Boring Update - TL;DR I'm getting Back To Work

Spending some time away from development has allowed me to reevaluate what I'm trying to get out this update, and to get some perspective on why I've been having so much trouble getting my ass into gear. No need to go into too much detail, I don't think, but here's where I'm at:

I really don't care about ship customization. I want it to be a feature eventually, but it's not mission critical, and it's just not something that I personally care about as a player. I got it into my head that if it was going to happen at all then it needed to happen now, but it can totally wait. So I'm reducing the scope pretty dramatically; I'm keeping the ability to change interior colors, but not models, and it should be easy enough to do the same for the exterior. That's good enough for now.

I still need to spend some time reworking the input system, and that actually does need to happen now, before I start adding more cockpit controls. This will probably be boring work, but it shouldn't take too long.

I'm still going to do some work on planet/moon redesigns, but only until it gets boring or frustrating. I don't need to do it all at once.

And I've got some bugs to fix, but when don't I?

That's it, that's the next version. Just a minor update before finally moving on to ship systems. I'm still pretty busy this month, so I don't expect to get a ton done, but I'm feeling good & ready to get back in the groove.

The Major Provinces of Solis

Bhumi-Tyran Republic

Now overwhelmingly agnostic, The Republic was formed as a partnership between the major theocratic superpowers of post-Exodus Tyra to form a single, united government for the planet. Once considered a technophobic relic, the natural beauty and plentiful resources of Tyra, not to mention the nostalgic allure of the homeworld of all known civilization, has helped The Republic to grow into a successful economic power as well as a bohemian haven for artists and naturalists. Ruled by a democratically elected 100-person senate, The Bhumi-Tyran Republic has brought the first lasting age of peace and prosperity to the planet.

The Sangha

The Sangha is a loose and far-flung collective of monks and lay Buddhists without a capital city or homeworld, but with presence and influence in every planetary system of Solis. Renowned as scholars and teachers, this collective oversees the largest universities in Solis as well as the Zazen City Nature Preserve, the largest off-Tyra collection of natural flora and fauna. The Sangha enjoys a deep respect, particularly among ship captains, for their at-cost emergency refueling missions coordinated by a monastery of Zen monks known affectionately as ‘Rat Boys’. Although technically an anarchy, the community of The Sangha tends to leave matters of politics and trade to a handful of recognized Lamas, high monks of a lineage of reincarnated leaders and holy people.

Church of the Outer Gods

In the exploration rush of the Exodus Era, tragedy and discovery often came hand-in-hand. The stranded survivors of the wreck of the capital ship Soyuz Tereshkova were the first to discover the Elder Tombs of Zaoth, and spent three generations studying the ruins in secret, cut off from the rest of Solis. The community descended from these shipwrecked explorers came to call themselves the Church of the Outer Gods. Obsessed with the mysteries of their de-facto homeworld, they are openly ambivalent about reintegration into society at large. The smallest of the major provinces, The Church is ruled by a secretive council of scientist priests and is largely uninterested in politics or commerce. While rarely participating in Solis-wide affairs, The Church has openly and enthusiastically shared their discoveries of prehistoric ruins and technologies, bolstering a new era of exploration and innovation.

Kingdom of Midgard

The only remaining monarchy in Solis, The Kingdom is ruled with strict and subtle efficiency by QuEEN, a massive central AI, housed in the near-Solis orbiting Yggdrasil City. While Yggdrasil is the official governing capital of Midgard, only a handful of scientists actually live here at any given time with the sole purpose of attending to QuEEN. The majority of Midgard's population is scattered about the dwarf planets of the asteroid belts, giving them unparalleled mining access to the materials that the rest of the system depends on. Highly respected as scientists and engineers, The Kingdom is perhaps most beloved for their skilled artisans; their handcrafted beer, wine and liquor is served in nearly every station bar in Solis.

The People's United Free States of Solis

The Free States are formed by a loosely connected alliance between the many small, independent colonies and cities of Solis. Any governing body is eligible for inclusion, and nearly everyone not associated with one of the four major provinces falls somewhere under the umbrella of the UFS. Individual states are free to govern themselves; The Free States only asserts itself as a governing entity when necessary for the protection of the rights and interests of these smaller provinces. Political decisions are made by consensus among member representatives, each chosen by their own state. The Free States represent the largest and most diverse collection of cooperating humans in the history of the species.

Potato Clock Games Spring Sabbatical

TL;DR: I'm taking a month or 2 off from Black Road Sky to get my shit together.

I don't want this to come off as too dramatic or anything, but I do want to be transparent about the development of Black Road Sky. I'm just kind of sick of it right now, and have been for a while. I think that's a normal thing to feel from time to time with a project like this. I've been working on this thing on & off since 2017 (see the historic first devlog post here) with no real incentive, financial or otherwise, aside from like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if I made this game? So regardless of any surrounding circumstances, I want to be fair to myself with a 'breaks are allowed' approach.

Aside from generally needing a break, I just need the time right now for other things in my life. Spring is a busy time for us beekeepers, and it's important to me that I respect these living things in my care. I also need to catch up on things around the house; I've been renovating my kitchen since 2020 and I'm starting to feel like I'm taking advantage of my wife's patience. I need to start exercising, read some books, touch some grass. I won't go on, but you get it, my overwhelming to-do list has reached critical mass and I just need to make some space in my life to get back to baseline. Cutting back on BRS development is just one of a handful of temporary adjustments I'm making in my life (also going cold turkey on Tetris, wish me luck) and I'm hopeful that I'll come out the other side with a more healthy, focused mindset than I've had for, I don't know, maybe like a year now.

I plan to keep up with the tradition of 9th-of-the-month-devlogs, but the next couple will be a little different; maybe lore dumps or something, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that this is a temporary, purposeful break, and regular development will continue soon. And honestly, I think it will be better for the game in the long run. o7

Interior Customization Screenshots

The interior decorating system is complete! Except for the shitty looking UI which I'll deal with later. I've started on the exterior customization system, but more on that another day.

Screenshots

Customization options are fairly limited for now, but you can still achieve a wide variety of aesthetics. Eventually, each province will have it's own set of wall, floor and ceiling styles available only at their city stations, but for now there's just a small set of standard options.

Here are a few examples:

so fresh and so clean clean

Klingon Vibes

Industrial Flavor

Just go nuts, kid

This will all be totally optional, of course, and I know lots of people won't care about it, but I think it goes a long way toward making the ship feel like your own. I'm looking forward to seeing what players do with it!

Coming Up Next

I was hoping to have the exterior customization system done by now, but like, it's not even close. So that's what I'll be focusing on in the next month. SEE YA.

Interior Decorating System Nearly Complete

I finally got my ass into gear this month and I'm happy to say that the interior decorating system is very nearly complete! I ended up needing to rebuild the entire ship interior from scratch multiple times, but I finally landed on a system/architecture that I'm happy with. I wanted to get it right because the same system will eventually be used for space station interiors.

The customization system can be accessed from the Body Shop terminals on the 2nd level of City stations. The UI, while functional, is deeply embarrassing.

Y'all, I ... am NOT GOOD at this

This is hopefully just a placeholder. I'm planning on giving it a proper beauty pass before release, but you never know, maybe I'll get lazy. Anyway, from here you can change the style and color of the whole ship or of individual areas, so you can have multiple vibes per ship. Business in the cockpit, party in the midship. It's pretty fun to play with!

Bonus Trippy Nonsense

I'm not ready to share final result screenshots quite yet, but here are a couple of short, trippy videos that I made while testing various aspects of the interior customization system. Just for fun:

Coming Up Next

I've only got 2 or 3 days worth of work left on getting the interior customization system feature complete, but then there's a bunch of loose ends like integrating it into the save/load system which will take a bit longer. After that we'll be moving on to exterior customization! I should be able to reuse some elements of the interior system and hopefully learn from my mistakes so if all goes well it should come together fairly quickly.

Notable words used in that last sentence: 'should', 'hopefully', 'if all goes well', then we've got another 'should', and a 'fairly' for good measure. Believing in yourself is for fools.

Potato Clock Games 2023 Powerhour

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 to BRS v5

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!