In the last post I talked about how I transitioned to this new game project, Stardustry, and today I want to chat a little bit about the progress that I made in it and the plans for it in the near future.

Like I mentioned Stardustry’s development started in December last year, so by the time of the writing of this post I am already in (more or less) the third month of its development, and oh my, time flies!

For sometime now I already had a lot of the game in place, the basic mechanic, the initial set of screens (title screen, settings page, stage selection page), and some initial stages for the first campaign (yes, first since I intend to have several, well, at least a couple of different campaigns).

Setting up the Steam page for the game consumed quite a lot of effort from me, I had no idea about the amount of graphic assets that steam requires developers to upload, as well as the amount of information that you need to input in forms about the game, so that slowed down the actual development of the game in a couple of weeks. But I am not complaining, that was good learning and I am glad I went through it!

Announcing the game and setting up the Steam page was my first planned milestone, now that that is done I am looking forward for the next one. Releasing the demo of the game, to gather initial feedback from players as soon as possible!

So for the past couple of weeks I have been working hard into polishing the game, refactoring some parts of it to make my life easier and playtesting a lot to make sure that the initial gameplay is solid enough to start to have people playing it!

Here is a quick comparison of the polishing progress, this is the past gameplay recording:

And the updated one:

The changes are probably subtle, but hopefully noticeable, some highlights worth mentioning are:

• Animated background of stars, giving more life to the game.
• Added some details to the ground so it resembles more of an asteroid surface.
• Improved UIs about storage and contract goals. Related to that is a major refactor that I implemented regarding the goals and construction material, which will enable me to implement different types of campaigns in the future with ease.

Also implemented camera control via UI elements and keyboard shortcuts:

In the next couple of weeks I will continue to work on the missing pieces to be able to have a cool polished demo, this is what I have planned for tasks next:

• Rework bot behaviour: As I was playtesting the game, I noticed that the way the bots work right now, they will not be able to make a production line where a factory connects to another factory, for example a furnace producing copper plates to a workshop making copper wires. So I need to refactor the way they are behaving right now in order to be able to make more complex levels.
• Add tutorials: Right now the player needs to figure it out everything on their own, I will add some quick, hopefully non annoying, explanation in certain levels so the players can grasp the mechanics of the game quicker!
• Music and SFX: Right now there is no sound at all and any game worth playing should have musics and sound effects, so I feel this is a must, even for a demo.

When will the demo be released? Hard to say, the last couple of weeks have been quite busy for me and I don’t believe the following ones will be much different, but I am thriving to have the demo released by mid march! Let’s hope I can make that happen since I can’t wait to start sharing the game with you all!

That is it for now, thanks for reading this and see you next time.