The shield makes its debut today — it takes up an equipment slot. Bullets and rockets are stopped cold, but the railgun can penetrate it. Holding the left mouse button will keep the shield in front of you, but you can let go and look freely without the shield moving. This means you can position it to cover your six as you try and make off with the enemy’s flag. Later I plan on letting the player deploy it and set up stationary protection.

I’ve began playing around with the HUD a bit. The idea is that when you power down into stealth mode, it’ll disconnect the pilot’s neural link to the mech, so the player will see from the perspective of the pilot’s eyes rather than having direct feed from the mech’s camera systems as they do with normal operations. This is just a quick 2D mock-up, but I’ll end up creating a 3D cockpit later.

Another big new feature is chat — you can finally communicate with other players in Space Junk. In addition to being able to send messages, the chat box will also notify players of flag activity, when someone destroys someone else, and general things like when someone connects or changes teams.

Space Junk is post-cyberpunk. Corporations rule and advertisements will be everywhere — including open space.

The grapple is now much quicker and lets you zip around the map very effectively. Your weapon and equipment loadout is now saved and loaded when you start the game again — down the road, I plan on letting the player save loadout presets so they can quickly switch between their favorites. Mouse sensitivity is now adjustable on the fly (and saved for next time) and there’s been a lot of usability fixes like hiding the cursor while playing and ignoring inputs while in the menus. And last, there’s now auto team select so there’s less to do before you enter the action after joining a game.