If you’ve read our last two developer diaries carefully, you will have learned quite a bit about the making of the spectacular new space ships in our upcoming outer space adventure Galaxy on Fire 2 – Supernova for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. However, if you’ve not just read about it in theory but also put your learning into practice by spending some time in the cockpit of such a space ship, you’ll know that even the most impressive vessel will be little more than a floating tin can ready to be taken down any second unless it’s equipped with some powerful weapons and helpful gadgets. Needless to say, we will make several new weapons systems and pieces of equipment available in the new add-on and we’d like to introduce some of them in our dev diaries. While today’s behind-the-scenes featurette will put the emphasis on some of the red-hot items and gadgets that will be part of the new expansion pack, the following developer diary will introduce an exclusive selection of the new primary weapons, secondary weapons and turrets to you! We hope you’re as excited to learn more about those new items as we are to talk about them. So let’s not waste another minute and move on to the first new apparatus right away!
In the Fishlabs HQ in Hamburg, the development of the new sci-fi epic GOF2 - Supernova for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is in full swing.
As all those of you, who’ve paid attention during their astrophysics classes at school, will certainly know, an expanding supernova will set free a particularly high level of gamma radiation, which poses a serious threat to hull of every space ship exposed to it. Hence, it is almost impossible to survive in the supernova’s area of influence for more than a couple of minutes unless your vessel is protected by a special kind of radiation shield. And since the new evacuation missions and other objectives in Supernova will require you to spend quite a bit of time in the trouble area, you won’t get around installing one of the new radiation shields in your ship – or else your precious Nemesis or S’kanarr will melt faster than an icicle in hell! Once you’ve mounted it to your ship, the gamma shield generate will create a jittering plasma bubble that surrounds your whole vessel and protects it from the menacing radiation. Since the shield’s duration and resistibility cease with every passing minute, a red gamma bar on the HUD indicates how much time you’ve left until your shield’s power has ceased and the deadly gamma rays will start to damage your ship directly.
Without a gamma shield, survival is nearly impossible in the radiation-poisoned star systems of Fishlabs' new iOS adventure GOF2 - Supernova.
This being said, in Supernova you’ll not only be able to inflict serious damage to other ships, but also to help them out and repair them. Yeah right, all you need to do in order to assist your allies’ ships in times of trouble is to mount one of the new repair lasers and stay close to them. The handy new devices will then automatically aim at friendly space crafts and prove them with a healthy dose of energy that fills up their drained shields and repairs their damaged hulls. Technically, the repair laser is pretty similar to the tractor beam – i.e. a simple ray of light visually enhanced by an animated texture – but gameplay-wise it will add quite a few new possibilities for the players and even be mandatory for succeeding certain story-bound missions.
In Galaxy on Fire 2 - Supernova, the new repair lasers come in quite handy when your allies are under enemy fire.
Another nice gadget that should be mentioned here is the so-called leech beam. Unlike the repair laser, however, this ray of concentrated radiance does not supply allied ships with additional energy but rather does it absorb power from nearby enemy vessels. The mechanisms behind it are as follows. After the target has been spotted, the leech beam establishes a radiation-band between the attacker and the victim. Due to different levels of denseness on both ends of the band, a spectral photon-transport is initiated and hence the attacker is able not only to steal energy from his target, but also to use the stolen energy for the re-charge of his own shields. Quite a handy piece of gear, isn’t it? Like all other new items, there are several versions of the leech beam available on the market and one particularly strong model even requires the player to lay hands on a rare and hard-to-obtain blue print first.
Leech Beams, such as the Crimson Drain, constitute a particularly sneaky means of inflicting damage to your enemy in Fishlabs' upcoming App Store hit GOF2 - Supernova.
That’s it for today, fellow space pilots. As always, we’re very eager to read your feedback in the comments. What do you think about the new gadgets of our upcoming sci-fi epic GOF2 – Supernova and which of the above-mentioned items will you definitely mount to your ships? Oh, and before I forget it… did you realize that all in-game screen shots had been taken from the HD version and not the SD version of Galaxy on Fire 2 this time? The new add-on looks pretty cool on the iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and new iPad, doesn’t it?
Tags: add-on, Behind-The-Scenes, dev diary, Developer Diary, Equipment, Expansion Pack, Fishlabs, Gadgets, Galaxy on Fire 2, Items, Making Of, Official, sci-fi, Science Fiction, Shooter, Space, Supernova, trader
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I hope the gryphon has a high agility. Otherwise it would be pretty sad.
@Carson
What game difficulty do you use? For Easy-Hard I agree, but I find in extreme that even the Archimedes is rendered useless with so many on screen enemies with 4-5 times the health of easy. Added to the “low” maneuverability of the S’kannar (170-ish with pulsed plasma thrust) and lower armour and equipment slots, for a fighter ships it doesn’t seem to hold up as well as the void x does. However, the spread fire could be useful to help mow down enemies, but when you run into as many as 20 pirates at a time, that extra 100 armour helps to just get in the station. Also, with the low number of commodities, the Rhodas on the Void x is all you need in terms of cargo space.
hello, supernova looks great! but I want to know, and I want to clarify what, if supernova will be available only for IOS? because I own android, android 4.1 and talves buy jelly bean, and let me know if it will be compatible, if the reason for not launching supernova to android, I tell you I have understood that jelly bean is impossible to install paid apps if you have not bought if that’s the reason I want you to know, and I look forward to a vercion for android, of course thank you very much, do a good job with their games
@Omnia-x
I usually play at medium-hard level, I just don’t like the 2 energy cell cost for the khador drive when you play at extreme. That said, I have both the s’knaar and the VoidX at kaamo, but I just really like the turret. It is also kind of an early warning system, if all your enemies are out of range, it fires at the closest one, just to show which one to attack first. And I always have a emergency shield attached, so if it goes off I just cloak and as soon as it ends get the heck out of there
@Tony Muller: Yeah, keeping the enemy targeted isn’t always easy. However, as far as I know, there are no plans to enable the pilots to lock their targeting device to a particular ship.
@Sid: Of course we’re very eager to add multiplayer gameplay to the GOF universe in the future as well. But right now it’s still a bit too early to talk about it. The upcoming Supernova add-on won’t contain any multiplayer features.
@Boba Fett: I don’t think we have any concept artworks of the re-modelled Gryphon. But I’ll see if I can at least find an old drawing of the Gryphon from GOF 3D.
@Carson: If I’m not mistaken, there won’t be any ships with more than 15 equipment slots in Supernova. So you’ll have to consider carefully which devices you install and which not. Some of the new gadgets – like the gamma shields – are only required for certain missions, so you can disable them after those missions and install something else instead.
@GA.Miller: The Gryphon is the only old ship that’s gonna make its return in Supernova. The Phantom, H’Soc, the Vol Noor and the Wraith had already been brought back earlier. The Centaur hasn’t really been re-made in GOF2, but it’s served as inspiration for the Bloodstar. So it kinda left an imprint on GOF2 as well.
@Jamie: Supernova will be out on August 30th, 2012.
@Davis Bradley: C’mon, you gotta admit that Alice ain’t lookin’ too bad at all. But kidding aside… we won’t change the presentation of the characters in Supernova, but we’re most likely gonna do so in GOF3. But that one’s still in its VERY early stages and hence it’s way too early to talk about it in more detail.
@Ilikepie: As said earlier, there will most likely not be any ships in Supernova with more than 15 equipment slots. But there’ll at least be a couple pf models with 150+ cargo space and 12+ equipment slots.
@Tower_Defender: Exactly! But don’t worry, you’ll also get to mount quite a few new weapons to your primary and secondary weapons slots in Supernova…
@Keono: Cheers, man! Do you have a personal favourite already? If so, what’s gonna be your fave new device in Supernova?
@tomas: Sorry, but right now there are no concrete plans for an Android release of Supernova for various reasons, the most important of which is simply the fact that it’s very hard for us to earn money on Android due to the platform’s high level of fragmentation, extreme piracy rate and Google’s rather developer-unfriendly rules and regulations. Let’s wait and see how all this will turn out and how the platform will evolve in the future. Fingers crossed that Google can pull it off and turn Google Play into a more mature, secure and developer-friendly eco-system rather soon…
Are there any plans yet on the price of supernova
About when is gof3 coming out
@tobi thanks for telling me, although I really hoped that there would be a ship with more.
@tobi
My favorite is scatter gun but it will be the sheild generater thing am ma bob
@ tobi
tobi you mentioned before having some features for the kamano station any more insight into what any of these will be thanks for your reply regarding the gryphon
I would like to know if there are any plans for customizing the Kaamo Club and the planet itself (say, you rename your planet, design a new planet, find weapons, create a invasion on other stations or change the station layout) i would like that!
thanks @tobi, i am sorry formy android T.T
@tobi
All those ships are right, but I think the zephyr and hawk also had an imprint on gof2. The hawk looks a lot like the inflict, and the zephyr looks a lot like the razor 6.
I like pie
@ ilikepie
What flavor my favorite s apple and strawberry
PIE FLAVOR
@tobi
i’ve spend many enjoyable hours on gof2 on my mac, but there are some part’s of the game that grow a little tedious:
when your cargo hold fills up either through killing pirates or however, you are left with dozens of items. This means when you dock you have to click on every individual item (repeatedly if more than one) to sell it to the station.
I think the option of sell all would save alot of time, with perhaps the option of protecting the few items in your cargo hold that you want to stay there, like energy cells or gunants drill etc.
Also I see you mentioned earlier that no plans for a ship with two turrets but this would be amazing – it looks like the bloodstar already can have 3 turrets with the two circles slots on each wing.
I’m calling it that Alice gets out of void space. I’m gonna be right
@Sid: There are no concrete plans yet… I think it will be in a similar price range as Valkyrie, but I don’t know this for sure. As soon as there are any concrete news, we’ll surely let you know right away.
GOF3 is still in its very early stages and not even the story has been fully outlined yet. It’s way too early to talk about it in more detail. It’ll surely not be out before next year…
@boba fett: Unfortunately, I can’t say more about the new Kaamo features at this point in time…as soon as I can, you guys will be the first to know!
@GalaxyCollision120: Sorry, but you won’t be able to customize the Kaamo Club in Supernova.
@Ilikepie: Yeah, you’re right… they surely bear quite a resemblance.
@staff: I think a button that sells all cargo at once wouldn’t be too helpful, cause most of the time you’ve got quite a lot of stuff on board that you don’t really wanna sell, such as energy cells or equipment you’ve currently uninstalled. If there was a “Sell everything” button, a lot of people would sell these items by accident and then have to buy ‘em again, which would be even more work and clicks than selling the cargo individually. But you’re right nevertheless: It can indeed be quite annoying if you have the whole cargo space filled small quantities of thousands of different items and then have to sell ‘em one by one.
@staff and tobi
I think a sell all button is great, I fly around with Rhoda blackholes, kill pirates, do missions, buy cheap stuff from a stations inventory, then sell it all at Loma. Instead of clicking things around 500 times, I could simply press sell all then buy back the 10 or so energy cells for the khador drive.
To finish my post above, that’s ten clicks instead of 500. Also, though I think this has been said before, it would be nice if you could buy the blueprint items directly from the blueprint list. In stead of flipping back and forth between blueprint and store, you could just buy the items the blueprint requires directly from the blueprint list that the station has for sale.
I think the price should be either 5 or 10 dollars, since it definitely has more content than valkyrie and you guys at fishlabs have put so much work into it. For me, I’m obviously gonna pay for it no matter what.
As anyone thought of having a ship that can be made from a blue print? Maybe something like a “secret” ship that has either great looks or great stats as the reason for going to the expense of making it.
@smither
Yeah they already thought about it, there won’t be any blueprint ships in supernova
In the light of the recent anouncement from CERN you should consider a tribute to Peter Higgs weapon or something. Something like a Higgs-field disruptor. Disrupting the Higgs-field would result in an immediate desintegration of the atoms in subatomic particles. Or perhaps a Higgs Boson multiplier artificiallly enhancing the effect of the Higgs-Boson collapsing the target in on itself.
Just really excited of the Cern anouncement. Keep up the good work!!
@Patrick
I just googled this higgs thing and that’s a brilliant idea. It said without this Higgs boson, particles would just be flying around at the speed of light in random directions, instead it pulls the particles together and there are planets and even life due to it. I can see that being an amazing space weapon-the ships disenigrating into billions of subatomic particles…though that would be overpowered. But I learned something scientific today at least
I like the idea of a sell all button when buying and selling items in the hangar, but rather than have one button to sell everything in your cargo bay, why not have a sell all option next to each item for sale. In this way, when buying 20t of Organs, you can then sell them on with a sole touch of a button. A cormorant with 4 Rhoda Black Holes contains enough space to buy an awful lot. Selling 245 artefacts and 382 Vossk Organs does get a drag after a while. Just a thought…..
@Sid – Yes, As Tobi said in the diary, “Like all other new items, there are several versions of the leech beam available on the market and one particularly strong model even requires the player to lay hands on a rare and hard-to-obtain blue print first.”
WTF, I just was looking at comments two pages ago. I did not realize that I had refreshed the original page of comments.
Now for something a little more valid to our discussion:
@Tobi – About GOF3. You said that it may be out next year. As each DLC for GOF2 is taking about a year, would there be another DLC after Supernova, or does Supernove wrap everything up? Also, if it is not too early for these basics, will GOF3 have our familiar characters, galaxy, and general idea?
Thanks tobi for confirming. You know me and guns. I aint satisfied until my lasers block off the sun
@tony
Sometimes I do that too, but sometimes other comments don’t show up for some reason. Sometimes I finally see comments when tobi replies to a comment I’ve never seen before and have to look back a lot to see it.
so are we going to get any more infor about the other the ships its only 8 weeks away thats just four dev diaries and so far we know a little about the bloodstar and thats all?
Hmm.. With all these new gadgets, none of the existing ships will have enough equipment slots
To mount them without sacrificing necessitys.
One thing.. As I’m jumping to another planet or solar system “loading..” comes up on the screen. Just a thought, but it could be more realistic if it said “entering system..” or something
I know you already said you wouldn’t but you should totally bring the Draaken back sometime, it was the biggest and meanest ship in GOF 3D and I’m sure you would make it look super stunning in HD.
It was my favorite ship just because of it looks, now I use a Vosk S´kannar, it reminds me of that huge missile ship the Vosk had in GOF 3D, too bad I can’t remember it’s name.
@tobi
This question I think will not let a lot of he surprise out but if it does just don’t answer it. Your choice
Q will the gryphon have the same handling like in got 3d meaning slow and and a low handling or will in supernova it will have a better handling #. If so what is the number?
The game looks great
I had an idear for GOF3 the story line,
Its a lot of years later, “ur sons” wants to become a pilot,
He has his basic training blA bla bla and at some point when he needs to catch a criminal
Mkt bkt Jr he gets to choose arrest him or become a pirate,
Both sides have special stuff thats only for there side,
The pirate story is about raiding other ships,
And if u stayed on the side of the law u can catch the criminals in those raids
Let me know what u think
Blue Fyre?
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/image.asp?ids=_17685_42842&img=artwork/na-kwdww/ios_fishlabs_gof2_supernova_01.jpg
good find so want that ship and those cluster missiles look epic
@ ilikepie
I am no expert at the new ships ( or for any thing supernova ) but I think that from the concept art work the blu ship in the main part of the pic I’d the blu fyre.
P.s. does enyone know what that clusters missile is called?
@Ilikepie & Lovely Jubbly: Yeah, a button that sells all items of a particular kind at once might come in rather handy. However, I’m not sure if such a button could be integrated smoothly into the screen design. Let’s see what our developers and graphics artists think about it.
As for the idea of being able to buy available blueprint items directly through the blueprint screen, I think that would be really cool. Most of the time, I totally forget which items I need as soon as I’ve closed the blueprint screen and entered the hangar again.^^
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@Smither: A blueprint for a ship would be a cool idea, but right now no such thing is planned. Who knows, maybe we’ll add it with one of the upcoming add-ons.
@Patrick: To be honest, I’m not really familiar with the work of Peter Higgs, but I’ll check it out soon. Sounds like that Higgs-Field Disruptor would be a pretty nasty little toy…
@Tony Muller: Right now, I don’t know ANY concrete information about GOF3 at all. But I would be quite surprised if it wouldn’t include a number of familiar faces as well.
@Mack: Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll forward it to our developers, too.
@Sid: I’ve neither flown the Gryphon myself so far nor have I seen its stats in GOF2 – Supernova. So I can’t tell you more about its handling. Sorry.
@Ilikepie, Boba Fett & Sid: Yeah, that’s the Blue Fyre! Tomorrow you’ll get to see more of it… and also a first in-game screenshot of the Amboss in action!
i cant wait untill tomorrow dev diary. I’m making a guess but i think it will mainley about the new ships that can kick interstellar butt! hopefully also some new primary weapons too…
still can’t wait
Can’t wait til tomorrow morning for the dev diary (I live in the us so by the time I wake up it’s already posted)
The next dev diary will be about the new weapons in Supernova. It’ll introduce some totally new weapon types, such as Cluster Missiles and Sentry Guns, as well as new models of already existing weapon types, such as new turrets and lasers, for example. In order to showcase the new weapons, we’ve mounted ‘em to some of the new ships like the Blue Fyre or the Amboss. So you’re gonna get to see ‘em in action as well. So whatcha say? Are you already excited for Supernova’s dev diary no.9???
Yeah the dev diary’s gonna be called stick to your guns I think, and it’ll be awesome. The sentry guns will be dropped like mines. Itll be so epic to use this stuff in game…
can’t wait hope to see some good frontal shots of the blue fyre in action
i live in the us as well so i get to read the dev diary first thing in the morning
WOO-HOO
it need more bigger ships carrier destroyers like things look at x3tc it have all