Part of the reason for why I decided to launch SBMS when I did was because the changes I wanted to make were going to qualitatively change the way the game played and felt. Players wanted the menu simplified and other quality of life changes that made sense, but didn’t fit into the vision for the game that I had. I made the first game as complete as I could, and started work on the sequel in December of that year, before SBMS was fully released.
A lot of the changes were massive improvements in the programming of how things worked. I remade a lot of systems and art that had superfluous components. There was a list of units the player owned, which had no practical purpose. To avoid dealing with it, I added a system in SBMS where each type of unit had a variable to count how many of it the player owned. Before that, the game had to go through the owned unit list and count how many Valkyries you had. The list stayed in the game because other things used the list, so it was more work to remove it than to leave it. in ABMS, I had to search for every place in the code where the list was being referenced, and change them to use the new system.
Most of these changes aren’t visible to the player, but they do make it easier to implement future developments and make the game less bug-prone. A lot of them would have made it easier to add new units and abilities, since now new content is mostly standardised. Right now, adding a new player unit requires me to make the unit’s object and assets, but also to add it to the player unit list, and add its abilities to the unit abilities list. Previously, I had to also add their information to the Planning room, Assembly room, and Aircraft Lab room, because their abilities, model numbers, and blueprints were only used in those rooms, so their information was also only stored in the those rooms. When I later decided I wanted to use their blueprint somewhere else (like the Library room), I had to either copy the information over, or move it to a central database. Now, every unit has its specs saved to the database when the game starts up, so players can see any information about any unit I add without me having to do extra work.
The other changes I wanted to make were visible, like the new customised colours, which required me to change every unit model and UI element to be black and white. A lot of abilities have improvements for tactical depth, such as airmechs being deployed with a delay and at a targeted location, to avoid just hitting four hotkeys and send out your unstoppable mech army to finish the job. Lasers now fire at the location you targeted, instead of the angle that the unit was with respect to where the mouse was. Ships that were moving would keep moving, aiming their laser at what was now the wrong direction. The weapon pressure system, ships having much larger energy pools and energy costs, rotational deceleration, aircraft now having to select mutually exclusive abilities, and other changes are collective a huge improvement to the gameplay, but I imagine don’t actually look that impressive because they’re viewed in isolation, making them look like an indeterminate amount of small improvements.
These were changes I (mostly) definitely wanted to implement. I wanted to give players what they asked for and finally develop all the cool ideas I had. But that was a lot of work, and even after being satisfied with the gameplay and visual changes, I didn’t think they were enough to justify a $6 game. So I got to work finishing the new missions, updating the old missions, and redesigning the unused missions that I had simply thrown onto the end of the SBMS campaign.
This is not how you make an expansion pack.
What I should have done was implement the major requests and done the story. Everything else makes this game essentially a full sequel rather than an expansion, but I also feel that too much has stayed the same to justify that. Now I’m wondering if the next game will be too similar to the expansion pack because I already implemented so many changes. I could’ve given players more content and updates by now, and had more money. But I think in the end, players are getting more for the same price, and that’s (probably) worth it.
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