It has been several months of trying to be perfect, design-induced headaches, and anxiety around slow progress.

But here we go. The first step.

Why did this take so much longer than the Sketchbook version? With Sketchbook games, I am not nearly as concerned about graphics, maintainability, or design. For example, on the Sketchbook, I just downloaded a PNG of a planet. For this demo, I iterated over four different atmosphere shaders before settling on the current one. The clouds, despite how they look, are the result of several attempts at a decent cloud system. The space stations are a 5th attempt to make something that looks decent. The HDRIs are custom made and blended together in a shader. And, a lot of new math issues appeared. For instance, in the Sketchbook, I could place "dots" as they were called by picking a random polar coordinate and converting it to cartesian space. Now, I am using the position of the camera, mouse, rotation of the planet, and rotating the station to correctly face the planet, done in a terror of transformations between screenspace, viewspace, spherical coordinates, and converting local and global Euler rotations.

Going Forward I have some cool ideas. I am writing a prototype planet generation compute shader and experimenting with ray-traced galaxies. After that, I'd like to work on galactic-level gameplay, make more resources, flesh out the economy, and the storyline!

I'll see you later! Add the game to a collection to get update notifications. If you would like to see sneak-peeks of the game, follow my Mastodon.