Ship Crafter - Semi-Launch and looking for alpha testers

So for the last few months I've been working on a little browser game called (for now at least) S.H.I.P C.R.A.F.T.E.R. It's a pvp focused browser game set in space where you buy ships, buy modules, configure and optimize the ass out of your ship, then send it off to combat with other players.








The Game: It's currently hosted the subdomain of my other site. Once it's developed a bit more and I've settled on a name I'll buy a proper domain for it:

http://shipcrafter.stillholdsup.com
(Note: Some of the artwork is just temporary artwork from conceptships.blogspot.com. If anyone has an issue with it, I can pull it and replace it with some other sort of temp artwork). I've replaced them all with some open license images.

Testing: At this point the game works but needs some balancing. You'll also find some areas such as the docks and rankings pages are turned off. At the moment I want to get the combat and ship building working really well before moving onto developing any new areas. What I'm looking for is some Gdnetters to create and build a ship, enter combat a few times and report their feelings on the game as well as any bugs. Is the interface shit? Was ship building confusing? Is the text based combat unbearably boring?

Registration: At the moment there are no players (woo!), but ships can be entered into combat for up to 6 hours, so don't let the ghost town scare you off. Hopefully we can get a few of us playing! Also to make it really easy to signup you can just register with a username and email address and the system will just auto-generate a password and email it to you so you don't have to bother coming up with and storing a new one.

Tutorials: You will notice that at the moment there are no tutorials or help guides of any kind. I'm going to post some guides here in this blog to get everyone started.

Future Development: At the current point for testing there are only 3 E-Class starting ships. Once some feedback rolls in and the games gets a bit more balanced I'll add in some more ships and more items. Or this post will garner no attention and I'll cry myself to sleep. Either way.


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Tutorial Overview:
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I'm going to make some more posts covering these areas in more detail later on. For now, here is a very rough overview of the game to get started.


Overview of ship building: Ships come in two varieties - Ship Chassis and Ship Packages. A ship chassis is the bare bones frame that makes up a ship and has certain bonuses applied to it which helps it's primary usage. A ship chassis comes with an attribute called "Area" which allows you to install "System Modules".

System Modules are what make up the core statistics of your ship, such as your powergrid size, the base speed of your ship, the starting mass and strength etc. These are installed into the chassis and consume "Area".

Item Modules are installed on top of a ship now setup with it's system modules. These are items such as afterburners, shield boosters, targeting computers etc. These are designed to extend your ship beyond the system modules and customize the roll of the ship.

If ship chassis are the basic frames that make up a ship, ship packages are buying them pre-built with system modules (albeit at a marked up prices). Since the numbers of system modules can get complex fast, numerous ship packages will be available (only three right now) that allow you to buy ships already setup with certain types of play in mind. At some point there might be 8 different types of "Hawk Chassis" type packages you can buy all with different strengths and weaknesses.


Overview of Combat: So you've got a ship cobbled together with some items you found in the marketplace with stats you only half understand! Now you can enter your ship into combat!
As you install items on your ship you will see your performance index will go up. There are several brackets of combat you can enter into, each with their own PI restrictions. If your ship is 170/PI, you can enter any bracket upwards of 170/PI (which is all of them). If you have 580/PI you will be in bracket C which has a restriction of 770/PI, meaning your ship cannot exceed 770/PI or else it gets bumped into bracket B. If your ship is 771/PI you're probably not going to do very well in combat so you're better off coming in at 669/PI and being at the top of bracket C as opposed to the bottom of bracket B.

You are free to fight against players in the bracket above you and if you win you'll get much more XP and money rewarded, but you cannot enter combat lower than your current PI class.

Note that this is different to the chassis class - The ship chassis comes stamped with a PI class on it, but this in no way restricts an E class chassis being sent to fight in bracket D. The class on the chassis is just a rough estimation of it's ability based on it's area, slot count and bonuses.

When you enter combat, you will see a dropdown for "Time Period". This is how long your ship will stay in combat for. If you select 1 hour, your ship will search for other players in the bracket you chose, fight, get any possible rewards, then automatically enter into combat again. This is a good way to rack up money and xp while being away from your pc. If you change your mind you can leave combat at any point by clicking "Leave Combat", but any matches in progress will still be carried out before you return to dock. Also note that you can't work on your ship while it's in combat (but you can buy other ships and work on those in the mean time)

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So like I said, very brief overview. I'll be doing some more posts covering system modules, chassis, some more details on how combat is figured out, which stats are most important and other areas soon.

I'm interested to see if anyone is interested

Cheers!