back it's all quite obvious. In my defense, this is my first production game, and it's been quite a learning curve! Anyway, enough about that, I wanted to write about how to fix the meta game. Again. For real, now.

Keep Your Stuff

The idea for the fix is quite simple: you keep your current ship and module blueprints after completing a mission. I want a feeling of "ownership" of your ship to be central to the game mode.

However, this causes two problems:

• Balance: players can end a mission with anything from a small fighter (when beelining to the target) to a large cruiser (when visiting the entire map and extracting maximum resources). The fighter will have a hard time in a subsequent mission, while for the cruiser the following missions become trivial.
• Replayability: one of the attractions of the old setup is that each mission was new in the sense that you would get a new set of parts to work with. I need to figure out different ways to increase replayability to compensate for this.

I'm now trying out several changes to fix the balance issue:

1. You keep your ship, module blueprints, metal, antimatter and exotics resources when completing a mission, and can take these on your next mission.
2. The maximum ship cost (metal / antimatter / exotics) will be capped based on your rank. This limits how big or advanced your ship can be during a mission, but the cap will increase rapidly as you increase ranks.
3. Completing missions grants XP. Your rank increases if you have accumulated enough XP. Doing more difficult missions grants more XP, while having a higher rank reduces XP gain. In other words: as you increase in rank you have to do more difficult missions to increase in XP faster.

For the replayability part I have some other plans:

1. The introduction of save slots that allow you to easily start from fresh and try something new without losing your existing progress.
2. Replacing the GG bounty by grants, offered to you as a reward for increasing ranks. Grants can then be used to train your crew or activating modifiers. Tying the crew and modifier unlocks to rank simplifies things quite a bit. I'm also thinking along the lines of having a "build" of crew and modifiers per save. Having multiple saves allows you to try out different builds and see what works well. Alernatively finding a "reroll grant" would allow you to retrain the crew and get different modifiers.
3. Choosing a faction when creating a new save. Each faction will then have its own module unlock tree. Enemies will no longer drop blueprints directly, but tech chips (or something similar) which can be used to unlock new modules in the tree. New (playable) factions can be unlocked using achievements, e.g. by beating a specific boss. At the peak of the tree will be a unique module specific to that faction. To make this work well I may have to introduce some new factions or redesign some existing ones.

Ideas for Repairs

In addition I'm toying with the idea of making your ship's repairs cost resources, with resources being quite abundant.

You'd have to manually trigger the repair process. The amount of resources you can carry along (and pick up) is also limited by the resource cap, limiting the amount of repairs you can do during a battle. Enemies also carry a limited amount of resources for repairs. Resources now may be dropped when any part is destroyed, not only when the core explodes, which makes life a bit easier for close-combat specialists.

This change could make combat quite a bit more interesting and difficult (I'd have to tune the difficulty a bit to compensate). No more magical infinite repairs for you, but neither for your enemies.

Of course this is all in development and may be subject to change!

Progress

I've actually got the save slots implemented, changed the code so that the ship and resources are stored at the end of a mission and used on your next, and am now introducing the balance fixes.

In addition to all this I plan to add several new (partially player-made) missions in the next update as well!