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[BlackMoon]

Hi all!

We are a student team working on a game dev project, and would like to share our dev blogs



The latest build can be found here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/interstellar

## Introduction

Interstellar is a 3D adventure game that puts you in the role of a daring space traveler, navigating the cosmos to uncover the secrets of a hidden chapter in history.

The player will travel in a sci-fi universe with realistic physics simulations. You’ll journey among the stars, defying gravity and overcoming challenging obstacles with guidance from a navigator—at least that's what the story seems to be...

## Story

A brand new story has been added to the game!

Content: An AI navigator that provides guidance; Several cutscenes with cool images and animations; Lots of texts for the story (voice to be added later).

Motivation: 1. We want to make the game more engaging and immersive. In previous versions, we explicitly told the player where to go, but this doesn't make much sense in the game world. 2. We want to make the target clear. Instead of just instructing players, we find it better to let them understand what is going on, and enable them to make decisions by themselves. 3. We find a story greatly enhances the theming of the game. Without the story there would be much less coherence between the levels, and players can even become confused about the game's purpose.


## New Levels

A new story level has also been added.

Motivation: 1. To continue the story; 2. To enable the user to use some mechanics that they might not have tried in previous levels; 3. To make the game more interesting and challenging.

The existing guidance level has also been updated. We added texts to guide the player - though this would impact the immersion, we believe it is necessary for the player to understand the game mechanics.


## Balance Adjustment & Bug Fixes

- Adjust fuel amount in the Solar System. Players now have more freedom to explore the level.
- Delete the UI instructions. Most of the time this isn't of much help.
- Use a clearer UI for target indication.
- Remove the confusing screen before the user. UI elements on it have been moved to the Canvas.
- Modify flying effects. Now the player can better understand that they are flying in space.


## Future plan

- Add more story levels - the story is not finished yet.
- Add more sound effects and music.
- Further optimize the gravity visualization. It's still a bit confusing currently, but we believe it can be improved.

[BlackMoon]

Hi all!

Here is our devblog for this week.

## Audio

Players complained about having difficulty focusing on the caption and game simultaneously. No worries, we have made audio for the whole story. Hopefully this can help you better understand the plot, and focus on gameplay.

## New Scenes

Our new scene received positive feedback last week. Therefore, we have made 2(+0.5) new scenes this week! The story for them isn't up yet - we'll complete it as soon as possible. The new scenes are even more challenging, and reveal more truth of the history in the game. In the meantime, we still made an effort to focus on our core mechanics to make levels consistent.
I don't want to leak too much before you try it, but... who would hate new enemies, black holes, or orbiting stars in the game??

## Adjustments & Bug fixes

- Font update: no more using the default font.
- Camera now moves together with the player. Unfortunately, it made me really dizzy when I first tried it, so we decided to restrict your max movement speed (which in turn makes the game even more challenging )
- Adjusted the solar system. Most people got to the target without utilizing most of the planets, so we adjusted the difficulty and the level design to better convey our idea.
- Better camera movement. We adjusted mouse control along the horizontal axis to make it faster and smoother.
- Fix a bug that caused the camera to jitter. "SmartUpdate" isn't quite smart - we forced it to be fixedUpdate so that it perfectly sync with our scripts.
- Better hints for unlocking the mouse, restarting the game, etc.

## Future Plan

- A complete story to come! The final truth is about to be revealed, and the destiny of the entire universe is in your hand...
- More audios and sound effects.
- A trailer for our game.
- Better shaders and arts.

[BlackMoon]

Hi all!

Here is our devblog for this weeek.

## The Game

The game is now complete and readily playable!

We also changed the title to Solariscape. Interstellar was a great name, and we did make it a tribute to the film but... copyright, copyright, copyright.

## Audio

We added a bunnnnch of audio to our game, both sfx and voice. Specifically:

- sfx for player: engine sfx for acceleration and deceleration;
- sfx for enemies: enemy encountering alert;
- ambient sfx;
- Background music for each level;
- Voiceover for the new story content

## Story

Yes, we've completed the story! We've got texts, audio and animations for the last several levels, explaining what is going on.

## Scenes & challenges

Accompanied by the story are a few new levels, for telling the story, guiding the player and displaying animations.

We've also adjusted existing scenes a lot. We added more sorts of enemies to make the scene more interesting. Also, we removed some challenges which seem unfair to the player, e.g., obstacles that appear in your face from nowhere

## Guidance

We received lots of feedback regarding the guidance part, so we overhauled it

- Now the player must press EVERY key that appears in the guidance to pass.
- Remove Q/E for rolling, instead, we use auto balancing. Controlling 6 keys at once is too much, indeed.
- We combined the story with the guidance, so the player can now understand why they have to face these obstacles.
- Seperate input tutorial into two levels, hopefully the player has more time to practice on every control.

## Adjustments

- Modified death animation - feedbacks for our trailer show that the death animation was confusing.
- Area limitation - now the player will get a hint when they go too far from the target.
- Acceleration & decel animation.
- Better asteroids, which enhance the performance and is more consistent.
- Better vfx: cooler blackhole, cooler animations!

Thank you!