Download Black Road Sky v0.3 here!
Not sure if you're ready to part with your hard earned zero dollars? Hype yourself off the fence with this release trailer!
Well, v0.3 is finally done, only two years late, and will be available to download by the end of the month. Still doing playtesting at the moment, for whatever it's worth. A one person testing team isn't nearly enough, especially when that one person already knows how to play the game. So I'm sure that plenty of bugs will sneak through, but I'm fine with that for now.
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| Moving the goalpost is the same thing as staying on track. |
The bigger problem is that no one will know what the fuck to do or how to play this fairly complicated orbital mechanicsy game due to the complete lack of any sort of tutorial. Thing is, the game is in such an early state and there are so many big changes coming that it feels foolish to spend a bunch of time on an in-game tutorial system that I'll just have to redo any time I release a new update. So instead I've decided to create a video tutorial series where I'll basically just play the game and explain how to do shit. I have a feeling that shooting and editing videos will actually end up being even more time consuming than creating a new in-game tutorial with every version release, but fuck it, I'm doing it anyway. I think it'll be a fun break from actually working on the game before I dive back in for the next version.
Anywho, I have no idea how long it's going to take me to put the tutorial series together so I'm going to go ahead and release v0.3 in order to meet my arbitrary July release target that no one knows about and then release tutorial videos as I create them. Stay tuned!
I'm back in the flow and working steadily to knock off the dozens of remaining items on the release prep to-do list. In addition to a final round of bug squashing and play testing, I've added a handful of gameplay features that I felt were worth taking the time to implement.
Added NavBall Functionality
The player can now manually rotate the navball into any orientation, then easily reset it to its home position. This is a feature that is not needed very often, but it's super useful in certain circumstances, particularly in making correction burns on interplanetary transfers. I have some other Big Ideas for easing the pain of interplanetary travel, which is still at least as tedious as it is engaging, but this was one easy-to-implement feature toward that goal.
Ship Ownership
You now begin the game without a ship, and kick things off by buying one and taking on the debt which is the backbone of Black Road Sky's engaging storyline of paying off debt. I thought about starting the game, just for now, with a little block of text like "You just a bought a ship, you're in debt, have fun", but I think that letting the player spend the money might give them a more meaningful connection to the ship. Probably overthinking it. But also, it's just a hilariously boring way to start a video game. How you gonna start your space game, an engaging cinematic cutscene of flashy lasers cutting down alien spaceships? Nope, let's make everyone apply for a loan via a cumbersome text-based banking terminal.
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| Cumbersome text-based banking terminal. Admit it, you're hooked! |
These kinds of features typically only take a few hours to implement, but considering that I only have an hour or two each day to work on the game, I'm trying to be very careful about what I'm choosing to invest time in. To this end, I've also decided to push a bunch of less critical things up to be dealt with in a future update, such as refining the keybinding system and diving down an optimization rabbithole. The game works great with keyboard & mouse and it runs fine on my mediocre 5 year old PC, so I'll save those tasks for later.
Bigger picture, I'm still in a sloggy part of development, but it feels better now that I can see a finish line. Still gunning for a release sometime in July!
Progress hasn't quite ground to a halt, but it's been particularly slow this past month. I mean, slower than making a game one hour at a time in the morning before going to work usually is. This is largely due to Wobbledogs, partly due to the two new beehives that I now find in my charge and, not insignificantly, also the result of a generally waning enthusiasm for working on Black Road Sky. This is normal and, I think, expected; my energy for the project ebbs and flows, and if I try to muscle through and ignore the ebbs then I'll just end up getting burned out on it. So I respect the ebb. This particular ebb coincides with the discovery of a pretty major bug in the base orbital mechanics simulation, which is especially disheartening. I've just about got it fixed, but getting it almost fixed required a frustrating 2 week detour and I'm still not sure if everything is quite working properly. Space is hard, I guess.
That said, I'm still shooting for a July release, 2 weird years later than my original plan for a July release, but a July release nonetheless. Unless, of course, I get distracted or things take longer than expected, but what are the chances, amirite?
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| BRS v1.0 Cockpit Mockup |
Well, time to start implementing the genetic simulation for crossbreeding ships in Black Road Sky. Back to work!
Play WUMPUS BASTARDS here!
I've never been able to convince anyone else that this is a good game, but I genuinely love it.
The high score table has been broken for years because the database was stored on a university server which I eventually lost access to after graduation. By that time I had completely forgotten how PHP and SQL and all that worked, so I kept putting it off, but it only took like an hour to fix once I finally sat down to figure it out.
The old leaderboard is lost to time, so there's plenty of room to make your mark. If you're into logic puzzles, long winded game manuals, and drawing crazy maps then this is your game. See you in the putrid caverns of the Wumpus abomination, wretched hunter!
A couple of months ago I outlined the possible paths I saw in moving forward with Black Road Sky: give up, start over, or just keep going. I have chosen a path.
I'm actually having fun again, so giving up has lost its appeal. And now that I've reacquainted myself with the code base, which was more of a trial than it seems like it should have been, starting over feels unnecessary. SO ONWARD WE GO! I have reduced the scope of the game somewhat, but I've never said much about what the full scope was going to be, so who will ever know the difference? No one, but I'm gonna tell you about it anyway.
I've pared all of the ship systems down and even eliminated a few. This will help give me a chance of finishing the game in my lifetime, and now that I've made that decision I think I was probably over complicating the systems stuff anyway. I'm getting rid of a planned Tank Management System which was going to handle pressurizing & depressurizing consumable tanks as well as routing them to the appropriate systems. The system also involved a complicated network of valves for refueling, purging lines, and so on. All of that stuff is just going to happen automatically now. I've also decided to completely hand wave away the Life Support System, which was going to handle cabin pressure & temperature and would have had its own tank of life support gasses. And nearly every remaining system has been simplified to some degree, most notably the electrical & communications systems. Don't worry, the cockpit will still be an overwhelming mess of buttons and meters, but I'm trying to make sure that every button and every readout is really significant in terms of gameplay. I'm also shelving some non-trucking and endgame ideas, but those are things that I could add back in someday if it seems like the game needs it.
It's looking like another 2 months before v0.3 is ready, so that probably means like 4 months, but work is progressing steadily. If I can get it done by July, it'll only be 2 years later than my initial goal. Pretty good.
The last thing that I did before setting Black Road Sky aside for way too long was to finally implement some actual space trucking gameplay. But before I started on that, I decided that now was the time to completely redesign the ship's interior and exterior. That turned out to be a dumb idea, and I spent a lot of time not getting very far before eventually giving up, but here are some screenshots anyway. None of this will actually be implemented in the playable build of v0.3, but it gives some idea of where things are headed.
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| Starting on the cockpit redesign. |
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| Detail of main control panel. |
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| Figuring out the engine room. |
The ship design is 100% placeholder, so yeah, a redesign needs to happen at some point. But I was really just replacing the placeholders with more elaborate placeholders and was spending way too much time on it with very little to show. I finally realized that it was completely unnecessary for the release of v0.3, so I abandoned the idea and got to work on gameplay stuff instead.
This gameplay stuff is also mostly placeholder, but at least there's something to do now in the game. The previously inactive terminals found in space stations are now functional (with the exception of the 'Body Shop' terminal found on city stations).
The bank terminal is used for taking out loans and will have additional functions added later. The first thing you'll need to do in the game is buy a ship, which will require that you take out a loan, and the only real objective of the game (for now, at least) will be to get out of debt by completing trucking contracts and eventually paying off your loan. You don't get to be a successful spacefaring civilization without a healthy dose of fiscal responsibility.
The contracts terminal offers up these trucking jobs. You can only take one at a time. Eventually, the plan is that you'll need to actually tow shipping containers much like real life semi trucks, but for now the cargo is just magically loaded into some mysterious cargo hold on your ship. The contracts are randomly generated and wildly unbalanced, but the core system works and finally provides some real motivation for flying from point A to point B.
Finally, the garage terminal provides refueling and repair services for your ship. I'm not sure if repairs will make it into v0.3, but I have refueling working.
That's all the makings of a GAMEPLAY LOOP, BABY! Cool. However, at this point I was forced to confront all of the bugs and loose ends that stood between me and a version release, and it was fucking overwhelming so I just gave up for a while.
Anyway, I'm back in a groove now and things are actually going pretty smoothly. Gonna take longer than the "month or two" that I estimated last month, but things are looking good. Bugs are being fixed, loose ends are being tied, and I'm confident that BRS v0.3 will be the breakout hit of Spring 2022. Maybe Summer 2022. Probably 2022.
