Starcom: Unknown Space News

I've uploaded another video on the Creator tool:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And I also uploaded the first version of the tool to Steam. I've sent some invites to players to check it out: if you're interested in playing with it and giving feedback, shoot me an email at [email protected] and include "Starcom Creator" in the subject.

I've also created some documentation, currently available as a Google Doc.

The documentation is still very much a work in progress but I'll be curious to see if/how players use the tool.

I've also started brainstorming a new storyline that I envision as another side quest to the main story, but still in the very early stages.

Until next week!
Kevin

Continuing my video series on the Creator Tool, this week's update covers Regions:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

At this point the tool is mostly working with a few janky areas. I'm still testing and fixing features, as well as working on creating documentation.

Besides work on the Creator Tool, I've also started work on fixing some minor game issues.

Until next week!
Kevin

For the past month or so I've been working on updating the game's content creation tool with the goal of making it available to players interested in trying to create their own content for the game.

It's not quite ready yet for beta testing, but in anticipation of that point, I've started recording a series of videos introducing how it works in the context of a demonstration storyline. I've uploaded the first part today:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

(Every time I record a video I gain increased appreciation for Youtubers. It's harder than it looks to record and edit a coherent video in a reasonable amount of time.)

Until next week,
Kevin

For the past few weeks, I've been writing about progress on the new "Creator Tool": an updated version of the tool I made for creating the game's content that I am planning to make available to players/modders interested in creating their own content.

Most of the game's content was authored in an earlier version of this tool and is organized into content groups called "Stories". Not all of these "stories" correspond one-on-one to what you might recognize as game stories. They might be better thought of as the narrative equivalent of code "modules" but I didn't want to call them to avoid confusion with ShipModules. These are essentially namespaces that group related content together and keep me from having to worry if I've already created an anomaly with id ANCIENT_DERELICT a year ago.

Each story contains some or all of the following content:

• Missions: Where any of the story's logic happens. These may be actual missions that can appear in the player's log, or invisible logic missions that trigger events in response to game conditions.
  
• Anomalies: A dialogue-like interaction occuring on a planet, with a ship, or celestial artifact.
  
• Conversations: Like an anomaly, but with an actor associated with some faction.
  
• Discoveries: A source of Research Points.
  
• Factions: Usually an alien race.
  
• Regions: One or more sectors and the various PersistentObjects they contain (a PersistentObject is anything in the game universe that will persist if the player leaves and comes back: planets, ships, and stars are PersistentObjects; projectiles, drops, explosions, etc are not.)
  
• Ships: Any custom ship designs, typically the ships used by story's factions, but can also be things like investigatable derelicts.
  
• Items: Analyzable artifacts that are a tangible source of Research Points, also used as mission objectives/requirements.
  

For each of these, there's a panel in the Creator Tool used for creating and editing these. As of this point, I've created updated versions of most of these sub-tools. If all goes well, my plan is next week to start creating a new mini-storyline using the new tool as a test to see whether I've replicated all the necessary features and identify any bugs that show up during real use. I'll also probably tweak some existing content.

Sometime after that (fingers crossed) I'll send out some invites to players who expressed an interest in trying out this tool. Since I've never released a game with modding support, I really don't know how this will go: I think the game's players are generally pretty clever and the survey suggests a lot of the people interested in this tool have technical backgrounds, but I may underestimate how much "internalized knowledge" I rely on during content creation. I'll have to see.

Until next week,
Kevin

As a reminder for anyone who hasn't seen this yet, I've created a player survey in Google Forms:

Google Survey

This week I am mostly just continuing to work on the "Creator Tool" project. The goal of this is to transform my design tools into something that others could use to create their own content. Still no promises when or even if this will be made available, but I'm making good progress.

I am currently working on what I expect to be the hardest part of the tool, the Region Editor. I have the working version of it that I used during development, but there were aspects of that version that I don't like, so I'm doing a full rewrite.



Two of the bigger challenges with redesigning the Region Editor:

[h2]Coordinate Systems[/h2]

There are many different coordinate systems that object positions may be represented by: world coordinates that Unity's rendering and physics operate on, the game logic's "SuperCoordinates" used for storing absolute position at scale and across universes, local position used for constantly keeping the sectors immediately around the player active and positioned correctly, the coordinates that the player actually sees displayed, "region relative" versions of the SuperCoordinates so I don't have to design and position the entire universe at once, and then the various screen and UI coordinate spaces that emerge from actually being able to visualize all of these in the tool.

[h2]Data and Class Design Constraints[/h2]

The logic of how the universe "works" evolved over the development process and at this point is both complex and fairly robust. Which means the new Region Editor needs to work while making few if any changes to the existing world logic. At the same time, there are design problems with the original Editor that I want to correct.

For example, the original Editor used the same "GameWorld" class as the game itself to organize persistent objects. This made sense at the time, but in hindsight it limited the tool too much, particularly now when if I want to add new features that the GameWorld logic doesn't support. The downside is re-duplication of some logic that I need in the Editor, but don't want to refactor out of the GameWorld for the aforementioned reasons.

Until next week!
- Kevin