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