PCG 2023 Shareholders Profits Report

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.

Release Announcement: BRS v0.04 (Ship Redesign & Damage System)

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

BRS Version 4 Release Date & Trailer!

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.

Let There Be Light, Before I Lose My God Damn Shit

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!

Chanting the Buddha's Name with Every Stitch

It's been a slow month, dev-wise. The first person controller bugs are squashed, a few more loose ends tied, and I'm working on getting ship maintenance pages added to the in-game help menu so that the new damage system doesn't feel totally opaque. That's ... pretty much it.

I spent a week visiting family out of state, which was great. I kind of needed the break and I was too busy drinking slightly different beers than usual to worry about Black Road Sky. Then I got back home and was promptly hit with some sort of fever which knocked me on my ass for about another week. And now I'm writing this. So that brings you up to speed. Back to work tomorrow, hopefully.

One Year Anniversary

I've been working on this version update for a year now. It's kind of depressing.

I was hoping to finish up by the end of this month so I could tell myself that it "only" took a year, but I'm not sure if that will happen. According to my notes, I originally expected to be done by the end of 2022. And that was before I dramatically cut the scope. What the fuck was I thinking? I try to be kind, tell myself it doesn't mean that I haven't accomplished enough, only that I lack prescience. The important thing is that I keep working and that I avoid burning myself out, and I am doing both of those things.

There are these Zen Buddhist priests who hand-sew their own ordination robes. It takes months of meticulous, daily work. Tomoe Katagiri, who introduced this robe sewing practice in America, was once asked what they consider to be the most important aspect of the sewing practice. She responded:

"When you think how many yards you will sew, chanting the Buddha's name with every stitch, if you count all the stitches, you say, 'I cannot do it!' But, if you do this stitch: one stitch. One stitch. One stitch continuously, you will finish. If you stop, if you quit, even if you are very good at stitching, you will never finish. Just continue!"

Coming Up Next

"Just continue!"

(https://tricycle.org/magazine/tomoe-katagiri-zen-sewing-stitching/)

BERGS N TWERKS

With the major goals of v0.04 either complete or kicked down the road for future-me to deal with, I've been focusing on fixing bugs and making small tweaks to various systems and game balance. This is usually a pretty boring phase of development that I lovingly refer to as ...

BERGS N TWERKS

These are mostly small, easy fixes. It's so easy to get sidetracked with little things during normal development, and those sidetracks often lead to more sidetracks, so that when I finally get back to whatever I was originally working on it takes another 20 minutes just to figure out what the hell I was even doing, and then, you know, oh shit, gotta go to work or whatever. So when I notice something small that needs to be done, I find that it's much more efficient to jot down a note and deal with it all later. Well, later is now.

I've been steadily knocking things off of the todo list, but there's not much to show or to write about, really. Like, I forgot to add the new light switches to the save system so I fixed that. I added an option to disable the new ship damage system, and added some more readouts to the cryopod UI. Lots of little shit. This is all work that players won't really notice, since I'm fixing problems that didn't even exist in the previous version.

Some bugs, however, are more long standing. Manual navball movement is now much less wonky (3d rotations are so fucking confusing, I still don't know what the fuck a quaternion is), and I spent some time cleaning up the way space stations transition into and out of physics range, which was previously causing a lot of weird station behavior. It's still not perfect.

Making Games is Hard

Of course, for every 10 easy fixes I'll run into at least one big pain in the ass fix. There were all sorts of issues with how my first person controller interacted with the new ship interior; clipping through walls and sinking through floors into backrooms nightmares, launching off of surfaces like a god damn pinball, just all kinds of problems. The first person controller was one of the first things I wrote in Unity and I've never revisited the code until now. It was horrifying. I ended up rewriting the whole thing. This handled all the weird bugs, and movement is now noticeably nicer in general. It also created some new bugs which I'm still working on fixing.

The other really time consuming issue was that every space station light broke at some point. I still don't know why. I spent so long researching and trying to figure out why nothing was working, but for some reason the solution was to increase the intensity of the lights by like 4 fucking orders of magnitude. I only figured that out because I was frustrated and I was like TAKE THIS UNITY and spammed '9's into the intensity setting of a light. This caused other problems, though. Lighting in URP works differently than the standard pipeline and I'm still struggling to get the space station interiors looking decent. On the one hand, it's pretty frustrating because the whole point was to make things look less like shit, and at the moment the space stations just look more like shit. On the other hand, I don't want to spend too much more time on it, since the space stations will all be completely redone eventually. Eventually might be a long way off, though, so I'll keep plugging away at it for a bit.

You might think that a dude who spends his free time coding an orbital mechanics simulator would be handling character movement and scene lighting no problemo. You'd be wrong. It's problemo all the way down.

Coming Up Next

More of the same on the horizon, just tying up loose ends and preparing the project for life in the real world. I still need to do things like setting up the initial game state, and there's lots of playtesting to do which will inevitably uncover more bugs. The circle of life. I'll admit to you, since you've read this far, that I'm getting a bit burned out and have been sacrificing some development time to replay Crystalis, maybe my favorite ARPG on the NES. I'm good at dealing with burnout, but it only slows down an already glacial development pace. I soldier on, though, and I'm committed to finishing this version update before taking a real break. Still a lot left to do, but we're getting close.

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.