April 2022 Lack of Progress Report

Progress hasn't quite ground to a halt, but it's been particularly slow this past month. I mean, slower than making a game one hour at a time in the morning before going to work usually is. This is largely due to Wobbledogs, partly due to the two new beehives that I now find in my charge and, not insignificantly, also the result of a generally waning enthusiasm for working on Black Road Sky. This is normal and, I think, expected; my energy for the project ebbs and flows, and if I try to muscle through and ignore the ebbs then I'll just end up getting burned out on it. So I respect the ebb. This particular ebb coincides with the discovery of a pretty major bug in the base orbital mechanics simulation, which is especially disheartening. I've just about got it fixed, but getting it almost fixed required a frustrating 2 week detour and I'm still not sure if everything is quite working properly. Space is hard, I guess.

That said, I'm still shooting for a July release, 2 weird years later than my original plan for a July release, but a July release nonetheless. Unless, of course, I get distracted or things take longer than expected, but what are the chances, amirite?

BRS v1.0 Cockpit Mockup

Well, time to start implementing the genetic simulation for crossbreeding ships in Black Road Sky. Back to work!

The Return of the WUMPUS BASTARDS Leaderboard!

Play WUMPUS BASTARDS here!

I've never been able to convince anyone else that this is a good game, but I genuinely love it.

The high score table has been broken for years because the database was stored on a university server which I eventually lost access to after graduation. By that time I had completely forgotten how PHP and SQL and all that worked, so I kept putting it off, but it only took like an hour to fix once I finally sat down to figure it out.

The old leaderboard is lost to time, so there's plenty of room to make your mark. If you're into logic puzzles, long winded game manuals, and drawing crazy maps then this is your game. See you in the putrid caverns of the Wumpus abomination, wretched hunter!

Post-v0.3 Plans for Black Road Sky

A couple of months ago I outlined the possible paths I saw in moving forward with Black Road Sky: give up, start over, or just keep going. I have chosen a path.

I'm actually having fun again, so giving up has lost its appeal. And now that I've reacquainted myself with the code base, which was more of a trial than it seems like it should have been, starting over feels unnecessary. SO ONWARD WE GO! I have reduced the scope of the game somewhat, but I've never said much about what the full scope was going to be, so who will ever know the difference? No one, but I'm gonna tell you about it anyway.

I've pared all of the ship systems down and even eliminated a few. This will help give me a chance of finishing the game in my lifetime, and now that I've made that decision I think I was probably over complicating the systems stuff anyway. I'm getting rid of a planned Tank Management System which was going to handle pressurizing & depressurizing consumable tanks as well as routing them to the appropriate systems. The system also involved a complicated network of valves for refueling, purging lines, and so on. All of that stuff is just going to happen automatically now. I've also decided to completely hand wave away the Life Support System, which was going to handle cabin pressure & temperature and would have had its own tank of life support gasses. And nearly every remaining system has been simplified to some degree, most notably the electrical & communications systems. Don't worry, the cockpit will still be an overwhelming mess of buttons and meters, but I'm trying to make sure that every button and every readout is really significant in terms of gameplay. I'm also shelving some non-trucking and endgame ideas, but those are things that I could add back in someday if it seems like the game needs it.

It's looking like another 2 months before v0.3 is ready, so that probably means like 4 months, but work is progressing steadily. If I can get it done by July, it'll only be 2 years later than my initial goal. Pretty good.

BRS - Pandemic Flashback #5: Gameplay Part Two

The last thing that I did before setting Black Road Sky aside for way too long was to finally implement some actual space trucking gameplay. But before I started on that, I decided that now was the time to completely redesign the ship's interior and exterior. That turned out to be a dumb idea, and I spent a lot of time not getting very far before eventually giving up, but here are some screenshots anyway. None of this will actually be implemented in the playable build of v0.3, but it gives some idea of where things are headed.

Starting on the cockpit redesign.

 

Detail of main control panel.

 

Figuring out the engine room.

 

The ship design is 100% placeholder, so yeah, a redesign needs to happen at some point. But I was really just replacing the placeholders with more elaborate placeholders and was spending way too much time on it with very little to show. I finally realized that it was completely unnecessary for the release of v0.3, so I abandoned the idea and got to work on gameplay stuff instead.

This gameplay stuff is also mostly placeholder, but at least there's something to do now in the game. The previously inactive terminals found in space stations are now functional (with the exception of the 'Body Shop' terminal found on city stations).

The bank terminal is used for taking out loans and will have additional functions added later. The first thing you'll need to do in the game is buy a ship, which will require that you take out a loan, and the only real objective of the game (for now, at least) will be to get out of debt by completing trucking contracts and eventually paying off your loan. You don't get to be a successful spacefaring civilization without a healthy dose of fiscal responsibility.

The contracts terminal offers up these trucking jobs. You can only take one at a time. Eventually, the plan is that you'll need to actually tow shipping containers much like real life semi trucks, but for now the cargo is just magically loaded into some mysterious cargo hold on your ship. The contracts are randomly generated and wildly unbalanced, but the core system works and finally provides some real motivation for flying from point A to point B.

Finally, the garage terminal provides refueling and repair services for your ship. I'm not sure if repairs will make it into v0.3, but I have refueling working.

That's all the makings of a GAMEPLAY LOOP, BABY! Cool. However, at this point I was forced to confront all of the bugs and loose ends that stood between me and a version release, and it was fucking overwhelming so I just gave up for a while.

Anyway, I'm back in a groove now and things are actually going pretty smoothly. Gonna take longer than the "month or two" that I estimated last month, but things are looking good. Bugs are being fixed, loose ends are being tied, and I'm confident that BRS v0.3 will be the breakout hit of Spring 2022. Maybe Summer 2022. Probably 2022.

BRS Version 0.3 Progress and Existential Dread

 I finally got back to work in earnest on Black Road Sky. It sucks.

The code base has been a nightmare to get reacquainted with, even after just a few months away. But I've been forcing myself to work on it for a couple of hours each day and I'm making progress. Some major bugs have been squashed, and I'm confident that I can get the game back into a stable state. Might take a month or two. I don't know what the future holds for Black Road Sky, but I feel pretty committed to getting v0.3 off the ground, at least.

Then what? I'm not committing to anything here, but these are the options currently floating around my head:

1. Fuck it. Give up. I don't think there's any way this game will end up meeting my expectations for it, but who cares, I'll end up with a cool tech demo and maybe I can move on with my life and make a different game that doesn't require a mastery of math that I barely understand.

2. Fuck it. Start over. I've been trying to make this game for like 10 years now, and I've started over 4 or 5 times, and maybe I'll just do that again. This is actually pretty appealing. I've already figured out a lot of the architecture and math and stuff, so I know that I could build a stronger code base if I started over.

3. Fuck it. Just keep going. Keep building on this monster until we have something resembling our vision. Maybe reduce the scope. Make like $150 on Steam. Get it right in Black Road Sky 2.

Maybe there are other options, but I can't see them right now. I'm not really leaning toward or away from any of the above 3 options. I suspect that I'll have some clarity in a month or two after I get v0.3 ready to ship.

DON'T WORRY, Pandemic Flashback The Last is coming up next. Cool yr jets.

Well, shit. Again.

 

BRS v0.3 COMING ... 6 months ago ... ? Aw fuck.

BRS - Pandemic Flashback #4: Gameplay Part One

I split the gameplay elements of v0.3 into two parts, concentrating first on flying/piloting stuff, and then on laying the foundation for space trucking. The focus for the piloting update was just to make the moment-to-moment flying a bit more involved, but this will be evolving as I add in ship systems.

WARP/SAN LIMITING

Stations are now equipped with some sort of magical warp inhibitor that automatically drops you out of warp if you're within a 500 km radius. This is not exactly what I have in mind for the final implementation, but it was easy to set up as a placeholder. I wanted to do this for a few reasons. First, it makes sense from a world building perspective as an in-universe safety precaution. Second, it forces players to take orbital mechanics into consideration when approaching a station, rather than just warping to like 1 km away. Finally, the physics system bugs the fuck out when warping or time accelerating near stations and this was an easy band-aid.

But I kind of hate it. This is not what the final version will look like. While this solution does do what I wanted it to do, it also introduces some major annoyance as you're constantly kicked out of warp. I have some thoughts on how to smooth this out, maybe even for v0.3, but more on that another day.

WARP MECHANICS

The warp system, like all ship systems, will eventually be fairly involved. So there's nothing final about this, but I wanted to make entering warp feel more meaningful. Now, you need to face the ship prograde and hold it there for a few seconds in order to achieve a warp lock before engaging. Once locked, warp is engaged by throttling up to 10%; this feels pretty good, like you power up and then suddenly slam into warp. This also disincentivizes using warp for short jumps, since starting out at 10% power makes it easy to overshoot. Similarly, you now drop out of warp by throttling all the way down to zero. Again, this just feels right, and avoids the weird situation where you could just sort of halt yourself in time and space by warping at 0% throttle.

BURNING FUEL

Thrusters now burn fuel! This includes attitude and translation thrusters. More powerful thrusters like the main boosters are more efficient than weaker ones like the docking translators. This makes sense in rocket sciencey way (probably?) but also, more importantly, for gameplay. Boosters are efficient enough for interplanetary transfers, while docking thrusters are inefficient enough that fuel still needs to be budgeted for close-range maneuvers.

BOOST MECHANICS

Finally, I made some tweaks to the main boosters. In maneuver mode, engaging and disengaging the deflectors is no longer instantaneous, with the physical mechanism taking a couple of seconds to respond. And in boost mode, the deflectors are no longer available. This was purely a gameplay decision. I just think it's fun to have to flip the ship around and burn when making big braking maneuvers.

The next task, before moving on to the second half of the gameplay update, was to, um, completely redesign the ship, both on the interior and exterior. It did not go well. Stay tuned!