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?

Goals for BRS v0.4

In my original plan, v0.4 was going to be all about implementing ship systems. I'm pretty excited to get started on this, but it's going to have to wait until the next version. My goals for v0.3 were a bit overambitious, and I ended up cutting out enough to justify an additional version release just to make up the difference. The focus of v0.3 shifted at some point from prepping for ship systems to implementing some basic gameplay. I'm still happy with this decision, but it means that there's still more to do before I can move on.

The major thing that I decided to put off was the ship redesign. This didn't do anything to support the gameplay aspects that I was working on so when I realized that it was going to be more difficult than expected I just said "yeah fuck that". It is important, however, that I get the ship interior in order before moving on to systems, and the exterior is just fucking embarrassing. The big roadblock here is that I know fuck all about 3D modeling. I've done a few Blender tutorials, some of which make cameos in BRS (shout out to those sick coffee mugs in the city stations) but I have a lot of learning to do still. If I can get to the point where I'm spending 70% as much time making models that are only 70% as embarrassing, I'll consider that a reasonable success.

This will also be a good time to implement ship exterior customization. I want to make the ship designs modular so that players can really dial in the look of their ship. This will be totally optional and purely cosmetic, but I think it'll be fun and anything that makes the player feel more invested in their ship is a good thing. Customization options will be very limited to begin with, but I imagine a future where every province has its own color scheme and ship style, with certain parts only available at certain stations, so players who want to can put a good deal of effort into pimping their rides.

So ship redesign & customization will be the main goals of v0.4, but there's a bunch of other stuff that I'd like to include if I have time. This might be a good opportunity to redesign the planets & moons, maybe start dialing in a visual style for the game, you know, make it not look like complete shit, and I'd like to add at least a little bit of new gameplay on the off chance that some weirdo out there is just waiting for a good excuse to start a new game by the time I get through all this.

All that said, I really haven't done shit in the past month. I think I just needed a break after finally hitting the v0.3 milestone. Here's to next month?

NOICE

Black Road Sky Tutorial Series Complete

The tutorial series is finally complete, check it out here!

When I had the idea to, in lieu of an in-game tutorial, just record myself slamming some 40s while playing the game, I really didn't think that it would set me back by over a month, but here we are. I'm not mad about it, I had fun doing it and it was a nice inter-version development break.

Yr gonna be a star, kid.

With that out of the way, I can finally move on to the ship redesign that I've been wanting to tackle for well over a year now. I expect this to be a slow process since I know fuck all about 3D modeling, but I guess if I'm gonna make a video game then I've gotta figure it out eventually.

Eventually has arrived. Wish me luck.

Black Road Sky Tutorial Series Progress

The tutorial series is coming right along, and you can check it out here:

BRS v0.3 Tutorial Series Playlist on YouTube

As of this writing, the first 5 videos are up. The remaining 3 have been recorded and will be uploaded as I finish editing them. They're not great, because as it turns out, making videos is hard. But I've been having fun with it nonetheless so I don't regret the decision to go this route instead of implementing something in-game.

Your drunk uncle explains orbital mechanics.

I've also spent the last month reacquainting myself with the basics of blender. So once I finish these tutorials we'll be ready to get back to work on the game proper. It's been a nice break, working on Black Road Sky without doing any programming or even opening Unity, but the party's gotta end at some point. I mean, I guess it doesn't gotta but it's gonna. Soon. Until then.

Gearing Up For BRS v0.4 But Actually Brewing An Assload Of Ancient Fruit Wine

I've mostly spent the past couple of weeks playing Stardew Valley (again! It's so fucking good!) instead of working on Black Road Sky, letting myself take a little break after finally getting v0.3 out into the world. Apparently the game has been downloaded 3 whole times, which is 2 more than I'd expect considering that I haven't actually told anyone that it exists yet. I haven't told anyone about it because I haven't started on the tutorial series, in large part because making the trailer was more of a pain in the ass than expected and now I'm scared. But I'll get to it.

One thing that I have done is to finally migrate the project to the current version of Unity. When I started working on Black Road Sky back in the whimsical carefree days of 2018, the most current version was Unity 2017 and I haven't upgraded since, for fear that I would break everything if I tried. But since a major goal of v0.4 is to make the game look less like shit, I figured that the least I could do was give myself access to technology that's not half a decade old. It was sort of a fiddly process, but not nearly the nightmare that I thought it would be, and I've now got everything working & error free in a modern game engine, so that's cool.

The next month will be spent dialing in the ship design on paper and hopefully getting my ass in gear on making these tutorial videos. And playing Stardew Valley. Seriously. So. Fucking. Good.