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[Seiseki]

About
It's finally time to get this devlog started. We went public with the game a few weeks back on various social media.

We're two people working on this, me Victor as the artist and Tyler as the coder.
We started this a while back in 2014 and recently we've been attempting to do it full-time.

I'll try to post here somewhat informally, but we also plan on having a more official devlog. I'll make sure those entries are being posted here as well.

The Game
It's a Dwarf Fortress like space station building and management sim.
You manage the station and a bunch of colonists, trying to survive in the cold vast outer space.

We're saving a lot of the good lore bits for later, like where it takes place, what the player is and what the world is like.

The game focuses on survival, trading, and missions.
Missions are like quests, usually involving sending a ship out to complete an objective, like delivering items, sending doctors, mechanics, bringing in wounded or prisoners to the colony.

Basic missions like mining, consists of the player gathering a crew, selecting a ship and a target destination.

Some missions and trading especially, relies on factions and faction reputation.

As for managing the colonists, they need to be fed, have free time along with free time activities and sleep time.
They have different jobs you can assign and a system for morale, making friends, enemies etc. Things that players have come to expect from games like this.

The Art style
The game uses Low-poly 3D with sharp pixel art textures and 2D sprites for colonists, resources and small details.


I'm not going to go into too much detail until we post the first official devlog.
But I do have a lot of WIP things to show.


Furniture:


Farming:


Cargo Ship:




Mining Barge:


Space:


Radar Tower:


Wall Tilesets:

[Seiseki]

I was recently introduced to Retro AA (Thanks Howard! ).

And I did try it and it's pretty great, it reduces a lot of shimmering and noise.

It did make some things look a bit too blurry though, I wonder if it's due the the texture size being too big.
I imagine it scales up the textures using nearest which makes it easier to do anisotropic filtering and mipmaps.
But it probably has a scale limit?

I'll look into it more later, here are some results of using Retro AA and they are promising.
However, alpha Cutoff textures and some bleeding through margins at mesh edges are problematic.

[rj]

!!!!

[Seiseki]

Floor Tilesets!  



I threw this together to test out tilesets in blender, so I can easily test how everything fits together.
Right now a tileset consists of 15 pieces that are flipped and rotated. But I dread the amount that would be required for a tileset not flipped or rotated. Half of the tiles right now are just various innercorners..  

[Reefpirate]

The art style looks great! I'm of course very curious about how all the mechanics play out. I still feel a bit of the burn from the Spacebase DF-9 project but I'm happy to follow along with the development of another attempt at the genre.

Did you play Spacebase DF-9? Learn any lessons from it?

[Seiseki]

Thanks! 

I haven't actually played it, so I couldn't really say.
I feel like they simplified a lot of things, and since they never finished them game, it seems quite shallow.

I'd say Starmancer is a bit more niche and bit more in depth, you mine ore and you actually get resources that you have to process in a refinery, store it somewhere. Same with farming and anything the station produces or brings in from the outside.

We're aiming for a bit of an RPG feel. With stats, levels, crafting.

Since the station is in space, without a physical world or solid ground that you can explore, we have to bring the action and events to the player. Traders, Pirates, Refugees, Tourists, etc. And make sure there are interesting events and catastrophes inside the station, to mix things up.
But also, to alleviate this we have missions where you can send ships outside to planets, asteroids, etc.
You deck them out with gear, a ship and hope they make it back without being followed by pirates or eaten by space monsters..

[hyperduck]

This is really, really gorgeous, and right up my alley, and with a focus on those RPG elements, I'm already sold on the foundation level of this whole game. Yes please 

[jg.camarasa]

The art is gorgeous!

[Seiseki]

Thanks guys!  

Dumping some mockups here 





Right now we only have the very lowest tier of resources in the game.
Which is something like, ore, fuel, water, refined metal and a few crops.
I feel like it's kinda tricky to come up with reasonable tiers for materials for a sci-fi game.
In fantasy is more straight forward, with copper->iron->mithril.
But in real life there's a crazy amount of metals and alloys.

There's also a lot of simplification and generalization needed.
Like having a generic 'plastics' resource, 'machine parts', 'electronics', which would be refined or crafted using 2 or more components.

It's great if we can somewhat base it on reality, but at some tier it will probably turn purely into fiction.
Especially since we have to prioritize gameplay and usability.

[io3 creations]

Nice visuals.   Based on one your screenshots, you are using Unity right?

[Seiseki]

Nice visuals.   Based on one your screenshots, you are using Unity right?

Thanks <3
Yeah, couldn't imagine creating a game like this without Unity :D

[Seiseki]

We came up with the idea of showing faces/emotions in speech bubbles, because the sprites are too small for that.
I think it works pretty well, but when the colonists blink you want to look at their face, so maybe they shouldn't. 

[jctwood]

I see gardening in space, I'm in! Loved spacebase DF-9 and this is giving me similar vibes. Look forward to more.

[Pixel Noise]

Yes, this looks freaking great already! The concept and mechanics you've described sound like it will be very engaging.

Really like the emojis for the colonists. I don't think the blinking is a problem - I think it would look weirder if they didn't blink.

[io3 creations]

I like the speech bubbles.

I don't think the blinking is much of an issue (whether the people do it or not) since the player's attention will be more on the speech bubbles than the blinking.  Oh, how long will these "speech bubble conversations" last?

[Seiseki]

Thanks guys!
I'm not sure how long they'll converse for. We'll try to set it up as modular as we can, without going too crazy.
If they get mad we might have the conversation end prematurely. Which is just an idea off the top of my head.


For something else entirely.
We're using wires, water pipes and airducts that the player has to hook up himself to input and output sources.
It's a pretty easy way to allow the player to decide what powers what and where air or water goes.

[Fat Pug Studio]

Oh my god, this is beautiful.

[Seiseki]

Thank you

Today I made a dialogue mockup, for missions and diplomatic conversations.
It will probably have to be more generic and definitely not lipsynced :D
I would like to have some control over dramatic pauses and how the words appear, but in practice that might be overkill.

[io3 creations]

For me, if you don't have actual voice over, lip syncing isn't that necessary since my eyes would be looking more at the words and not as much the speaker.  But when they finish a sentence or at dramatic moments it's still nice to have them stop.  Sentence endings can be detected with the dot and adding a <PAUSE=2> like tag (pause for two seconds) in the dialogue text for dramatic pauses should be "simple enough" to handle.

[j-swan]

Great art style, so cool to see that 3D models with the low res texture. looks very well implemented.