starwick - the void gets a roommate

second devlog. last time starwick was an empty glowing void. now it’s got soft twinkling stars a proper wispy nebula and a little companion floating next to u humming its own tune. starting to feel like a place not a screensaver.

the cosmos got real

the stars used to be blocky squares. default particle no texture, looked rough. swapped em for soft round points i generate in code, basically a radial gradient sprite, plus a twinkle layer that fades stars in and out so the whole field shimmers. bumped bloom so the bright ones actually glow.

nebula was the real fight tho. first pass was a few clean soft blobs and it jus looked like lens flares lol. so i went noise based, fractal perlin clouds with a soft falloff, and overshot the other way. came out dark and basically invisible. third try i dropped the noise threshold and roughly doubled color and alpha and now its vivid purple-and-blue wisps sweeping across the sky. took three goes to land that one.

vesp

the companion. small violet mote that orbits near u, bobs around, plays a soft little bell arpeggio that layers over the ambient drone. no samples, melody’s built from sine waves like everything else.

first attempt vesp came out as a giant white sun lmao. i’d picked a bright purple but cranked the hdr way too high so between that and 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, rebuilt it from a hard sphere into a cluster of soft glowing dots. now it reads like a tiny spirit drifting with u instead of a death star.

where it stands

empty void -> twinkling stars + vivid nebula -> a companion that floats beside u and sings. still all procedural, no art or audio files anywhere.