starwick - meet vesp
second devlog. last time starwick was an empty glowing void. now it’s got soft twinkling stars, a proper wispy nebula, and a companion floating next to you humming its own little tune. starting to feel less like a screensaver and more like a place.
the cosmos got real
the stars used to be blocky squares (default particle, no texture). swapped them for soft round points i generate in code - a radial gradient sprite - plus a twinkle layer that fades stars in and out so the field shimmers. bumped the bloom so the bright ones actually glow.
the nebula was the fight. first pass was a few clean soft blobs, looked like lens flares. so i made it noise-based - fractal perlin clouds with a soft falloff - and overshot the other way, came out dark and basically invisible lol. third try: dropped the noise threshold and roughly doubled the color and alpha, and now it’s vivid purple-and-blue wisps sweeping across the whole sky. took three goes to land that one.
vesp
the companion. a small violet mote that orbits near you, bobs around, and plays a soft synthesized motif - a little bell arpeggio - that layers over the ambient drone. no samples, the melody’s built from sine waves like everything else.
first attempt vesp came out as a giant white sun, lol. i’d picked a bright purple but cranked the hdr way too high, so between that and the bloom the core blew out to pure white and it hogged the whole frame like a second star. dialed the color back, shrank it, pushed it further out, and rebuilt it from a hard sphere into a cluster of soft glowing dots. now it reads like a little spirit drifting with you instead of a death star.
where it stands
empty void -> twinkling stars + vivid nebula -> a companion that floats beside you and sings. all still procedural, no art or audio files anywhere.
next up is the actual game verb: tracing constellations to relight stars, and being able to reach out and interact with vesp.
