Getting the project production-ready.

I’ve finally added local storage for the settings menu, so your graphics and gameplay preferences now persist between sessions instead of resetting every time you launch the game.

A lot of people mentioned in the last devlog that they couldn’t figure out the controls, so I added a “Show Keybinds” toggle in the settings menu (press ESC to open it). It displays the controls on-screen whenever you need them.

I also found a pretty game-breaking bug, so I’m documenting it here for future me:

If you’re mounted in the rocket, enable Show Keybinds, and then hit Apply, the player can no longer unmount from the rocket. I’ll be fixing that later.

I spent some time messing around with Godot’s built-in graphics settings and realized I’d completely forgotten to enable anti-aliasing.

Turning it on made a huge difference, the game looks so much cleaner now.

As you can see, I’ve also added a fuel gauge for the rocket. It helps sell the whole “claiming and exploring planets” vibe.

I also changed observatories so each planet can only have one.

Another gameplay change is that you now have to visit an observatory to dock a satellite onto your rocket instead of doing it anywhere.

Finally, I changed how world persistence works. If your rocket crashes and you reset the game, any observatories you’ve already built will still be there instead of disappearing.