Here we give a brief introduction to SpaceSlog and show some basic game play.
Category: DevSlog
Electricity
We now have power in SpaceSlog. Power will be required to run everything on your ship including thrusters, lights, powered doors, oxygen generators, air scrubbers, computers and more. Not having power could cause serious consequences for your crew.
Currently there are two types of power. Generators and solar. Solar is currently unusable as we do not have an energy source for them to take power from. Though eventually going near stars will allow these to generate energy. The only problem being, you will need to store this power in batteries because of course once you move away from the star your solar panels will no longer be working. Generators will take a type of fuel, though it is still not clear how this fuel will be acquired. For now it can be purchased from passing ships, so you should probably be stocking up whenever you have the chance.
All powered items need to be connected via a cable. I thought long and hard on the type of ‘feed’ we would use for the power supply to items and i decided on using cables as i think this adds a nice extra layer of strategy. Other ideas were to use ‘wireless’ electricity, but again, i think that would remove a layer of strategy where you need to decide where to place your items and cables for maximum efficiency. Of course enemy ships might eventually decide to take out your power supplies or cabling systems.
As usual all the parts that make up a powered item are added as components/modules and can be added to various items via JSON.
If you have any other ideas or suggestions regarding power in SpaceSlog, then feel free to join our Discord or Forums or post a comment below.
Improvements to core features
With the initial test build released on Itch.io i have spent a bit of time making improvements to some of the core features of the game to improve usability.
When multi selecting an item it will now only select up to 200 items of that type, this should help performance if you have too many objects that are the same. I also removed the ability to multi select hull pieces as there are always quite a few of these for each ship. There should also not be any reason for you wanting to multi select all hull.
To further improve performance, I added a VisibilityNotifier to each Entity in the game, this is a node provided by the Godot engine and allows us to check which items are being shown on the screen, or what the player can actually see. Using this we can now make sure only those on the actual screen will be selected.
I further improved the multi build tool adding new sounds to let the player know when the multi build has started. Unfortunately you cannot hear those sounds in the gif below. I now need to allow multi build for removing build objects and blueprints.
Skin and Hair Colours
I have moved skin and hair colours into a separate JSON file. This allows modders to easily change what colours they want in the game and for which race to assign them to. As you can see below, the pawn data file accepts an array of colour categories, this means you can create separate categories of skin tones and add as many as you want to each race.
This also means you could have different coloured skin tones for humans too if you really wanted.
Building, objects and materials
My main goal for any game mechanics associated with building and the building objects themselves should be flexibility, extensibility and ease of use. Not only for those that want to modify the files but also for the players playing the game.
In other words the menus should be intuitive and easy to read, whilst giving all the information required to quickly build any of the objects available. Anyone wanting to modify the files should be able to do so easily and with the least amount of friction possible.
I also wanted materials to change the appearance of the item whilst also changing its composition, from how it reacts in the world to how much health it has etc.
A lot of time was spent iterating upon the UI and adjusting the mechanics of the game associated with building and materials to fit the criteria set out above. Below you can see the menu I finally settled upon, though be aware that like most other things in this game, it is still a work in progress and could be subject to change.
You can see from the above image we have a primary material and a secondary material. Not every object will require two different material types to build and this can be modified in the JSON files if required. Below you can see this item requires 3 of either Titanium or Gold plus 2 Silicon. These materials can be further modified via another JSON file.
"material_types": {
"primary_mats": ["Titanium", "Gold"],
"primary_mats_amount": 3,
"secondary_mats": ["Silicon"],
"secondary_mats_amount": 2,
},Below you can see the effects of the different primary material types (Secondary material types will not change the colour of the objects). This is achieved by using a shader and a mask material which can be input into the JSON file.
Adding new objects should be as easy as copying and pasting a similar object, changing parts of its data and pointing it to your texture file in your module folder.
As usual, if you have any questions then feel free to head on over to our forums where I will be happy to reply.
Title Screen Artwork
Our current artist Leone Simonetti (You can find more of his work here) has created new background artwork for the title screen. Although the previous art looked very good i did not think it fits the intended atmosphere of the game correctly. Hopefully the new art created by Leone better encapsulates that feeling of being lost in the vast emptiness of space with a smattering of lonely alien planets and derelict space stations that can be explored. You can probably see some influences here from The Expanse too.
Let me know what you think!