New year, new powerhour!
Visit the Potato Clock Games Low Effort Debauchery Generator to check it out. This dumb thing takes a YouTube playlist and plays a random minute of each video for a somewhat underwhelming but hassle-free powerhour experience.
Cheers!
A slow start is still a start, but it has not been a particularly productive month. This is due primarily to a bunch of IRL drama (mostly resolved now) but, if I'm honest, also because I've been coping with said drama by obsessively trying to 100% horror-farming masterpiece Gleaner Heights. I've been a fan of the genre since Harvest Moon on SNES and I've always wanted to make my own weirdo farming game. Maybe someday. Anyway.
So I didn't get started on v5 in earnest until pretty late into January, but despite that I've made decent progress and, more importantly, I'm back in the groove of working on BRS nearly every day with my burnout meter comfortably in the green.
Pregame
My time has been spent almost exclusively on my 'pregame' checklist, getting set up for the work ahead of me and fixing little things from the last version.
I've been using VS Code as my IDE but ever since I upgraded my PC like a year ago it's been absolute ass. I spent a bunch of time trying to get it to work, and I guess I succeeded, but for some reason that caused compile times to jump up to like a full minute for every little code change. So I dove into Unity assembly references, which hurt my brain, but it brought compile times back down to like 10-30 seconds. Which was cool, but it somehow introduced a bunch of new annoying behavior to VS Code so I finally said 'fuck it' and made the switch VS Community which is working fine except compile times are back up. I am losing my god damn mind a little bit with this so I'm just moving on and dealing with it for now.
I also added a teleport tool for testing & debugging. I can't believe it took me this long. A lot of my testing time is spent just traveling between planets & stations, and now I can teleport immediately to any station I want. The logic for this was fairly easy to code, but I got got bogged down for a day or 2 wrestling with the UI. It's partly because I'm not good at UI, but I think Unity deserves some blame here, too. Implementing clickable text links apparently requires a CS PhD, so with my lowly bachelor's I had to improvise a bit. Still took longer than it should, but well worth it for the time it will save me later on. It's a little buggy, fine for internal use, but I might clean it up eventually and integrate it into free flight mode, so you can start the game anywhere you want.
Interior Decorating
I've got a nice start on the interior customization system. The architecture is mostly in place, I've coded the main tools that I'm expecting to need, and I'm working on solving the technical challenges of changing object models & materials at runtime. Nothing is actually hooked up in-game yet, but the groundwork his being laid.
Rogue System Reboot Madness
There are currently 2 projects underway to reboot / remake Rogue System. Please spend a few minutes now & then radiating positive vibes in their directions.
One dude apparently has Michael's blessing & possession of the IP. There's some info at the end of this video about it and he's got a website up as well.
Another dev is making good progress on a similar project, here's their YouTube channel. They've taken a pretty hard turn away from a strict RS-like (no plans for orbital mechanics) but maybe they'll have a change of heart. It's been a fun project to follow so far, at any rate.
If either of you are reading this, godspeed & good luck! Now get back to work!
Coming Up Next
Once I get all the technical bits & pieces in place I'll diving into the nightmare of putting together a UI for ship customization. Customization will happen at Body Shop terminals which you may have noticed hanging out on the 2nd floor of city stations. The UI will be a whole lot different than the other terminals; rather than relying entirely on keyboard commands, I'll be experimenting with a UI that players can interact with using this new fangled 'mouse' contraption. Get off my lawn. Until next time!
