Starventure

Alright, let’s do this.
So, as I promised, I finally did something about the horrendous visuals of the past devlogs. Now, it’s still not the prettiest game ever, but I think the textures I got from ambientCG definitely make this more pleasing to look at!
Also, I revamped the player movement and jumping… why? Because moving on moving planets didn’t work at all! So, now the player movement mainly consists of a bunch of wacky _rb.AddForce(…) calls, as well as a somewhat janky speed limiter that I definitely have to work on, or… I could call the slow falling speed a feature… let’s do that, it’s a feature of the jetpack now.
Also, as I just mentioned, the jump has been replaced by a jetback! Now you can float around a planet… until your stamina (or fuel) runs out.
Oh, right, that blue bar in the top left of the game view is the stamina bar, just incase you had no idea what it’s there for.

So all of that definitely took me a considerable amount of time, especially since I had to wrap my mind around how I wanna handle jumping and gravity and limiting the player’s speed all at the same time. The system isn’t perfect, but, eh, screw it. Good enough.

Now I will head off, talk with some friends, and maybe code more after that. But for now, I’m gonna take a break until tomorrow.

Happy coding! And remember that you are all awesome!

Welp, this took me longer than I want to admit, but… you can finally jump between planets without your player’s view suddenly snapping and disorienting you. Now it still disorients you, but smoothly~
I’m very happy with how this is turning out and I am honestly just so glad I finally have this working, it was such a major headache. I really, really, wanted to use DOTween for this, but for the sake of me I cannot figure out how to make it work properly, actually writing this I have an idea. I’m gonna try that, but for now, I’m using a regular coroutine.

Now, I’m getting bored of looking at these bland cubes, spheres and this default skybox. I wanna make it feel more like space. Time for dev art!
Happy coding!

Alright, more stuff to showcase!
This time I worked on an orbiting system, so I can make stuff spin around other stuff, how neat!
I’m mainly going to be using this system for stuff like space stations, which I’ll add later on in development, or moons. Also, since I made it so the orbit ellipse is actually an ellipse! Which means I could make a full on solar system!
I am planning to do that, btw, I made a whole visitor system which parents StellarObjects like the player or scrap you might drag along with you to the player they’re currently on (which is determind by if they’ve collided with the AtmosphereCollider).
So, hey. Things are looking pretty good, if I do say so myself.
Now, I’m gonna go fix up the system for changing the player rotation when you jump between planets. Happy coding!

Alright! More stuff to showcase!
Been doing lots of work on the player controller today, mainly trying to figure out how the heck to make it function properly.
My first approach was to make a Rigidbody player controller like I did lots of times for my (failed) FPS projects. However, that resulted in my character either not moving, or slingshotting at mach 10 across space. And since it’s encouraged to post hilarious fails, here you go. First attachment is exactly that lol.
Doing some research, I found that you can also move Rigidbody players via Rigidbody.MovePosition(…), so I opted for that instead.
Then I added a jump, then some ground detection, and also (finally) a look controller so you can look around.
Honestly, pretty proud of my work so far. Only issue is that at the very top of planets, your player gets locked into place and all they can do is spin uncontrollably. But, that’s an issue I’m going to fix soon, as well as some small visuals, like a better skybox.
Also, you can hop between planets! I haven’t added camera smoothing to it yet, but it’s still super cool to do. Jumping off a planet’s atmosphere just to fly into another’s… so much fun! Maybe you’ll be able to do that with asteroids in the future or something… We’ll see!
For now, thanks for reading, and happy coding!

I added custom gravity, yay! It was honestly weirdly simple. The most complex part of it was honestly calculating the gravity vector for the rigidbody class. But now, I can have my cubes falling onto a planet, or even cruising through zero G! This is such a small thing, but it’s so exciting for me. Time to work on the player controller!

Ok, I’ve been working on getting the StellarRigidbodies to detect when they enter a planet. For that I made a brand new AtmosphereCollider class, as well as a new tag, just so thinks set themselves up automatically.
Now I just need to calculate the gravity vector and somehow apply it on the rigidbody and we should have (very basic) planet gravity working! Yay!
Thanks for reading, and happy coding!

Hello there! I’ve just started work on a project I’ve been meaning to work on for a long time… Starventure!
Starventure is going to be a survival-sandbox game where you can explore procedurally generated space, like in No Man’s Sky! You’ll have to fly down to new planets to keep yourself alive, whilst also building settlements in the orbits of planets.
Or at least, that’s the hope!

Right now I’ve got a simple visualizer and outline for the PlanetGravity class working, soon this class will be used by StellarRigidbodies to figure out what kind of gravity should be applied to a physics object. Let’s hope this goes well, and happy coding! (also happy pride month!)