Allegiances (Patreon)

Hey all, I've been sharing heaps of images of the new UI over on the #supporters channel on Discord, but I have some secret stuff to share here.

The 8 Companies

The Soltrium galaxy is dominated by eight intergalactic companies. Their names and logos aren't finalised yet but I'm pretty confident that Rocket and I both like them.

I need your feedback in some areas as we have multiple variations of each logo. For example here are the Terra logo variations:

Here are some of the Nova variations. I love the look of column 1 and 2, but Nova is a weapons manufacturer which means column 3 and 4 are more appropriate as they represent chain-fed ammo. Could use different variations based on the weapon!

Integration

A player's allegiance with a company will be tightly integrated with progression. Players will begin as a Devoid, pledging to no-one but themselves and their personal gain.

To join an Allegiance and unlock allegiance-specific rewards, players must complete tasks/pledges/oaths. I'm undecided on the word yet, for simplicty we'll refer to them as tasks for now.

As an example, completing the Steel Skin task will increase the player's standing with Corahk:

Once a player has completed a certain number of tasks for a company (some companies are harder to impress), the player will be given the option to pledge allegiance to that company. This company will become their active allegiance and the player will be able to display it on their Player ID and unlock company-specific rewards.

I don't want players to change their active allegiance freely, but I don't want them to be locked in. I'm thinking there might need to be a proton cost to pledge to a company, or a 7-day cooldown between pledges.

Players will still be able to progress tasks that don't belong to their active allegiance.

For clarity around the wording: a player pledges allegiance to a company, meaning the term 'active allegiance' refers to a company. For example if I pledge allegiance to Irridyne, Irridyne is my active allegiance.

Rewards

This will take a lot of work, but I would love to have company-specific cosmetic rewards that unlock when completing a certain amount of tasks for a certain company.

For example:

• Completing 2 Aegis tasks will let the player pledge allegiance to Aegis and display the Aegis logo in their ship and Player ID
• Completing 5 Aegis tasks unlocks a Gold+Black weapon skin for all weapons
• Completing 10 Aegis tasks unlocks the Aegis Annihilator character model

I tried creating a super-simple weapon skin and I now understand how much effort Rocket has put into creating all his textures. It's not easy! Here's an Aegis skin that I came up with:

Conclusion

That's all for now, I'll be spending more time implementing the new UI in-game and I'll send videos here once it's functional.

I'll also be sharing more info about the 8 companies, what they specialise in and what their tasks will revolve around soon. Some companies might even have hidden sub-divisions that you can pledge allegiance to, but you won't know they exist until you discover them...