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!
I've taken a bit of a break from Black Road Sky to deal with the holidays and other various IRL drama, but I'm getting myself back into the groove this week and looking forward development in 2024. My goal for the year is to finish v5 and get a decent start on v6, which will finally focus on ship systems.
The Plan For Version 5
Ship customization system. This will be purely cosmetic, but I think that the ability to customize both the interior & exterior of your ship will be a cool feature. It's also something that I don't really know how to do, so I'd like to clear the hurdle sooner than later. Customization options will initially be limited, but will be expanded significantly when I get around to fleshing out the 5 provinces in like a couple hundred years.
Input System Refinements. The input system for control bindings needs some love, and it will need room to grow once I start adding more cockpit controls, so it's something I need to tackle now. I'll probably regret saying it, but I don't think this should take too long. The system itself is working pretty well as far as I can tell, but there's UI work to do and some basic features (deadzones and whatnot) that need to be implemented.
Graphics. I plan to spend some time with every update from now on working on making the game look better. This time around I'd like to redesign all of the planets and moons that I didn't get to in the last update (so, most of them) with the new procedural planet generator. Except for the gas giant, probably, which I think will require its own shader. The current planet generator can't handle craters, so adding that feature will be the main technical challenge.
Gameplay. The main new feature here will be a basic pilot reputation system. Reputation will be per-province, basically you'll gain points for timely deliveries and accurate landings and, eventuality, lose points for violating station protocols and whatnot. Reputation will eventually unlock things like new mission types and customization options, but for now it will probably just be something to grind. That's gameplay, technically!
But I Don't Want Any Of That Shit, I Want More Buttons To Push
Me too, dude. We're getting there.
In the coming month I have some cleanup/pregame work to do, then hopefully on to figuring out the architecture and UI for ship customization. o7
Ladies, gentlemen ... (clinks diamond-bedazzled champagne glass full of Miller High Life) ... if I could please have your attention, esteemed yuppie plutocrats. I see you all found your robes at the door, very well, very well.
Another capital year has further consolidated our unholy power, casting the suffocating chill of our magnificent shadow upon enemies and supplicants alike, the filthy masses cowering in fearful reverence of our numbers, our numbers, our numbers that go up.
(The robed congregation chants, "OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS THAT GO UP!")
Excellent. As you know, downloads of the latest version of Black Road Sky, released only 2 short weeks ago, have already shattered expectations, the numbers reaching values that can only be described as positive integers. Surfing the bloody wave of this success, YouTube subscriptions have very nearly broken the single-digit barrier, sending a shockwave of doom across an already decimated landscape of smoldering flesh and bone. Next slide, please.
The whiteboard illuminates. We drink of its purity. And we pray.
("OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS, OUR NUMBERS THAT GO UP!")
This concludes today's meeting. Thank you for your continued conspiratorial racketeering as we look forward to another year in the terrible reign of Potato Clock Games.
New version now available on the Itch.io page, give it a spin!
In this update I've attempted to make the game look less shitty with a redesigned ship (interior & exterior) and some redesigned planets & moons. I've also added a new planet with 2 moons to explore.
Gameplay-wise, we now have a basic damage system, which will be expanded on as I add more detailed ship systems in future updates. This can be disabled if you still want to exercise your god-given right to run into shit without dying. For more information on new ship maintenance considerations, check out the 'Help' option now available from the escape menu, which also includes basic procedures for departures, arrivals and warp drive operation.
The help menu was a player suggestion, as were the new additions of an infinite fuel option and a free flight mode, both now accessible from the title menu.
Other quality-of-life improvements include slightly less wonky manual navball rotation and an expanded cryopod display which now shows the nearest station in addition to your targeted station, as well as your distance to the edge of cryopod and warp range limits.
There were also a few steps backwards, if I'm honest, particularly with space station lighting, both interior & exterior. But, like, whatever. I'll fix it later.
Thanks for sticking with me through another glacial development cycle. Hopefully the next one goes quicker. It probably won't, you know, but here's to keeping hope alive. o7
GET HYPHY, CREW!
New version will be dropping in 10 days, on December 19th. It'll be available for free from the Potato Clock Games Itch.io page. Here's an incredibly unnecessary trailer that makes the game seem more exciting than it actually is!
I also plan on releasing a more casual 'what's new' video along with the game on the 19th, so stay tuned here or keep an eye on the YouTube channel for that if you're interested.
I'm never trying to edit an Aphex Twin song again, by the way. That whole album is sick, though, if it's your sort of thing.
Things are generally going well, and a version release draws near. Don't take this as an official announcement or anything, but I'm pretty darn confident that I'll have this out in the wild before the end of the year. That's the goal for now, anyway.
This month I finished up the in-game help pages for the new damage system and knocked out a few little bugs before realizing that I had bigger fish to fry. A couple of months ago I mentioned that the space station lighting wasn't quite up to par. As it turns out, I was not fully aware of the scope of the problem. What I should have said was ALL OF THE LIGHTING IS FUCKED AHHHHHHH!
Turning Off The Dark
So yeah, converting the project to Unity's Universal Rendering Pipeline (URP) absolutely fucked all the interior station lights, resulting in a huge detour which took most of my development time this month. The good news is that everything's working now, with the possible exception of my brain.
The station interiors were basically unplayable, the darkness pierced only occasionally by glitchy strobing bullshit. The main problem, which took me way too long to figure out, was that URP only lets an individual mesh be affected by a small number of realtime lights, so the dozen or so hangar lights plus all of the lights in the ship were fighting each other for dominance over the giant interior meshes and causing all manner of ruckus.
I'd never messed with baked lighting before, but it seemed like that was the solution. And it was, but hoo boy what a mess. The stations are all what Unity calls prefabs, which I was instantiating at startup. I couldn't get the baked lighting to work for days, and it's so obvious in retrospect, but it was because the stations weren't actually instantiated in the editing scene, and so didn't bake. So I had to redesign the whole architecture of how stations work in Unity's object hierarchy (now they all live in the editor & I just activate the objects when I need them rather than instantiating the prefabs at runtime) which worked but I still had to redo all the lighting after that and then, for some reason that I still do not understand, I had to bake the lights for each station individually. That part was easy but it took for god damn ever. So it was all just a huge time sink for very, very little payoff. It still doesn't look great, but it's good enough for now and I have a decent idea of what I need to do to fix things properly whenever I get around to redesigning the stations.
Procrastinating But Not Really
As anyone who has been following this development process knows, I hate fucking with graphics shit. It's just the worst. So this lighting fiasco kept bringing me to the edge of losing my shit but I had limited development time this month and I didn't want to waste what little time I had, so I spent some cool down days working on less pressing matters. I got my recording environment set back up and started planning out a release trailer and a 'what's new' video for v0.04, and started sketching out ideas for cockpit control layouts. I don't expect to be adding any new cockpit controls until v0.06, but it's fun to work on and I'll need to figure it out eventually.
Coming Up Next
This thing is pretty much ready, I think, but there are still a few loose ends knocking about and, more importantly, I need to sit down with the game and actually play it for more than a minute or two at a time. Who knows what soul-crushing bugs I'll uncover in the process.
I spent 2 of the last 4 weekends out of town and another one preoccupied with CTWC '23, so I really haven't been putting as much time into Black Road Sky as I'd like. But with the last known major bug squashed (LIGHTS!) and no big travel plans for the rest of the year, I'm excited to finally wrap this version up. The next post here will either be a trailer and some hype, or a deep meditation on the futility of existence, depending on how playtesting goes. Stay tuned to find out!
