Hi everyone!
So I'm trying to make this game, but it's not exactly going according to plan.
That is, if there was a plan. I guess that's part of why I'm here. You know, to get my thoughts straight. And secondly, maybe to get some sensible input. Okay, shall we begin?
So the basic idea is you as the player farm tomatoes to fuel your spaceship. That's right, your spaceship runs on tomatoes. The title of the game, "Pomodori," is Italian for "tomatoes." You fly your spaceship to another planet, where you farm more tomatoes. And so on.
I know, it's a bit thin. That's why I'm looking to add some stuff. First of all, though, I should say the planets are tiny, like the one on the cover of "Le Petit Prince."
Except everything is 3D instead of 2D.
Also, I'm doing my modeling in MagicaVoxel. For the game I use Unity.
Anyway, about the stuff I'm looking to add. The planets have suns. And the suns have sunflowers. The more sunflowers a sun has, the hotter it is. You can transplant sunflowers from one sun to another, making the donor sun colder and the recipient sun hotter. But first you should probably upgrade your ship with a sunscreen.
Obviously, changing a sun's heat output will affect the planet(s) around it. Maybe they grow or lose a snow blanket, I don't know. One thing's for sure, though, you won't be able to grow tomatoes in the snow.
But, before all that, you have to get there. Which means traveling through space. Now, I can assure you traveling against a background of fixed stars is no fun. Which, unfortunately, is what loading a night sky shader into Unity's skybox gives you out of the box.
You wouldn't know you were traveling if it weren't for the planet. As soon as you turn away from it, you appear not to move at all. One solution I came up with is to make the shader two-sided and apply it to a sphere around the spaceship. As the sphere remains in place and you fly across it (or, as is the case here, when you remain in place and the sphere moves past you), the illusion of movement is preserved. The problems begin when you near the circumference, as the stars first grow bigger and then pass through you.
Two obvious fixes are (1) to decrease the star sizes in the shader as you near the circumference of the sphere and (2) reset the position of the sphere before its surface reaches you. I applied the second fix in the gif below.
Did you notice the stars glitching near the end of the clip when the position of the sphere was reset? It grows worse as the ship's speed increases. Now I could continue to tweak this, but I kind of feel I'm on the wrong track here. I wonder if anyone has a better idea?
I hope to be able to share more soon (by the way, I have a
post on my blog looking back at how Pomodori got started). Besides suns and stars, I'd like to add characters for the player to chat with and some music too. And I'd just love to have a good story. But I guess that'll take its own sweet time in coming, if it comes at all.
You have a good day now.