Stellar Safari

Although it might seem like I haven’t changed much, behind the scenes there’s been a lot of progress. Apart from the minor UI tweaks where I added a box and border to the different bars, made the energy bar yellow to match the power cells I modelled and made the overall colour scheme blue instead of having different colours, I have been working on the core systems that change the values of the different bars. For example, I linked the heat bar to the actual mining system which is now in place, and allows the player to actually mine the ores, the drill durability, energy and heat then all get updated. And then when the drill overheats that is also handled. Now I just need to make it look a bit nicer, since there is currently no particles or animation and ores just disappear.

Done some work on the UI. Would appreciate some feedback!

I have made some quick renders that I am going to be using for the inventory icons.

The drills have been textured now and man do they look clean!!! I have kept them to the same red aesthetic since I have made it so they are all made by one company called the Stellar Frontier Agency, and they are the ones who have sent you to collect and mine resources. Once I flesh out more of the “lore” of the game I will be sure to share!

I have been working more on some 3D models for drills that I will have in the game. The premise is this. The player starts out with a simple drill. It can mine copper and iron ore, however it is quite slow because it overheats quickly and also requires recharging often. The player can upgrade three parts of the drill to improve it. First they can upgrade the energy capacity so the drill can be used for longer without needing more energy to run. Or they can upgrade the cooling which means the drill will not overheat in the middle of drilling as often. Or they can upgrade the drill head, which can improve other aspects such as the amount of material you get per ore.

Really testing the limits of my optimisation here. I was just playing around with some settings and wanted to see if the game would still run at a spawn radius of 100 and surprisingly it does. I have added a world object manager that now handles despawning ores and other items, keeping it separate to the tiles. I managed to capture this screenshot from underneath the “lunar surface” in the scene view, and it looks quite like an asteroid belt which I though was pretty cool.

Well I said I wouldn’t be doing more work on the tile generation system but well, I just couldn’t help it. Previously the tiles only generated in a small radius around the player, which meant that it lost the immersive feel of space exploration, where it should feel like a truly endless expanse. This is why I changed this system to instead spawn a semicircle of tiles in front of the player. This allows for a larger range of tiles and better view. I have also implemented my ore generation in this system, so iron and copper can now be found on the surface. I also added key optimisation features such as object pooling, which means that the tiles don’t constantly need to be instantiated but are instead pooled and reused which significantly improves performance.

The next thing I want to work on now is adding more resource spawns and a crafting system so the resources can actually be used for improving your spaceship and building your lunar colony!

Currently I have been working on not just tile generation which was my main focus before, but now I am looking at ore and resource generation. In my game I have some key resources, those being:

• copper
• iron
• power cells
• gems / crystals (idk which one to call)
  So what the game loop will be is that across the moon’s surface there will be certain resource deposits. In order to obtain those resources there will some obstacle in the way. For example, around iron deposits there is a higher chance of crater formation. Power cells can also be used to power generators and such but I have not got onto that yet.

For the past couple of days I have been working on implementing different systems that make up the core of the gameplay. Namely, the grid generator and the animations. Now the player has the freedom to move in any direction they wish, with tiles randomly generating in all directions. This is moving the project closer to the exploration game I intend. I still have to add ores, power stations, hazards and puzzles, but this is a step in the right direction.

I have been working on this project for a couple of months so far. This game is basically a survival game where the player is an astronaut who crash lands on the moon and has to repair their spaceship in order to go to other planets. Currently I have implemented a simple grid movement and also some initial tile management. The main thing that I added was a way of keeping the player in view by hiding any objects in front of the camera through the use of raycasts. I still have to work on the actual tile generation and eventual puzzle mechanics to complete the game.