Implementing Player Suggestions

I've been having trouble getting my ass into gear with ship customization, so rather than stalling out I decided to move on to other areas of the todo list. With the release of v0.3, I finally shared Black Road Sky with a few dark corners of the internet, mostly to the soothing sounds of internet crickets, but a few nerds took the bait. Some of them were even enthusiastic enough to offer suggestions for the next release, so let's kick off a round of gameplay improvements by bending to the will of the people, yeah?

Free Flight Mode

I'm well aware that the first 5 minutes of the game are pretty fucking dull, so it was no surprise to learn that players found the first 5 minutes of the game to be pretty fucking dull. Eventually there will be more going on at the start of the game, and the space stations won't be boring white caverns, but we're obviously not there yet. So when someone suggested a free flight mode, where you can just jump in and start flying, I thought it was a pretty great idea.

You can now choose "Free Flight" from the title menu, and start the game parked in orbit near Gagarin with a full tank of gas and a ton of spacebucks burning a hole in your pocket. This is a great way for new players to quickly check the game out, and a nice starting point for people who just want to dink around and explore rather than getting into the trucking grind.

Help Menu

I had a lot of fun making the BRS v0.3 YouTube Tutorial Series, so I don't regret the time I spent on it, but spending 4 hours watching a dude get drunk and ramble while playing his own game is obviously not the ideal way to onboard new players. At the same time, with the game in such a state of flux right now I think it would be a waste of time to implement a proper in-game tutorial. So I am instead, thanks to another player suggestion, leaning into the opposite extreme and augmenting the TMI tutorial videos with some very basic in-game help.

Help Menu

Hopefully a quick reference for flight controls and standard procedures for departures, arrivals, and warp will help to make the learning phase of the game a bit more accessible.

Vincent Mode

One dude asked for an infinite fuel option so now it exists. Be the dev you want to see in the world.

Coming Up Next

I'm currently working on some improvements to the cryopod and I've got a few more gameplay related features that I want to squeeze in before moving on to concentrating a bit on the game's visual style. You know how you can run into a spacestation going like 1000 k/s and just sort of bounce off of it unscathed? Well not for long, bucko!

Potato Clock Games 2022 Powerhour

The latest entry in my beloved annual powerhour series has been released. Get crunk here!

"Space Trucker Drinking Cheap Beer" courtesy of Stable Diffusion

It's just a YouTube playlist of 60 newish songs that I dug in 2022, played through my Low Effort Debauchery Generator, which takes a YouTube playlist and plays a random minute of each video for a somewhat underwhelming but hassle-free powerhour experience.

Cheers!

Interior Redesign Progress

Welcome aboard!

After starting over a handful of times, I've managed to nail down a workflow for building the interior space of the ship, and a first draft interior is in place. It seems pretty straightforward in hindsight but it was surprisingly difficult for me. The models for the floors, ceilings and whatnot are all placeholders, but I hope to replace them with nicer models by 0.4 release. It's all modular, so now that I have the parts built and the workflow figured out, it should be pretty easy to change things as needed.

Here's the current vibe:

Entryway

Cockpit

Midship

Engine Room

I ended up deviating from the plan in a few ways, and as usual that meant getting rid of shit. Somehow I'm plagued (blessed?) with whatever the opposite of feature creep is. Feature atrophy? First, I ditched the airlock. I've already decided to forget about EVA stuff and external station docking (although external docking will still be a thing for coupling your ship to cargo containers) and I'm also abandoning plans for a detailed life support system, so ... what's the point of an airlock? I was also going to add a crew quarters sort of room, but I never had a clear idea of what I was going to do with it, gameplay-wise, so fuck it. These are both things that can be added in later if I want to, but like, I don't think I'll want to.

Because of the dumb way that I built things in the first place, redesigning the interior broke a ton of shit; the entrance gangway, the light controls, the cryopod, the ship info terminal, and viewscreens in the cockpit. So, like everything. I'm currently working on getting all that working again and rebuilt in a way that moving things around won't cause so much drama in the future. This is kind of annoying, but shouldn't be too difficult or take too long. After that I'll be moving on to ship customization which should be fun. More on that next time!

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?