@NexBlade-Studios

For the final devlog of the Stardance competition I decided to cram everything in that the project was missing. I added: a title menu, sound effects, music, mining mechanics, ore drops, ore generation fixes, and that’s just what I remember!

I hope you enjoy the game!

Although it might seem like I haven’t changed much, behind the scenes there’s been a lot of progress. Apart from the minor UI tweaks where I added a box and border to the different bars, made the energy bar yellow to match the power cells I modelled and made the overall colour scheme blue instead of having different colours, I have been working on the core systems that change the values of the different bars. For example, I linked the heat bar to the actual mining system which is now in place, and allows the player to actually mine the ores, the drill durability, energy and heat then all get updated. And then when the drill overheats that is also handled. Now I just need to make it look a bit nicer, since there is currently no particles or animation and ores just disappear.

Done some work on the UI. Would appreciate some feedback!

I have made some quick renders that I am going to be using for the inventory icons.

The drills have been textured now and man do they look clean!!! I have kept them to the same red aesthetic since I have made it so they are all made by one company called the Stellar Frontier Agency, and they are the ones who have sent you to collect and mine resources. Once I flesh out more of the “lore” of the game I will be sure to share!

This is now the final stretch of the project before I ship!!! I have finished the gallery section of the app, and it enables users to save their generated thumbnails, manage and delete them. This means that if there’s a thumbnail that you want to keep, you can save it to your gallery instead of needing to share or export it. Also, the prompt used to generate the thumbnail is listed at the bottom so that you could use the prompt to generate the thumbnail again.

I wanted to put a quick number of updates before shipping the project because it isn’t in a state that I am satisfied with yet. I have added dark mode support because I know that without it the app is very bright (it is practically a flashlight). I am now working on implementing a gallery system where thumbnails you have generated can be saved to the thumbnail gallery with the prompt attached. Currently you would have to share the thumbnail and then save it to your phone, so this makes it more convenient. I also added some more categories, hopefully this covers all the key areas of content creation now.

I have been working more on some 3D models for drills that I will have in the game. The premise is this. The player starts out with a simple drill. It can mine copper and iron ore, however it is quite slow because it overheats quickly and also requires recharging often. The player can upgrade three parts of the drill to improve it. First they can upgrade the energy capacity so the drill can be used for longer without needing more energy to run. Or they can upgrade the cooling which means the drill will not overheat in the middle of drilling as often. Or they can upgrade the drill head, which can improve other aspects such as the amount of material you get per ore.

Really testing the limits of my optimisation here. I was just playing around with some settings and wanted to see if the game would still run at a spawn radius of 100 and surprisingly it does. I have added a world object manager that now handles despawning ores and other items, keeping it separate to the tiles. I managed to capture this screenshot from underneath the “lunar surface” in the scene view, and it looks quite like an asteroid belt which I though was pretty cool.

Well I said I wouldn’t be doing more work on the tile generation system but well, I just couldn’t help it. Previously the tiles only generated in a small radius around the player, which meant that it lost the immersive feel of space exploration, where it should feel like a truly endless expanse. This is why I changed this system to instead spawn a semicircle of tiles in front of the player. This allows for a larger range of tiles and better view. I have also implemented my ore generation in this system, so iron and copper can now be found on the surface. I also added key optimisation features such as object pooling, which means that the tiles don’t constantly need to be instantiated but are instead pooled and reused which significantly improves performance.

The next thing I want to work on now is adding more resource spawns and a crafting system so the resources can actually be used for improving your spaceship and building your lunar colony!

Currently I have been working on not just tile generation which was my main focus before, but now I am looking at ore and resource generation. In my game I have some key resources, those being:

• copper
• iron
• power cells
• gems / crystals (idk which one to call)
  So what the game loop will be is that across the moon’s surface there will be certain resource deposits. In order to obtain those resources there will some obstacle in the way. For example, around iron deposits there is a higher chance of crater formation. Power cells can also be used to power generators and such but I have not got onto that yet.

The website is finally complete! This last chunk of progress has been about rounding out the final features. Particularly working on responsive design which is something that I am not very experienced with, so it was interesting to see the different strategies I had to use in order to best represent the information while also maintaining the visual style of the website.

Getting the website to this point has been a really amazing opportunity to work on my website design skills which I hope to apply more in the future.

I’m in the final stretch of development now, with the completion of the product pages and the about section. The website is really feeling like something that could be found in the Portal universe, but again if there’s anything you think I should add please let me know.

The project has been moving along quite nicely, although it has been a while since I have made a devlog. I have been working on perfecting the aesthetic of the product page, which is the key part of the website. For that, I recreated the test chamber sign, making it act as the label for the product, with each of the symbols representing actions related to it. I have also added a short description taking inspirations and dialogue snippets from various Portal media. The main thing that has inspired this is the Aperture Investment Opportunity videos where some of the products I am “selling” were also shown. Please give some ideas on what I should add to the website!

I initially created Treevolve as a hackathon project, with the idea of being a quick app that I could develop. The key concept is the visualisation of progress in skill trees instead of simple lists. After seeing the potential of the project, I have decided to expand upon the concept, adding a journal system so that users can link journal entries to their skills. If there are any additional features you think I should add let me know :)

#TESTERS NEEDED
The project is now complete!
Creators can now use Creator Launchpad for their content creation, being able to generate video ideas and thumbnails, all straight from the app.
I want to put the project on Google Play, so I require at least 12 game testers before publishing.
If you want to help with my project, please email me at nexbladestudios@gmail.com