New Stars - 1 Year of Development
One year ago today, I started New Stars development. In this post, I will explain the origins of New Stars and its goals. I also will summarize each month of development with a screenshot from that month.
It all started with some blobs, in Unity:
Later that day, those blobs became stars in a donut shaped galaxy:
The first system that was worked on was the galaxy generation itself. Now I will show a screenshot from each month of development.
April 2022:
May 2022:
June 2022:
July 2022:
August 2022:
September 2022:
October 2022:
November 2022:
December 2022:
January 2023:
February 2023:
March 2023:
April 2023:
Since this project is large-scale, New Stars improves by around 1-3% each day of development. The screenshots above are a summary of each month of development. Since I have over 1,500 screenshots of development, I'm not going to include all of them here for obvious reasons.
The project still has yet to reach closed-beta. Most the features have to be stable before I am ready to release that. At the start of March 2023, New Stars was unplayable since I added lots of features before making sure they all work well together. Since multiplayer reworked practically all features, it has yet to be fully integrated, and loading saves is the last feature yet to work correctly again. Apart from that, now the game runs relatively smoothly. New Stars will improve and become more stable over time, prior to public playtesting (closed-beta).
Wishlist New Stars to support future development.
Here is how much development time that was tracked by Steam I have spent, since adding Steam integration on July 12th 2022 (~75% of development time):
Note that Spacewar is the placeholder game provided by Steam, which has been used for New Stars development.
In March 2022, I was playing a similar space grand-strategy game, but it seemed to have mechnical problems and each game lacked the ability to be played and finished within a certain timeframe (i.e. 50-100 hours was too long). Why start games that you won't have time to complete? I do not aim to clone that game by any means as New Stars is its own game.
In New Stars, starting and finishing game should not have to be a life decision, and games generally take a few hours long with high replay value. This is the aim at least, and the game is incomplete until this vision is achieved.
New Stars also has simple and universal game mechanics, when combined creates a dynamic and new experience each time. Primary features are randomized, such as procedurally generated skyboxes, planets, stars, empires, backgrounds, and more. As Sun Tzu once said,
"There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen."
▛▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝ ▜
Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).
Community Discord: discord.io/adamjr
Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr
Feel free to comment your suggestions below.
Wishlist New Stars to support development.
This page is subject to change in the future and is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.
Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0
▙ ▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▟
It all started with some blobs, in Unity:
Later that day, those blobs became stars in a donut shaped galaxy:
The first system that was worked on was the galaxy generation itself. Now I will show a screenshot from each month of development.
April 2022:
May 2022:
June 2022:
July 2022:
August 2022:
September 2022:
October 2022:
November 2022:
December 2022:
January 2023:
February 2023:
March 2023:
April 2023:
Since this project is large-scale, New Stars improves by around 1-3% each day of development. The screenshots above are a summary of each month of development. Since I have over 1,500 screenshots of development, I'm not going to include all of them here for obvious reasons.
The project still has yet to reach closed-beta. Most the features have to be stable before I am ready to release that. At the start of March 2023, New Stars was unplayable since I added lots of features before making sure they all work well together. Since multiplayer reworked practically all features, it has yet to be fully integrated, and loading saves is the last feature yet to work correctly again. Apart from that, now the game runs relatively smoothly. New Stars will improve and become more stable over time, prior to public playtesting (closed-beta).
Wishlist New Stars to support future development.
Here is how much development time that was tracked by Steam I have spent, since adding Steam integration on July 12th 2022 (~75% of development time):
Note that Spacewar is the placeholder game provided by Steam, which has been used for New Stars development.
In March 2022, I was playing a similar space grand-strategy game, but it seemed to have mechnical problems and each game lacked the ability to be played and finished within a certain timeframe (i.e. 50-100 hours was too long). Why start games that you won't have time to complete? I do not aim to clone that game by any means as New Stars is its own game.
In New Stars, starting and finishing game should not have to be a life decision, and games generally take a few hours long with high replay value. This is the aim at least, and the game is incomplete until this vision is achieved.
New Stars also has simple and universal game mechanics, when combined creates a dynamic and new experience each time. Primary features are randomized, such as procedurally generated skyboxes, planets, stars, empires, backgrounds, and more. As Sun Tzu once said,
"There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen."
▛▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝▝ ▜
Stay tuned for more updates, or join the community Discord (linked below).
Community Discord: discord.io/adamjr
Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/adamjr
Feel free to comment your suggestions below.
Wishlist New Stars to support development.
This page is subject to change in the future and is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.
Credits:
- Star satellites icon by Lorc under CC BY 3.0
▙ ▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▟