Here’s an update for the month of January.

Alpha Test

Opened up the current version of the game for some Alpha Testing on the Raygun Gadabout Discord.

I’ve been pretty nervous about this since I haven’t had the opportunity to have the game tested by people in quite some time. How’d it go?

Bugs bugs bugs! As should be expected. But it still always stings. Then comes the discouragement… But eventually you have to fight passed that and realize that it’s all for the greater good of the game. They are just bugs and are fixable. It’s just a never-ending thing.

A shout out to the people who helped out with the testing this month: Master, Coach, airen and HEKAU.

If there’s interest, I might put out a new build for testing monthly, if there’s enough changes to warrant it.

Music

I rebuilt the system I created for handling music in the game. Basically, I needed something that could be called start songs, stop them. Crossfade between them. Also it handles Ambient sounds.

I had built the system for this over a year ago. But due to my inexperience at the time it was prone to breaking, was a bit of a mess as well. After having looked at it for a while, I came to the conclusion that it would be better to redo it from scratch.

This is a decision I don’t take lightly, but sometimes it really is easier to redo something than to fix it. My dev time is finite so I try and make sure it will be a fruitful decision. Previously my inventory system, which was also old and from a time of relative inexperience, had been overhauled successfully and really works nicely now.

Above you can see images of the old code next to the new code. That’s kind of neat! How over a year I learned how to do the same thing using half the amount of code. And it probably took me a 1/3 of the time to do it.

Space

The ship can now be destroyed and respawn. Also, you can take damage if you enter certain areas, like too close to a star like in the example below. There’s also a crash warning if you are at warp and risk colliding with an object. So slow down!

Be like Icarus!

Worked on the Galaxy Map. It’ll give you an overview of where you are and allow you to fast travel between locations.

Fast travel, eventually.

Planets

Started on some new art for new planets.

Concept Art

How it’s looking in game so far

UI

Fixed up the Hint system, added some new art for it.

Winchester is a good pal

Save/Load

I’ve done some work on the save system, there’s now a very ugly menu. The menu can populate information about your current saved location and time played. The % you see is for completion but that doesn’t work yet.

Work in progress save/load menu

In Closing

I’m pretty happy with how things are progressing but there’s still lots of work ahead. I really want to concentrate on stability and getting all the pieces in place in February and then get back to building out more levels in greybox and tying things together.

It’s feeling a lot more like a game now that there’s a proper loop in place.

As always thanks for reading and hope to see you in a month!

-M.