Project Astraeus Development Blog

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...