gareththegeek 🚀 making Loadstar ⭐

Drawing a mug of coffee to add some mundanity to my FTLike spacetrader Loadstar

#coffee #pixel #pixelart #gamedev #solodev #coffeeislife

Galaxy map in Loadstar

#milkyway #galaxy #astronomy #gamedev #spacesim

Figured out what was wrong with my previous galaxy map - fell for the old degrees vs. radians trap - really happy with the new one! Instantly familiar to me from my days playing #elite 2 and #EliteDangerous !

#astronomy #galaxy #map #mathfail

Building a realistic 2d galaxy map from academic data is hard! Any space travellers who can tell me if this looks right?

#galaxy #astronomy #space #map #python

5. A lot of stars in SIMBAD don't have distance data so they are missing from my 100 parsec galaxy map 🤦

4. A parsec is just over 3 light years (and of course measures distance not time)

3. Brown dwarfs are not quite big enough to be stars and there are loads of them floating about the galaxy not part of any solar system

2. There are 88 constellations and they all have three letter abbreviations

#stars #astronomy

Things I've learned this week while making a realistic galaxy map

1. SIMBAD is an awesome database of stars you can access free of charge and query using SQL

#astronomy #database #sql #space

Why does space have to be so big?

Looks like I'm moving to double precision floating point!

#space #maths #math #coding #gamedev

Loadstar - Loadstar Devlog - Alpha 3 - Crew - Steam News Annoucing the official Loadstar Discord server - The focus for alpha 3 was crew Rooms Before I could add crew, I wanted the interior of the ship to be made up of individual rooms with doors rather tha...

Just published a new #devlog for Loadstar

In this version I added crew manipulation

store.steampowered.com/news/app/394...

#ftl #elite #crew #spacesim #gamedev #indiegames

Here is the finished font

Making a #pixel display font for Loadstar using #aseprite

#font #pixelart #gamedev

Someone on reddit asked if I had an official #discord so now I do!

discord.gg/bGPab7CXxp

First person to join earns my gratitude*

*my gratitude has no intrinsic value

#spacesim #gamedev #indiegames #community

Just realised you can control the enemy's crew, whoops! Maybe it's a mind control feature?

#bug #featurenotabug #gamedev #spacesim

Thanks! The basic standing pose is 13x13 but I had to give myself a bit more room for the odd cool hairstyle or death pose 😀

Adding a bit of #diversity to the crew available in Loadstar! Trying to get the most out of 13x13 pixels and 48 colours is an interesting challenge!

Any suggestions?

#indiegame #spacesim #pixelart #gamedev

Nothing ruins your day like trying to fix a performance issue. The #godot profiler tells me it's due to "Physics Time" 🤔

#debugging #coding #gamedev

I think the contrast is too low, it's the same colour as the background. I would adjust the values on it, or maybe a subtle animation will draw their attention.

Crew list hi-fi #wireframe process in #aseprite

Step 1 of adding a new component to the Loadstar #UI to list all the player's crew, their health and allow the player to select them

#ui #uidesign #gamedev #ftl #process

The pot and the kettle

That's a cool idea. I'll try to consider modability when I start coding that part! Probably it'll all be in json files but I may make an editor to help me during development, if so I'll share it.

For sure, there's tons of scope in an open world for this and I think it's what's really exciting about the idea. Instead of being told why you're fighting, you set your own stakes. Imagine combing ftl text dilemmas with rumours and treasure maps from a tavern or a crew person's backstory etc.

YouTube video by Gareththegeek Games Loadstar - Ship Design and Combat Preview

Just posted a new gameplay preview on my YT showing ship design with automatic layout of rooms and doors plus some combat with the new crew control and helm features!

youtu.be/NRrC2t_G2hg

#Gameplay #gaming #spacesim #spaceship #godot #ftl #elite #elitedangerous

That's beautiful, keep it up!

Saw an absolutely giant one in Cologne Zoo recently and now it lives rent free in my nightmares!

Light goes on, light goes off

Currently working on adding crew to my #FTLike #spacetrader Loadstar. Stress testing this little guy's reactions to me flipping the weapons power on and off.

#indiedev #pixelart #solodev #gamedev #indiegames

Rude!

Might have got distracted while working on my FTLike #spacesim !

There's a long way still to go!

#gamedev #spacetrader #animation #funny #godot

This is the first time I've felt genuinely optimistic about a political party in my adult life, and that's longer than I care to think about!