Project Star: Core Systems
Welcome to a new devlog for project star, The fast paced looter shooter set in space.
Last devlog we worked on giving the hub a new design, allthough it stiill looked like a small box, some of the interactables were already visible in the scene. Not all of them functional though. These last couple of weeks i made alot of progress regarding the Hub and the actual gameplay systems, these systems allow you to progress further in the game.
First i found that the new hub was feeling a little bit too crowded and didn't really resemble a spaceship. I took some time to redo the layout of the ship and gave it some more breathing room. Also spaceships need engines, so i added an engine room.
Let me know in the comments what you think of this iteration of the hub. Does it finally feel like an actual ship?
The first order of business was trying to come up with an upgrade system for the game. I took some inspiration from Black Desert Online. Where you have a chance to upgrade your weapon to the next level; provided you have enough of the upgrade materials. Each upgrade is harder to obtain and requires more raw materials.
These materials are rare and can be obtained by slaying monsters during your expeditions. I think there should be a consistent path of acquiring these rare materials by printing them in the 3D printer, so i made a new recipe that allows the crafting of these upgrade items. So when your out of luck there is always a way to get these materials consistently.
In black desert whenever an upgrade fails it will downgrade and you lose a level, i decided against this system and think that this feature is too harsh for my game, losing upgrade materials is all the punishing a player needs.
Upgrading gear means that the weapons i made before also need a big overhaul.
Before it had hardcoded stats that now need to be upgradeable. To expand on the theme of 3d printing, I thought it would be cool to give the printer a upgrade path as well. By introducing these levels, we can a allow players to print a more powerful version of the weapon that they might own. Think of it as a common, rare, legendary suffix.
Which in turn allows the weapon to gain more power with each new level it reaches. And maybe in the future give these weapons some new abilities.
In more technical terms i made scriptable objects out of the weapons that i call "Weapon Configureable". in these objects i can provide an item name, description, rarity, stats and a growth rate.
Every new level that the item reaches the attack points or defense points will receive the amount of points defined in the growth rate. This allows me to make weapons that can scale depending on their rarity.
Another cool thing i can define is something i call a "Weapon Processor", this is an object that defines how the weapon should behave; is it an automatic rifle?, or a burst?, or does it shoot multiple rays like a shotgun?
As you can see in the current example i defined the same Rifle in different rarities; each with a higher growth rate and possible some higher base stats. The configuration is a little bare bones right now but can easily be expanded on in the future.
Last devlog we made a basic starmap screen; This screen allowed you to select an expedition but all stars where linked to the same static level. It was time to change that, first i implemented a basic seeding system and generated a value i called "infestation rate". This rate will determine how infested a space station is. The infestation rate then is linked to the difficulty and will scale all the monsters appropriately.
The seed will now also be used to generate a totally random level, and will make exploring a bit more fun. My goal for the demo is to have two visually different locations in the game.
I also overhauled the graphics quite a bit, giving the stars some actual depth and textures. Still we need to make them look unique; but for now this gives you a good impression on how i want things to look.
On the UI side of things i now display the values we talked about before; and its very easy to glance how hard a specific expedition is.
For the navigation side of things; I started by creating a work in progress game menu, this menu can be activated at all times, and allow for different options based on the current context. In this example you can see i can freely exit the game from the hub, and while on an expedition i can return safely back to the hub.
I briefly talked about the "Infestation Rate", in an expedition its possible to come across infested rooms, these will in the future have different kinds of enemies and loot drops. The level of the monsters are also higher than in the non infested rooms.
Speaking of monsters; The Rapex felt a bit lonely. So i Implemented a new egg based monster. When hatched will spawn a larvae that will attack you. These eggs will hatch based on a certain distance from the player. If you destroy the egg before it hatches, it will not spawn these larvae. So be careful where you step. These eggs will spawn in large quantities in infested rooms.
Some other small but nice additions these weeks was re-doing the Entity and Finite State Machine logic. This allowed me to easily implement new monsters. And i added an optional ragdoll component to the enemies. This gives their deaths some more funk.
Thats it for todays devlog, i'm really having fun working on this game. Let me know what you guys think and drop your suggestions in the comments. In a few weeks i will post a new gameplay video that showcases the current state of the game.
Like and subscribe and see you guys in the next one!
You can watch the video down below!
