The Game Looks Less Shitty Now

This month was a bit of a trial, but it all came together in the end. There's still a lot of work to do on this front, but I'm happy with the progress and I'm calling it good enough for now. I think I'll just commit to spending a month or so with each update from now on working on graphics.

Procedural Planets Drama

Integrating the procedural planets into the main game did not go smoothly.

I have a system. 'x' means 'done', but it also means 'fuck it I give up'.

This disaster was due in part to me not understanding what the fuck a rendering pipeline is, but was mostly caused by my dumb ass panicking when everything broke. I changed a bunch of my own code as well as settings balls deep in esoteric Unity menus without backing things up first and I just ended up spending a day completely borking everything. I finally decided that it was easier to take the loss and revert to a previous version. My version control discipline isn't great but it's not entirely non-existent, so it ended up setting me back by like a week.

I thought about moving on and just sticking with the old planet models for now, but you don't spend years slaving away at a game that no one is ever going to buy without being a stubborn son of a bitch. So I took another shot at it, and I'm glad I did. Check it out:

Tyra's new groove

Same shitty old clouds, and I'd like to add some atmospheric effects eventually, but I think the planet itself is a huge improvement. More importantly, the procedural planet generator is working (with a few bugs, admittedly) in the game, so I spent some time replacing a couple of other planets & moons as well. Happy exploring! I'll try to get to the rest in the next version.

Ship Interior Complete

The interior is still very much a work in progress, but it's finally starting to feel a bit more space trucky. I sealed off the engine room for now with non-functioning doors labeled 'Cargo Hold', pretty sneaky yeah?

Lower Deck Hallway

Cockpit

Midship

Good enough for now! Luckily, as I mentioned last month, I had moved on to planet generation before spending the time to tediously place these new interior art assets, so that saved me a lot of re-do work when I had to revert the project.

Post Processing Effects

I also spent some more time dinking around with post processing. Applying effects selectively to different cameras turns out to be pretty problematic in Unity URP, and Black Road Sky uses a bunch of different cameras to create the illusion of scale, so I wasn't able to do a lot of the things that I wanted to.

I ended up applying effects only to the main 1st person camera. The result is subtle, but generally makes things look a bit nicer. I think? Either that or maybe worse? I can't tell. Whatever. I'm just not a graphics dude, you know?

Coming Up Next

I've got a little bit of cleanup work to do with this graphics nonsense, but the coming month will be focused on bug fixing and optimizations as I get ready to think about possibly maybe finally releasing this version someday soonish.

Interior Decorating & Terraforming For Dummies

Work on the amorphous goal of "making the game look less like shit" continues this month with reasonable success. Note that the goal isn't "make the game look good" ... I'm neither that ambitious nor that foolish.

A brief foray into the world of post-processing didn't yield any results that I was stoked about, and I just wasn't having much fun with it so I moved on from that pretty quickly. I plan to take another stab at it before release, though. So, no obnoxious lens flare screenshots this month but hold yr horses, they're coming. Probably.

Interior Art Assets

I considered shipping v0.4 with the placeholder interior art assets, but I need the 3d modeling practice and it seemed like low hanging fruit in the pursuit the goal so that's what I've spent the most time on recently. I wouldn't call the results impressive, but I do think it's a significant improvement, which is all I'm going for here. Here are some of the interior assets hanging around a test scene to give you a feel for the vibe:

Some of the new modular interior assets

I'm still working on getting all of these assets placed into the game proper. It's taking a while because it's boring but it should only take another day or two of focus to get it done.

Planet Redesign

To break things up while I'm tediously placing art assets I decided to start turning my attention towards the planet models. These are currently shitty not-even-spheres with slapped on textures from Google image search, so I was pretty confident that I could do something to improve on that.

All of the inspiration and most of the code comes from this fantastic tutorial series by the Bob Ross of programming himself, Sebastion Lague. I'm a big fan of his, and I've had the idea to use this procedural flavor of planet generation for a while. The style feels right for Black Road Sky, and someone else already did the work, so win-win.

I'm still working on getting this integrated into Black Road Sky, but here are some early results:

Some Test Planets

Coming Up Next

It'll just be more of the same in the coming month, placing the rest of those interior pieces and finishing up the planet generator. That will still leave a lot of graphical work left to do, but I think it should be good enough for now.

Damage, Repair and Moving The Goalpost

Development this past month has focused on finishing up the damage-related systems. I think it turned out great, but it took quite a bit longer than expected for a bunch of boring reasons. Like, I literally finished it yesterday. In fact, everything is taking a lot longer than expected, so I've decided to reduce the scope of v0.4 a bit and tackle the rest in the next version. This is annoying, since v0.4 was just meant to clean up the leftovers from v0.3 but whatever. More on that in a minute, but first let's talk DAMAGE, BABY.

Damage & Repair Game Mechanics

Visually, there's not much to show off beyond the ostentatious new UI elements:

MORE READOUTS LET'S GO

So we now have hull integrity, systems health and engine efficiency to manage. Engine efficiency was already a thing in Black Road Sky, it was just hidden from the player so you couldn't directly see how different engine modes worked at different efficiencies. Now you can! This is really just a measure of how effectively your ship is converting fuel into thrust.

Efficiency is now affected by system health, which is a measure of general wear & tear on the ship's systems. The ship will still perform well with system health in the 80's or 90's but will start burning fuel noticeably faster as you drop towards 50 and below. Wear accumulates naturally, but is pretty minimal outside of high throttle maneuvers.

Hull integrity refers to the structural stability of the ship's outer shielding. Damage occurs naturally during normal operation, but accumulates very slowly ... unless you're running into shit. This is pretty much a standard video game damage bar. A careful pilot will rarely need to worry about hull repairs, but system damage accumulates faster with a weaker hull, so fuel economy can be affected seriously by any major hull damage that goes unrepaired. Let things go too far, of course, and fuel economy will be the least of your problems.

Game Over!

Repairs can be ordered from any garage terminal. This works basically the same way as refueling, just pony up and it's done. As with refueling, there's a flat fee in addition to the cost of repairs. This is meant to discourage players from refueling and repairing every single time they land, just because I think that would be a tedious activity to reward.

Get fucked, get fixed.

On paper, this doesn't change the gameplay that much; don't throttle up higher than you need to and it's just an extra fee to pay every once in a while. In practice, though, actually having a reason to care about your ship's health adds a fun element of immersion to the game. It's a placeholder system but I think it's a nice taste of the direction things are moving in.

Reducing The Scope of v0.4

It should come as no surprise to Potato Clock Games stans that this update it taking for god damn ever. And there's still a lot to go. So I've decided to polish up what I've got once I'm done with the visual improvements that I have in mind and release it.

The game is already in a stable, playable state so this shouldn't have much of an effect on the overall development schedule, and it will be a good way to get some player feedback before moving on. I'm obviously not qualified to hazard a guess at a release date so I won't even try. It isn't exactly imminent but I'll say that it's on the horizon, whatever that means.

As for the elements that are being cut from this version, fear not, they'll make up the bulk of the next release. This means pushing systems implementations back YET AGAIN, but it's cool. We'll get there.

Coming Up Next

With the damage and repair systems finally complete, I'm moving on to experimenting with post processing, shaders and lighting. This is stuff that I know pretty much nothing about, so it's more research than active development at the moment, but it's something I've kind of got to deal with eventually. I'd also like to start redesigning the planets and moons. That might just amount to research, or redoing one planet, or maybe replacing all of them. Dunno yet. And I want to take another stab at some of the placeholder ship interior models. But then we'll just be a round of buxfixing, optimizations & loose end tying away from a release.

Tune in next time to find out if I just spent a few weeks ruining the game with a bunch of lens flares or something. Until then, fly safe, and I'll catch you next month!

Gameplay and Quality of Life Improvements

I've spent the last month ticking a bunch of little things off the gameplay / quality of life to-do list because that's less intimidating than working on more important shit. Here are some highlights:

Cryopod Improvements

I took a bit of time to work on stability problems with the cryopod (time acceleration is hard) and made some marginal gains on that front, but I'm more excited about the new quality of life improvements. There's now a throttle warning light outside of the pod, which I think is a big improvement over just pushing the button and wondering why nothing is happening. This tripped me up all the time after getting kicked out of warp and it bugged the shit out of me but then I was like, huh, I'm the dev, I guess I can fix that. I also added readouts to indicate the nearest station, your distance from it, and your distance to safe warp range. So you no longer have to target the station you're departing just to see when you've left warp inhibitor range. These were easy things to add but they've really improved the gameplay experience, at least for me as a player.

New Planet & Moons

This was a bit of a sidetrack, but I wanted to add some new places to explore for a the small handful of weirdos out there actually looking forward to this update. There's a new rocky planet beyond the orbit of Tyra called FuShen, based sorta kinda on Mars, but named after a Chinese god of happiness instead of a Roman god of war. Call me a hippie. The actual moons of Mars are too small to play nicely with my orbital simulation so they've been altered beyond recognition in a way that I hope will provide new orbital mechanics challenges. The near moon, Mekka, is a human-built superstructure which will be the in-fiction production facility for the exotic handwavium that powers the warp drive. The far moon, Mirchick, is a small, irregularly shaped, natural moon. There are 7 new stations in the FuShen system including Zazen City, the de facto capital city of The Sangha, and Juliano Station, named as a nod to Michael Juliano, the developer of Rogue System.

FuShen, Juliano Station, and Mekka

Ship Damage System

I'm currently working on implementing collision damage, wear & tear, and the ability to repair from garage terminals. This is a much simplified version of the eventual goal in which individual hardware components will accumulate damage and wear, and that damage will affect specific ship systems. For now, there are two very video gamey damage bars to manage: hull damage and systems damage. Hull damage accumulates slowly & naturally during flight and particularly during high thrust maneuvers, but is mostly there to penalize you for running into shit. Systems damage will build faster the harder you push the ship, and negatively affects your thrust power and fuel efficiency as it accumulates. The lower your hull health, the faster it will accumulate. My goal is that as long as you fly safe you'll rarely need to worry about paying for repairs, it's just another resource to consider and manage.

Coming Up Next

I did a bunch of other little things, too, but that's pretty much it. Spring is a busy time of year for me between beekeeping, fucking around in the yard and generally trying to spend time outside after a depressing Michigan winter, so development took a bit of a backseat this month and probably will continue to do so for a few weeks. But I've been forcing myself to work on Black Road Sky for at least a few minutes every day just to keep in the groove and I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made. Once I wrap up the damage / repair system I'm planning on getting back into modeling & graphics in an attempt to make good on my stated goal of "making the game look less like shit".

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!