Intercept and Escort

One of the gameplay features I’ve been working towards recently is dialogue with NPCs, both on planets and with spaceships encountered in free flight. This post is about the approach for spaceship comms.

As Pulsar Kick features disproportionately scaled solar systems, there’s not much time to complete a conversation without travelling a fair distance across the solar system which didn’t feel right. I tried pausing the world sim during dialog but this felt unnatural, and an attempt to make the ships come to a stop to engage in dialog seemed to break the flow of spaceflight.

What I settled on in the end is when comms are initiated, the player cedes control to autopilot which rendezvous with the NPC. The camera pivots to a front view between the player and NPC ships to signal to the player that they’ve handed over control. The ships then follow a repeated escort course (avoiding planetary obstacles!) while the player can move through the dialog options.

I like how the dialog feels with this approach, and the escort flight path and camera has allowed for some cool screenshots of the ships flying in tight formation.