Project Astraeus Development Blog

I apologise for the late arrival of this blog post, the end of last week was a little bit hectic for me, and left me without time to write this up. Week 3 was all about research and learning the topics surrounding graphics and aesthetics for me. This meant lots of new information about shaders, mesh generation, volumetrics, post processing, and render pipelines. It was sometimes a little bit overwhelming, but overall a great learning experience. I feel pretty confident in saying now that I've got a basic and functional understanding of shaders and how they work, though there's always significant room for improvement. Also with this blog post comes a project name change. There are various reasons behind the decision to switch names, but (as you would know if you're here) the game now goes by the name "Project Astraeus", which I'm actually quite partial to. The Results In line with the topic of this week, the results themselves are quite shiny. I

I want to take a step in a different direction for this post. Most of this week has been tedious background work getting the subtypes fully up and running, and it's felt like an incredibly long week compared to the others. The good news of course is that the subtypes work correctly, and they have skills and bonuses assigned to them ready to be utilised for an attack action. Other than that, the only thing of particular note that I completed was an overhaul of the crafting UI, both functionally and aesthetically. The overhaul, or rather the design process of said overhaul, is what I specifically want to talk about in this post, but I'll get into that after I show off the achievements of this week... Achievements The first is the UI overhaul, which I am honestly most proud of. The new UI is more space efficient, more functional, easier to use, and far more beautiful. Here's a screenshot of it, and you can make up your own mind (Though I very much welcome constructive

Nov 4-8 Week 1 Update - Not what it was supposed to be Unfortunately, this will be the first week that I've not managed to hit my feature targets. At the end of last week's blog post I had stated that this week was going to be an advanced pass over the crafting system, and while you could stretch the meaning to make that true, the work I accomplished this week was not at all what I set out to do. Be warned there will be very few screenshots and no gifs this week, because frankly I have absolutely nothing but code to show, though I do have an interesting experience to share, especially for anyone focusing or learning C#. What was supposed to be achieved This week, to finish off the skills from last week I had hoped to fully implement an item subtype feature. That is, based on the values of modules the user puts into a crafted item, it's assigned a discrete subtype. For example, were the player to create a 'Melee' type weapon with a 1m handle/grip module,

Oct 28-1 Week 4 Update - Stats and Skills Of all the weeks, this has I think ended up being the least 'shiny'. It was fundamentally difficult and required some extended visual brainstorming for solutions, and the end results aren't very impressive from a front end perspective. The good news is, this paves the way for an advanced pass over the equipment system, hooking procedurally generated item 'sub-types' such as polearms or swords into the skills system. Primary Achievement - Stats and Skills Continuing the long running tradition, The first two gifs I'd like to share directly relate to this week's core feature. The functional stats UI. The stats UI is relatively bare bones, but functional. I've already got a short list of quality of life improvements to go in, aside from the eventual design overhaul to make it look better, of course. All the values are hooked into the instantiating character's stats, and will reflect the current val

I'm somewhat surprised to note that the weekly blog post is one of the most difficult and stressful parts of development. If I had to hazard a guess why, it's likely because it's front facing. This blog is/will be a gallery of my challenges and progress, as well as my evolving knowledge and understanding of game development in general. It's a sort of vulnerability in and of itself, and that makes it difficult to do. On the flip side though, this does mean that the development work is easier than writing a blog, which is funny in a sort of dry way. Oct 21-25 Week 3 Update - The Equipment System (And minor UI tweaks) This week has been a somewhat odd week, simply because I had my final shift at a bar job on Wednesday night, which ate into my available time Wednesday afternoon and the following morning. I was worried I wouldn't be able to meet the deadline, and thus would have to admit I'd bitten off more than I could chew in a single week. Happily, that was

The State of This Blog and Solaris Development (If you're simply interested in a project update, read from the next large heading.) It's been a few months since I've written a post here, and for good reason; I had temporarily ceased development of Solaris. There are a few reasons why that occured, but none of them were intentional and they all boil down to one thing: lack of time management. My activities had become more whimsical than planned, which resulted in very little if any dev time, and a very low productivity. Regardless of this, this post signals the dawn of a new era of consistent progress and updates at the very least to say "Hi, I'm alive, I haven't stopped!". Solaris Development and Time Management This week has been the trial for a new lifestyle I'm getting myself into. The lifestyle involves 9-5 work 5 days a week on Solaris, with no interaction with the game or code base (Beyond blog writing, of course!) outside of those h

Technical Planning Even after all the pre-development theory, I still felt like I had more planning to go. The technical planning was admittedly far less robust than the designing, consisting only of a single Draw.io flowchart with some terms that had more meaning to me than anyone else. Frankly, the use of such terms may have been a mistake. A class hierachy plan If it's not apparent, the above image is a flowchart denoting a class hierarchy and their functions in terms of interfaces. The interface names, while relatively self-descriptive, are also quite mundane and could potentially be easily forgotten. I rarely refer to the flowchart at the current moment, as my attention is consumed by the minutia of features rather than the overarching class system, however this flowchart proved incredibly useful in starting the project off on the right foot. Having an organised class hierarchy has saved me a fairly significant amount of work as far as refactoring and duplicated c

Solaris is the working title of a game development project currently solely developed by me. In essence, it's the result of several years of frustration over my inability to continue work on a single project to completion. Somewhat ironically, this is the largest project I've ever attempted... The purpose of this blog I want to take a moment before diving into this post to outline why I created this blog. Essentially, I hope that one day this blog will serve as somewhat of a time capsule for myself - not only for nostalgia, but also to serve as a learning experience, my own digital rubber ducky. Beyond that, I hope that to anyone reading this, it could eventually be a source of both entertainment and information. If I were to ever release whatever Solaris eventually becomes, I would hope this blog would serve as a practical example of the past and future trials and tribulations of a young indie dev hoping to develop one of the many games of his dreams. This post wi