Solar Lander News

From this day forward, Solar Lander is no longer available for macOS and I will no longer develop anything for Apple-brand products. Solar Lander will continue to be updated for Windows and Linux though.

I am currently working on a massive overhaul of Solar Lander's systems to fix a few issues that the game has and to make it easier to develop the game in the future. Here's a video about what I'm doing with the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDJ8Ql3kjNk

Engine and crash sounds have been added to the game. You may have to go into the game settings and check the "Sounds in Space" checkbox for them to work. A skybox has also been added which you can turn off if you desire. Along with these things, a credits page has been added to the game which you can view from the main menu.

Here is a video preview of the new updates for you to enjoy.

The freeroam game mode has been successfully implemented. This will allow you to start a new game where you visit planets in any order that you want, provided you have at least reached that level in the Progression mode. The same framework will be used to create tutorials and scenarios.



On top of that, there have been a few performance tweaks and bug fixes. One of the bugs that have been fixed is the one that reverses a few of the controls. I don't know when this bug was introduced, but when I discovered it, it was top priority and I thought I had fixed it in the previous update but I was wrong. There have been a few other bugs that have been fixed along the way.

For the next update, I intend to focus on adding some more sounds, some dialog, and maybe some background music to the game.

There have been some changes and updates to the some of the game mechanics. Here is a short summary of the changes.

• Added a "level failed" mechanic that allows you to stage before landing and continue to the next level, having failed the objective of that level. Failing 3 levels will result in a game over.
  
• A framework has been added to allow multiple game modes to be implemented. Unimplemented game modes will have their respective buttons grayed-out.
  
• A thrust-to-weight ratio indicator has been added to the upgrades screen to determine if you need to increase engine power. The ascent stage's TWR is the first number while the descent stage's TWR is the second number.
  
• A basic subsystem damage system has been implemented, allowing certain parts of the vehicle to be disabled without triggering a crash condition.
  

• New button graphics.
  
• Staging before landing no longer results in being stranded.
  
• Giving contradictory control inputs will result in them being canceled-out. All button and axis inputs for a specific control are added together with the response that you get being the sum of all of the inputs.
  
• All features that are not yet implemented have had their controls grayed-out.
  

• Fixed a bug where the center of mass is not at the vehicle's local origin. This caused an issue with the orbit script not calculating the vehicle's position correctly.