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.

Starwick - a cosmos

first devlog. starwick’s a procedural cosmic adventure i’m building

what’s in it so far

right now it’s just the bootable cosmos. no art, no audio files, nothing downloaded, it’s all generated in code. 700 stars on a sphere around the camera, bloom and vignette, and an ambient drone synthesized at runtime (few detuned sines + a slow lfo).