Cats, Computers and Chase View

Progress has been slow this past month due to a handful of IRL things. I adopted a couple of new cats who don't seem particularly interested in my productivity, and I upgraded to a new PC, which is cool, but it took forever to get my development environment set back up. It's still not working quite how I want it to, but it's good enough to get back to work. This upgrade has been kind of a pain in the ass, but the Unity project for Black Road Sky now loads in less than 30 seconds instead of the 10 to 15 minutes that it used to take. So that's nice. Anyway, throw in a couple of weekends spent out of town, and there just wasn't much time left over for development.

When I did finally sit down to get working on the new ship interior, I made a sad discovery: I wasn't actually done with the new ship exterior. Now, if you're not a computer science whiz like me then you may not be able to spot the difference, but:

here's what the ship was looking like before docking:

and after docking:

That's right, the docked ship that you see from 1st person view uses a different model than the ship you see in chase view. In fact, they're completely different entities in the game. Your reaction to this fact probably lies somewhere on a continuum from "That's weird" to "That's stupid", and you're not wrong.

In order for Black Road Sky to work, I need to make wildly different scales play nicely together. This is non-trivial due mostly to what nerds call floating point precision, but basically you can't make those scales work together without employing some clever tricks. I'm not calling myself clever here, by the way, I didn't come up with any of this on my own, but those two ships, the docked one and the chase view one, essentially exist in different dimensions. They're linked only by the background simulation and the human mind's tendency to seek continuity. In order to maintain that illusion of continuity, and to support ship customization, I needed to make the chase view model update itself based on the current 1st person model. As is almost always the case, this was easier said than done, but behold, it has been done:

YAS CHONK

This completely broke some major systems, most notably the ability to dock the ship, but I eventually got everything working again. I think. So it is with mixed feelings and an annoyed sigh that I now declare the navigationally useless chase view to be in working order.

With all of that out of the way, I've finally started blocking out the new interior layout, but it's not much to look at just yet. It's going to include space for an airlock, engine room, consumable tanks, hardware storage area, quarters (not sure if that'll really end up being a thing) and of course the cockpit. If all goes well, I'll have a grand tour prepared for you by next month. Stay tuned & fly safe!

Chonky Boi Reporting For Duty

Just Big Boned

Well, I wouldn't say that I succeeded in making the ship look any less ridiculous, but I certainly made it a new flavor of ridiculous. If I sort of squint my third eye then I can convince myself to call that progress. More importantly, the shape and size of the ship are now conducive to supporting the planned trucking and maintenance gameplay features, and the behind-the-scenes architecture is now designed to support ship customization which is a planned feature of v0.4 (more on that in a later post).

I guess I'm sticking to this low-poly sort of cartoony vibe. It's a style that I have some chance of reasonably pulling off, and I think that I should be able to put assets together pretty quickly once I get comfortable with the workflow. I'd love to make a more realistic looking game someday, but it's becoming clear that I'd need to take like a year or two off of development to get good at that so, you know, fuck it. How realistic does a game with a wrap drive and unexplained anti-gravity/inertia really need to look?

Before tackling ship customization, I need to get working on the ship interior. Most of the ship will be inaccessible for now, but I also need to redo the model for the buttons (although the huge red circle buttons do have a goofy charm to them), revamp the cockpit layout, and who knows what else.

That's it for this month's report, gonna go get my interior design on, catch you in the next one!

PCG 2022 Shareholders Profits Report

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen of the board. Time is money so let's get started.

2022 has been a banner year for Potato Clock Games. The highly anticipated Version 0.3 of Black Road Sky has finally been released to an adoring public and downloads have soared into the double digits. Subscribers to the Potato Clock Games YouTube channel have increased by infinity percent from 0 to 3 thanks to the resounding success of an obnoxiously long series of drunken tutorial videos. We have prayed daily unto The Whiteboard, and lo it has been updated, may it show us The Path.

We stand poised for global market domination, laughing maniacally atop a mountain of skulls while red neon lightning cracks the night sky wide, revealing the incomprehensible fractal structure of reality folding in upon itself in an ever changing self referential loop beyond time, beyond space, beyond love.

Boys, we're gonna make a fortune.

Ship Redesign Progress

 

Well it's ... not ... nothing?

So 3d modeling is not my thing and this part of the process is kind of stressing me out. I'm trying to use that as motivation to muscle through so I can get back to having fun. We'll get there, but there's not a ton to report this month.

Still, I'm happy with the progress that I've made this year and I am back to working on Black Road Sky every day. I should have a lot of time to devote to development in the coming month. Stay tuned for the 2022 shareholder's report at the end December!

I checked things off, so that's progress, right?

Goals for BRS v0.4

In my original plan, v0.4 was going to be all about implementing ship systems. I'm pretty excited to get started on this, but it's going to have to wait until the next version. My goals for v0.3 were a bit overambitious, and I ended up cutting out enough to justify an additional version release just to make up the difference. The focus of v0.3 shifted at some point from prepping for ship systems to implementing some basic gameplay. I'm still happy with this decision, but it means that there's still more to do before I can move on.

The major thing that I decided to put off was the ship redesign. This didn't do anything to support the gameplay aspects that I was working on so when I realized that it was going to be more difficult than expected I just said "yeah fuck that". It is important, however, that I get the ship interior in order before moving on to systems, and the exterior is just fucking embarrassing. The big roadblock here is that I know fuck all about 3D modeling. I've done a few Blender tutorials, some of which make cameos in BRS (shout out to those sick coffee mugs in the city stations) but I have a lot of learning to do still. If I can get to the point where I'm spending 70% as much time making models that are only 70% as embarrassing, I'll consider that a reasonable success.

This will also be a good time to implement ship exterior customization. I want to make the ship designs modular so that players can really dial in the look of their ship. This will be totally optional and purely cosmetic, but I think it'll be fun and anything that makes the player feel more invested in their ship is a good thing. Customization options will be very limited to begin with, but I imagine a future where every province has its own color scheme and ship style, with certain parts only available at certain stations, so players who want to can put a good deal of effort into pimping their rides.

So ship redesign & customization will be the main goals of v0.4, but there's a bunch of other stuff that I'd like to include if I have time. This might be a good opportunity to redesign the planets & moons, maybe start dialing in a visual style for the game, you know, make it not look like complete shit, and I'd like to add at least a little bit of new gameplay on the off chance that some weirdo out there is just waiting for a good excuse to start a new game by the time I get through all this.

All that said, I really haven't done shit in the past month. I think I just needed a break after finally hitting the v0.3 milestone. Here's to next month?

NOICE

Black Road Sky Tutorial Series Complete

The tutorial series is finally complete, check it out here!

When I had the idea to, in lieu of an in-game tutorial, just record myself slamming some 40s while playing the game, I really didn't think that it would set me back by over a month, but here we are. I'm not mad about it, I had fun doing it and it was a nice inter-version development break.

Yr gonna be a star, kid.

With that out of the way, I can finally move on to the ship redesign that I've been wanting to tackle for well over a year now. I expect this to be a slow process since I know fuck all about 3D modeling, but I guess if I'm gonna make a video game then I've gotta figure it out eventually.

Eventually has arrived. Wish me luck.

Black Road Sky Tutorial Series Progress

The tutorial series is coming right along, and you can check it out here:

BRS v0.3 Tutorial Series Playlist on YouTube

As of this writing, the first 5 videos are up. The remaining 3 have been recorded and will be uploaded as I finish editing them. They're not great, because as it turns out, making videos is hard. But I've been having fun with it nonetheless so I don't regret the decision to go this route instead of implementing something in-game.

Your drunk uncle explains orbital mechanics.

I've also spent the last month reacquainting myself with the basics of blender. So once I finish these tutorials we'll be ready to get back to work on the game proper. It's been a nice break, working on Black Road Sky without doing any programming or even opening Unity, but the party's gotta end at some point. I mean, I guess it doesn't gotta but it's gonna. Soon. Until then.