There will be a brief delay in the next update as I managed to get myself into another game jam, just a month after wrapping up After\\Burner! Whoops! If sci-fi games are your thing, I'll be plugging away at an outer space mining/horror game called Ore for this next little bit.

After that, I'm turning my gaze back to After\\Burner with some thoughts on how to brush things up. I'm very proud of the smooth inclusion of power management (folks with deep memory of the Lucasarts space flight sims will think of this as Energy/Shields/Lasers). That said, I think it could be a bit easier to grok, and I think some changes here and there could eliminate the need for the POWER resource in the game. As it stands, there's a chance you could wipe up a sortie a round or two before you would need to engage with the power management mechanic at all. While I don't think that is bad per se, it's a fun and novel element of this game, and a strong thematic element of the video games that inspired this one. Ideally, every player would mess with it at least a couple times per sortie. Removing POWER and necessitating direct interaction with Diverting/Shunting energy when it makes strategic sense feels more engaging overall. As far as what to do with weapons that spend POWER rather than ammo, I'm thinking of using SA as the fuel for said weapons. This gives you more to do with SA - which is fine since it refreshes pretty swiftly if the squadron stays aggressive. Other options are to set the ammo equal to your GAUGE...which opens up the possibility of ammo being dictated by your other Attributes as well...maybe an idea worth exploring.

Besides, with POWER gone, you only have one "mana" pool for your special powers to worry about --which is nice!

All of this means revaluating some interrelated elements: right now each of your core stats (Trigger/Burn/Gauge) pump up the numbers of your starfighter, and losing POWER affects that dynamic. Additionally, the bump to starting POWER was an element of balance between the types of starfighter, so that's another thing to look at.

Whatever does change in the next version will be carefully spelled out in the Changelog at the end of the document, and expect a revamped Character Sheet either way (need a convenient place to log your kills, after all!) If folks have any thoughts on these changes, or experience in play, happy to hear about it!

Until then, watch your six!