If you look way back, the hull was initially made of only square
blocks, and that was when I wrote the lighting system. Since then
I've added various angular shapes to make far more interesting
spaceship designs, but the lighting system still treated all tile
shapes as square blocks. At the time I was just thrilled we had
nice new shapes to play with, but I've noticed a few shadow
glitches in the new ship that I wasn't happy to ignore any longer.
So I've expanded the lighting system to take the hull part &
rotation into account when generating the shadows. It's subtle,
and you could argue that there are more important things
to work on - yes, you'd be right, but screenshots get seen
everywhere and they're scraped by websites who never update them
afterwards!
One popular games website still shows screenshots I made in the
very first *month* of development saying they're the latest *sigh*.
So I'm trying to make sure screenshots don't have any work-in-progress
glitches that might get scraped early and shown forever. But
it's hard because by definition it's in development.
Flexible Save Format
Aside from extending the lighting, I've extended the save file
format to make it more flexible for adding new fields to objects -
essentially making it backwards compatible with old save files.
Not exactly exciting, but I'm not going to risk the angry lynch
mob of players with flaming torches and pitchforks coming for me
when I update the game and it breaks their save files! So, that is
now vastly improved!
Runtime Re-colour
Speaking of flexibility, I've added the ability to re-colour
objects at runtime. Not just a basic tint, but it does a kind of
colour search and replace so I can change just one hue and keep
the others. This is super useful! It'll save me a ton of work
making uniforms of different colours. And allow players to
decorate their ship, changing the colour of beds, other furniture,
floor tiles, gas tanks etc. It'll vastly reduce the graphics I
need for heads of different skin tones too. I think it's so useful
I'm going to need an editor for it so the player can access it.
Something for a future update.
A lot of new objects have gone in this month, the hydrolyser
(splits water in to H2 and O2), the electric heaters are now
animated with on/off frames that crossfade nicely. Shower heads
and drains too. Oh and the double bed (though it still sleeps one
for now).
Thermal Fix
And I've updated the thermal simulation yet again. (I swear I
feel like I write about this every month!) But I noticed the heat
was spreading far too easily through the walls (due to a bug).
After fixing that the heat is now captured inside rooms nicely,
and leaks out visibly when you open a door. So now, coupled with
the thermostats on the heaters, the heat system has a nice dynamic
heating & cooling behaviour, and it all works really well.
New Sick Bay
Oh, and no ship is complete without a sick bay..
We now have medical beds, a medical monitor and
intravenous drip to speed recovery. Ironically I had the flu while
making these, but they didn't help! :P
That's all for now. The next update might a little later due to the
Christmas break, but until then have yourselves a relaxing holiday and
hope you all enjoy your Christmas! 🦌🎅✨🎄 :)
Building a New Ship
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
This month I've finally got the game loading and saving properly.
It's taken a huge amount of work to ensure all of the state for all
of the behaviours (e.g. the fork position when eating) is correctly
saved so that everything is exactly restored when you reload it again.
I had to rewrite all of the behaviours to use a state machine
architecture because the fancy C# coroutine method I was using hid
some state behind the scenes making it impossible to save and reload.
It was painstaking work, but I never felt happy with the
coroutines technique. I'm much happier with architecture now.
It's also forced to me fill in some gaps and fix some shortcuts I took to get it up and running.
Title Screen / Game Cycle
So now that we can load and save games, we can also have a proper
title screen, and game cycle! About time!
I also did some GUI work to create load & save windows.
New Ships Now Possible
And this also means I can invest more time to make new ships.
Previously I've been reluctant to spend much time building
anything bigger as it takes time and without being able to save
and reload properly, any work would be wasted.
So after looking at the same test ship for 18 months, I thought
it was time for a bigger boat.. :)
As you can see this one is huge. It's roughly 4 times the length
of the previous ship, and likewise on the width, so about 16 times
the area!
Thermal Simulation
This new ship has also brought the missing pieces into focus.
While I have a long list of features I want to implement, playing
the game and seeing what's urgently missing, (for example seeing
the ship get freezing cold because I didn't have heaters), helps
me prioritize what's needed next.
Note the engines generating heat, and the way the heat is
isolated by the design of the gaps in the hull shape. The forward
section is nice and toasty due to about 20 heaters in the crew
quarters, and the RTG electric generators which also give off
heat. I still need to do lots of tuning and balancing of all the
systems yet, but a large ship like this helps to get a better feel
for it and is something a more ambitious player might build.
Missing Pieces Next
This ship by no means complete, there's a huge empty space in the
engineering section at the back where all the equipment needs to
go (and a hangar!), but it's good to play the game more properly
now, and it highlights what I need to literally fill in the
missing pieces.
New Angular Corner Objects
To make designing your ship easier, and also look better,
I've just added a system to allow for objects with diagonal edges
to fit in against the diagonal wall pieces. So we can have wall
consoles on the bridge etc.
Like so:
I have to draw every object 4 times for each compass rotation
direction.
The problem was until now I couldn't place objects into corners
with diagonals because everything that overlaps a tile was
considered solid, and I have to prevent players from putting
objects into the walls.
So rather than consider every tile either empty or solid, I
extended the object definitions so I can tell it the footprint
shape more accurately. Not just in a Tetris sort of way, but each
tile can have a particular angle.
That means I can test the object's footprint against the walls
and allow some parts to go right into the corners like these wall
consoles at the sides and top.
To make it work I had to build a table with 144 entries by hand
for all the piece-to-piece overlapping combinations (including 4
rotation angles). Paintstaking work but I'm quite pleased with
the result as it's very flexible now for adding future objects.
Other Improvements
There's also been lots of other (less visual) behind-the-scenes
work done, like making the crew more responsive to the changes you
make in the Task Priority Manager. Now they jump to it when you
say do 'this' not 'that'. Much more satisfying! :)
I've added proper icons for the Gas, Heat, Power and Pipes
overlay buttons. Not the highest priority in the world but the
boxy placeholder buttons bothered me because they were on
every screenshot. They had to go!
I've also retired the custom forum in favour of Discord and
Steam's forums as they seem to have a monopoly grip. I notice the
same migration pattern in other game website forums too.
That just seems to be the way of the world.. So be it.
Special thanks to those that joined so early and helped kickstart the community. I will remember! ;)
Also this month I've set up a Developer Page for Black Belt Software
on Steam. Please follow for notification of new releases. Maybe game
soundtrack.. or a prequel? (I'm so tempted..)
The websites have been revamped. The old versions were put
together very quickly, in the spirit of 'something is better than
nothing'. But I now have proper logos for both game and company,
and I've updated the layout to show bigger better screenshots.
Million Dollar Domain Name Saga
That reminds me, I had some trouble acquiring the
StarshipColony.com domain (without the hyphen) because I delayed
too long in buying it initially. Some domain squatter bought it, I
think speculating that Elon might buy it for the SpaceX 'Starship'
or something. I offered to buy it off them for a reasonable price
(what they'd paid over the past two years plus a little more) -
can you believe the GoDaddy middleman asked me for a million
dollars! WTF!? Seriously! It took considerable self-control on my
part to articulate 'No' in such a way that didn't involve
unfavourable commentary on him, or his mother..
Needless to say - I didn't pay a million dollars for it. I let
them stew for a year and get tired of paying renewal fees for a
domain they can't do anything with now I have a game on Steam with
that name. No other developer would buy it. They eventually let it
expire, and I picked it up for about 60 dollars at auction. Finally
I can use it now!
Podcasts
I've also experimented with some AI generated podcasts based on these
development logs. They're frankly fantastic and super helpful to
players. But I eventually decided not to use them. They're a little
self-aggrandising, and although I didn't write the script (the AI did!)
players wouldn't know this and just think I'd got the AI to say
nice things about the game (and me!). So, I didn't feel comfortable
using them. I'm probably missing out on much-needed publicity as a
result, which bothers me.. but, there will be other opportunities.
Speaking of audio, I've also done more work on the game music,
particularly the main theme tune. I can't wait to put all the music
and sound effects in and show people! :)
New Terrestrial Planet Terrain
I've been feeling we're lacking in a bit of green. In Starship
Colony most of the game takes place in space, or on icy asteroids,
or lifeless planets, so I thought we could do with some green
Earth-like terrestrial environments to add some nice visual
variety. Possibly as terraformed colonies or naturally occurring
oases.
New Mountains, Grass and Trees
I've spent some time reworking how the mountains were drawn.
Rather than a single colour, they're now shaded based on depth,
which could have some gameplay use down the road.
I've also made a new colour spline blending function to let me
map different height ranges to different colours. I've used this
for the gravel, dirt, grass transitions. It's super flexible now
rather than hardcoding gradient numbers, so I'll be making more
use of this for other planets and desert-like colours.
We now also have trees. These took a lot of work, mainly just
trying to find a style that worked with the view angle and style
of the game. I threw out realistic looking trees, 3D rendered
looking trees, AI generated trees. Eventually I settled on using a
tree silhouette outline then manually placing every leaf shape
over it by hand - yep! I like the end results and the process
allows for control to get good lighting and variation of foliage
type. I'll add more variation in future.
I also made some random stones pick up a tint colour from the
surface they're on - this helps them blend in cohesively and avoid
that floating look.
I've also tweaked the round asteroid terrains, and added a subtle
darkening shade to the very edges to smooth off the otherwise
jagged look of the mountains of white ice against the jet black of
space. They now blend into the background better.
I still think we need more variations in the planetary terrain,
but some green is better than no green, so it's another step in
the right direction. The Steam screenshots have also been updated
as I think the green really helps to counterbalance all the black
of space we've had so far.
Adding Fire and New Particle Systems
Lots of updates on the visuals this month:
New parallax star field with longer star streaks at higher speeds
New engines graphics, now with animating particle thrust effect
Fire! Lots of fire!
This is one you really need to see moving! so check out the video:
Star Field
My first implementation of the star field was too fast. Seeing so much high speed movement around the ship gave a good sense of speed but was incredibly distracting. So I pushed it into the distance, and added another layer of fine dust-like particles that whizz past nearby at high speed but they're faint so don't distract too much.
The length of the star streaks also grows as the ship goes faster. I shift across 4 speed levels in the video. I might tweak this some more, but it seems to work nicely to give the sense of speed.
New Engines and Particle Thrusters
I've tidied up the old engine graphics which were mostly placeholders. They're now boxed-in and fit flush against the hull wall pieces. The thrust plume until now was a static image. It was fine for the early screenshots, but now I'm recording more video, leading up to a trailer (and demo eventually), so motion was needed! I wrote a custom particle shader to efficiently animate the particles and recycle them.
Getting the animation to not appear repeating on a short loop while also not requiring constant uploading of new particle data to the GPU took most of the time. I also came up with a way to make each engine appear to have a unique flame while using the same random particle data. I'm quite pleased as it's extremely efficient and I think looks great!
Fire!
I reused the same particle shader for the fire effect. A lot of tweaking was done to get it to look right. The temptation is just to crank up the number of particles to make it look good, but that's just wasteful and only ends up washing out the screen to white blobs. I wanted to keep a certain amount of transparency so you could see what's on fire. There's also a background glow around each instance of fire - this helps give that hot feel.
The flames are also stretched a little vertically so in screenshots they give the impression of vertical motion blur. The game has to sell itself in static screenshots like this one:
Overall I'm quite happy with the fire effect. In places they really look like they're licking around the object on fire. There's still room for improvement and variation of size, but this really adds drama and action to the game, especially if you blow a hole in the wall and combine it with an explosive decompression! I think we'll be having a lot of that.. :)
New Pipes System for Liquid Transport
Another major system was added this month - Pipes!
Finally we can connect the H2 and O2 tanks to the engines! This has been bugging me since the very first screenshot.
Here you can see the new Pipes overlay and pipes editor. It looks a lot like the power cable system in that you can place pipe tiles to form any pipe network you want.
I've also added an 'Auto' mode that will just let you paint where you want the pipes and it will usually do the right thing to connect to neighbouring pipes. But the manual mode is still there as you'll need to say when you want pipes to go over/under each other or cross-connect together. This 'Auto' mode has also been added to the power cable system too.
The pipes go under the floor and are only visible when the pipe overlay is, as are the coloured circles on equipment showing pipe inputs and outputs.
Liquid Hydrogen = Red
Liquid Oxygen = Light Blue
Water = Dark Blue
Dirty Water = Light Brown
Sewage = Dark Brown
Better not mix these up or your colonist won't be happy if they want a shower and you confuse clean water for the sewage! :)
The rocket engines take in liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, but they also have a liquid cooling option (the blue input and output) not in use here for clarity.
Pipes are able to carry any combination of all liquid types simultanously, and various filtering stages will be needed to recycle your dirty water and sewage into clean water and organic compounds Matt Damon would be happy to 'science the crap out' of!
I'm pleased this is in now as it forms the backbone of the whole recycling and life support system for your ship. Now I can make equipment and objects perform their individual functions and interact with each other. Pipes may not sound exciting, but it's a major step forward in the simulation and gameplay!
Temperature and Power Systems
Hot Stuff
This month I added another two major systems to Starship Colony - the Temperature and Power systems:
Temperature Heat Map
Heat Map View
Regular View
As you can see the engines and RTG power generators at the back of the ship generate heat and this propagates through the ship. Walls offer some insulation but still conduct a little heat. I've made it so that heat is also naturally lost to space and that's important otherwise the heat just keeps building in the ship.
I think we're going to need some kind of deployable external radiator part to help players actively remove heat because the only way right now is to shut down heat sources and let the ship cool. This is a problem real satellites and the ISS space station have to deal with.
The addition of temperature adds another simulation layer to the mix which means you need to think carefully about the layout. You may want to isolate the engines and power generation areas from the rest of the ship, or alternatively make good use of the latent heat to keep crew quarters and growing areas warm, or maybe help to melt mined ice. And your liquid oxygen & hydrogen tanks need to be kept cold or they'll explode! The choices and trade-offs involved make for more interesting gameplay.
Power System
The new power system has it's own visual overlay and editor for placing build orders. Here's a crewman laying the red power cable:
Notice the consoles which require power are automatically connected to the nearest point via their own power cords. Electricity icons flash over equipment without power.
You can also see square split points in the cable that give a realtime indication of the power flowing through it, black is no power, yellow is full power, and colours in between signify various brown-out power levels. Cables can only provide so much power and connecting too many items will realistically cause power drops especially over long distances.
You can also create T-junctions and connect multiple power generators to the same network and the power will distribute itself evenly (simular to the gas system but faster).
It's also possible to create multiple separate power grids and have them cross over each other without connecting. That might be useful in future for quickly shutting down power to non-essential systems in an emergency, or as a redundant secondary backup. Lots of potential there in future, for switches and software controlled switching.
I should also note that these cables exist below the floor tiles, so turning off the power overlay makes all of the cable clutter go away, and leaves you with a nice tidy looking ship. I know that's important to some people. So the choice is yours whether you want to see them.
At the moment you manually have to pick the cable piece and rotate it with Q/E. I think in future I may add an auto-tile mode to pick the orientation of the wire piece for you, but manual control will still be needed to let you create crossover/under parts for separate power grids. For now it works very well and other areas of Starship Colony need fleshing out more, so time to move on to those now. Onwards! :)
Gas Simulation
Every Breath You Take
Starship Colony now has proper gas (air) simulation. Until now your crew could just remove a section of hull and stare out into the void of space without consequences, but no longer!
Your crew now breathes in oxygen (O2), and exhales carbon dioxide (CO2). Without air they die! (Also a new feature).
To help you see what's going on, there's a new gas overlay mode which shows O2 in blue and CO2 in orange. Brighter means more, darker means less.
The simulation actually tracks the flow and mixture of 7 different gases internally, but only 2 are shown for clarity right now.
I'm particularly pleased with the particle effects showing the rush of gases as they flow through open doors and around corridors. In normal mode they're shown in white, but the gas overlay mode shows which gases are mixing using coloured particles.
Strictly speaking there shouldn't be a gust of air when separate areas of CO2 and O2 at the same pressure mix, but it's visually informative to see when lots of gas mixing is occuring, so I've allowed that to bend the rules a little.
Now that we can simulate the air, I've made the various existing objects interact properly with it. So the CO2 scrubbers will remove CO2, and the hydroponics trays & potted plants will also take in CO2 and release O2. This balances nicely with the crew doing the opposite as they breathe.
I've taken care to ensure the simulation uses only descrete maths and so doesn't lose gases over time due to rounding errors. Every unit of gas is correctly accounted for as it flows around the ship, and so should allow for long duration flights with recycling.
I'm quite pleased with how the simulation works with decompression holes in the ship. My fear was there would be a sudden loss of gas throughout the ship that would be too hard for players to deal with, but the doors provide natural air locks, and even without them the air is literally bottlenecked from flowing out too fast giving you time to deal with the situation, even without a space suit for a while.
I've made crew take small amounts of damage continuously when they're in vacuum, so even when all the air is gone they've got a bit of extra time to reach safety. So it's quite forgiving in practice.
Over all I'm very pleased with how this is working. The space-based nature of the colony is one distinguishing aspect of Starship Colony from other colony management games. And you can't really design away the need to breathe in space, so it has to be embraced and made fun to deal with. And I think making it not so catastrophic to have a hole in your ship does this. It's more like having a puncture or a leak in a boat. Coupled with the particle effects it makes it enjoyable to play with.
Engine Control
Going Beyond the Red Line
Last month I built a BASIC compiler so software made (in-game) by players could control things. Here's the first practical example - the main engine thrust controller. You click on the pilot's console to bring this up.
The big slider controls all your engines. Too much and your engine temperatures rise. Too hot and your engines burn up and explode. You can red-line it for a short time, especially if you ramp up the water cooling - great for an emergency getaway. But it exacts a heavy price on your engines, especially if you don't have water for cooling. There will be some interesting trade offs to be made there to balance speed and risk!
(A high quality full screen video of the above GIF animation is available if you click on it.)
Note the CRT emulation, screen warping and shadow mask, and the reflection on the bezel.
Also here's the same computer running a Command Prompt (like DOS) to navigate the file system.
(A high quality video is available - depending on your browser you may need to right-click to download it.)
This DOS-like shell is just a simple BASIC program that uses commands to list files and directories, and to change directories. Players won't need to use this, but for those who want to dig deeper it shows the depth and power.
Players in Starship Colony will be able to customise not just their ship's hardware, but also its software. I'm looking forward to seeing what players do with this!
Adding User-Created In-Game Software!
Empowering Players
OK, I've been working flat-out on this update which is definitely
the biggest and most complex piece of functionality I've added to
the game to date.
So far the game allows you to build your dream ship out of
hardware pieces and connect them together. But in the real world
most of the interesting things you can do involve software. Just
look at phones - by running the right software they can be turned
into almost any other object we used to buy separately - a
clock/alarm, a camera, a CD player, a radio, a TV, a torch,
sat-nav, a notepad, diary, a book, a video game etc.
It's the software that makes the hardware do interesting things.
If we could add in-game software to connect the in-game
hardware, we could do some amazing things! And the best part is
that players could build these for themselves - they wouldn't have
to wait for me to add the feature!
If the thrusters are controlled by software, then we can do more
than just hook up WASD keys. You could make your own autopilot!
Take evasive manoeuvres during combat. Maybe create a homing
missile? An auto-mining drone?
Hook up the ship's computers to radio transceivers, and you
could make your own in-ship WiFi! Send signals to all the doors.
Automatically close during a hull breach, or open to vent the air
to space if there's a fire.
So now imagine you want to board another ship that has this. By
eavesdropping on their radio signals you might figure out how to
open their doors remotely! Hack their engine control signals to
stop them dead in the water!
The possibilities are endless - and none of this requires me to
be involved - it can be all player-made if I just give them the
ability to run their own software on the in-game ship's computers,
and hook it up to everything.
This update is about making that vision possible.
To do this I've build a Virtual Machine - a kind of virtual CPU
that runs machine code. On top of that I've built a BASIC compiler
that turns easy-to-write BASIC programs into this virtual machine
code. Yep, that's right - I wrote an entire compiler and
programming language for use in the game while you're playing!
lol. Kinda ridiculous for only 5 weeks too. (And all human work -
no AI - it can't do this yet). Hope people appreciate the effort
here.
So the blue computer consoles that the crew sit at are now real
computers, running real software!
Click on them and you'll open up the computer's screen running
some Basic code. Here I'm just drawing some lines bouncing around
the screen like an 90's screensaver to test the drawing, but
imagine controls for the engine, or star map, comms, trade
screens, alien language translation, or desktop GUI or command
line, or whatever you want!
It's still new and raw, so it needs some additional commands for
drawing text, and images for making sliders and buttons etc.
Here's a little look at some Basic code. You're seeing it within
Visual Studio, but it'll have a simpler Notepad-like editor within
the game (probably also written in Basic!).
And of course, you don't need to know how to write this to play
the game, you can just use what other people have written. This is
for those that want to tinker and make new things for the game.
More Details
For those interested, it's a deliberately simple dialect of
Basic, without line numbers. It supports numeric & string
types, plus arrays of either. Has user-defined functions with
local variables and supports recursion.
There is no GOTO, but I've added BREAK and CONTINUE instead for
the few times where GOTO is handy.
The IF..THEN flow control comes in both single line and
multi-line variations.
Built-in Commands:
PRINT, DIM, FOR, TO, STEP, NEXT, BREAK, CONTINUE, LOCAL,
FUNCTION, RETURN, IF, THEN, ELSEIF, ELSE, END, WHILE
It's possible to extend the commands in the game code without
recompiling the compiler. This will make my life easier. I've
already used this to add the graphics commands PLOT and LINE. More
commands will be added.
The Virtual Machine (VM) is an efficient interpreted VM,
dispatching virtual instructions every 10 real instructions. I've
measured it running at 216 MHz on my laptop. I'm very pleased -
this is exceptionally fast for an interpreted VM. New instructions
like LINE can be added as a single instruction to perform heavy
jobs in C and will help keep the speed high.
For simplicity the compiler has a simple stack machine
architecture. This trades some stack-twiddling inefficiency for
implementation simplicity - a good trade-off given the speeds
we're already getting.
Why Basic?
Why? Because it's the simplest language for anyone to learn.
Basic lacks many of the complex features of more sophisticated
languages, which is why it's ideal. Although the aim here isn't
necessarily to teach programming, everything you learn in Basic
you can apply in C/C++ or C# or Java. People get caught up on the
word 'language' - it's not like learning French, then moving to
Germany. It's more like learning to ride a bike, then learning to
ride a motorbike. Or learning to think methodically and
systematically - it's applicable to everything in life. I hope it
does some good in the world, as well as just be fun to play with.
New Task Priorities Manager
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! if you're reading this in the present. This month
was an odd one, I ended up working on something completely
different from what I had intended. Some things take longer than a
month and it always worries me if I think I won't have something
to show in time for the next update, so switched task priorities
midway to doing this. Quite amusing given what it is! :)
Fans of other colony management games like Oxygen Not Included,
and Dwarf Fortress (with Dwarf Therapist) will know from
this screenshot what just got added to Starship Colony:
It's the main Task Priority Manager - something I know a
lot of you really wanted to see! :)
For each member of the crew you can set their task priorities and
essentially shape their roles. It's a core piece of functionality
very familiar to anyone who's played this kind of colony sim
before and greatly helps you manage your colony.
It's only a first draft - the basic tasks are plugged-in but some
of the more complicated behaviours need further work, so expect
changes to what you see here. There are also tasks listed that
don't exist yet, but are planned.
Plus there are crew behaviours that exist but are not shown on
this interface. Things like sleeping don't really make sense to
have as a priority. Though come to think of it that's an
interesting idea, but I do plan to make a day scheduler for that
where you can set times for work, meals, free time and sleep.
Implementing this priority manager has forced me to think in more
concrete terms about crew behaviour and how it's managed. Up until
now each behaviour has been implemented as an isolated task, and
during development I've been triggering it manually via a
right-click menu. But there are subtle things to consider like how
long should the piloting task last? If it's long-lasting then what
if a high-priority build order is given? Should it immediately
supersede the current task, or be picked-up only when they become
idle? ..which might be while if the current task is
long-lasting. And what about emergency things like a fire? Do some
tasks interrupt others? Not all tasks are equally important even
if its priority is set high.
I'm also keen to keep it as simple as possible. Some things like
planting and harvest might be merged together if that makes more
sense. And some things like Engineer incorporate several different
build & uninstall behaviours, which we could split.
So there's going to be a lot of experimentation and fine-tuning of
all this yet to come. Nothing is set in stone - we'll have to see
what's actually most fun in practice rather than what sounds best
in theory.
Aside from the above, there's been a lot of nitty-gritty bug
fixing work with the existing behaviours (I'll spare you the
details of those), things like a general spot allocation system to
ensure multiple people don't attempt to do the same job, instead
of bespoke solutions for each and every behaviour. After a while
you start to see patterns across behaviours and find ways to reuse
systems.
Oh and I also made new smooth door animations! They're not
strictly necessary or a high priority for a working game, but
seeing them snap open & close so abruptly in the first gif
animation was an obvious thing that I felt really needed to be
fixed right now so that all future animations and video clips will
look much better. It's a case of playing Whac-A-Mole with what you
feel most needs work now. As soon as you do the worst looking
thing, the next worst looking thing needs fixing. Gradually we
work our way up towards more functionality and higher quality.
OK, that's all for now. Next month I may work on something a
little larger which may delay the update, we'll see. But I'm happy
with the way the game is coming together.
In the mean time please follow and wishlist on
Steam.
It really helps! You can also reply to this in the web forums
or chat on Discord to ask
more questions or tell me what you'd like to see (or not see). I
really appreciate feedback. Thanks!
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