Developement Update #2

Intro

Hi, I’m XavBell  and I have some exciting news for you. I’m no longer developing this game alone as Scatman joined me in this adventure! He’ll mostly work on the visual side of the game, which will help speed up the development a lot! So here’s an update about what he worked on since he joined the development. Oh and I just want to let you know that the game is also on itch.io!

Scatman

Hi Gamers!

I’m the new artist for Rocket Engineer. I was task to create a replicated feel based off Kerbal Space Program tutorial animation.

The reference.

A few things went through my mind.

- The two ship references from the animation differ. The left one had shadows and more emphases on form (the teal stripes on the ball) vs the right with a flatter profile. This left some confusion as to how to proceed. We eventually landed on flat and form are fine but no detail shadows as those will be generated by the in-game engine. Essentially the first one without shadows.

- The designs felt more suited for an illustrator something I’m not entirely comfortable with. Time and repetition along with trial and error is the only way to learn a design and style I’m unfamiliar with.

- The last hurdle was understanding the subject matter. Although I’m a sci-fi nerd myself I know very little about the details of a real rocket. So, when requested to design a tank texture, I’m of course a little lost as to what exactly the tank was. XavBell was happy to educate me.

As I started the process Photoshop was a clear choice for me. After about 4 or so textures I realized Illustrator was the correct software for its refined illustrative tools, but I have a feeling ill be using both after a while. With all that being said I believe I’m starting to better narrow in on the game’s aesthetic. I have no doubt that as the releases keep coming and I get to witness the art in game, design changes will occur. This leads to the most important part of long-term development, saving your work. 

XavBell

During those last two weeks a lot of progress has been made on planning how I’ll integrate the planned features and what needs a rework, as well as reworking features. The first big progress that has been made is reworking the whole save system. Now, rockets that you launch will stay where they were the last time you played. That also means that the saves will be divided by worlds. For now, you won’t be able to access tank/engine/rocket design from other saves. I’ve also added an option to delete the saved designs in game. It took roughly one week to finish. During that same week, I’ve also worked on the way textures will work, so I had to rework some game logics but now, textures will be able to have more details while being scalable.

In the second week, I worked on reworking a bit of the precedent features. Previously, distances and sizes of planets were random. I now scaled it to match the proportions of our solar system. I discovered that I was insanely far from the real scale. A problem appeared, because of this scale, the more you’re far from the origin (0,0), the more details you would lose. So I had to implement what several open world games have, a floating origin. Basically, each time the player exceeds a certain threshold, you move every object so that the player position is equal to zero. It’s fairly easy for now as there are not so many objects and as the game is 2D I’m not worrying that much about future issues.

The next thing I did during this second week is work on the time scaling. Unity have a built-in max time scaling of 100 (basically you can make the game run 100 time faster 1s = 100s). However, on a space scale this time warp is clearly not enough. So the calculation that was done to show orbit predictions will be used to predict the position of the rocket.

Finally, I started working on the launch site building system, here’s some WIP screenshots. 

(1:50 scaled planet)

On the side, a rework for the engine design and tank design is planned, engine design rework will be especially hard. 

Conclusion

So as you guessed, a lot of work has been done and is left to do. Rocket Engineer is still at its early state. A polished version will allow us to know what it could look like.