Ship Update: Introducing, the Leo!

My favourite thing to do with this project is to add new ships, but a lot goes into it, and there are so many other things that need to be done-- many of which aren't nearly as fun for me.

So, I'm happy to introduce the latest ship: The Leo.

This ship is mainly built around its secondary weapon: An array of heat-seeking missiles. Its primary weapon is a somewhat weak plasma attack that causes a minor burn effect. Burn damage can build up very quickly though, and become quite dangerous, so having this as a primary attack makes the Leo unique and formidable. This pairing of weapons wasn't an accident, of course. Any ships with the burn status effect will be detected from a greater distance away, allowing easy targeting from a distance. I briefly considered giving this ship a scope to assist in the long-range capabilities, but I quickly realized that this would make the heat-seeking feature completely pointless.

The Leo's ability is self-destructive: Once activated, the ship super-heats itself. Any damage will cause it to explode, causing (potentially) massive damage to surrounding ships. The caveat is that the power of the explosion increases with the amount of damage the Leo has taken. Using it when you're also dead will deal more damage than anything else in the game so far, but a Leo with low health is likely to be a high-priority target to prevent this kind of attack from being carried out.

One other fairly significant update is to the way type weaknesses work. Previously, each ship was assigned a weakness to one of the four main weapon types. I couldn't figure out a good way to make each ship's weakness readily visible to the player without it being in the way. So instead, I went with Pokemon/Fire Emblem route, and made a rock-paper-scissors relationship between the four types, which can be seen from the pause screen. A ship's type is defined by the type of its primary weapon, which is always visible on each of their mini HUDs. The few ships whose primary weapons do not fall into one of the four type categories simply do not have type weaknesses.

All other minor updates are listed in the text file included with the game package.