We made Showdown of the Dungeon!

Play free at hooliganlabs.itch.io

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The latest Tweets from Hooligan Labs (@HooliganLabs). I make apps and sometimes 3D prints of my own design! https://t.co/gbTfGCyO3Z. Michigan, USA

Just so you know, this is where you can usually find me!

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Early prototype of walking robot with physics.

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Have I not put up the awesome icon for Cosmic Crew? Made by Lea Matte! 

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And... docked!

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Needed to upload the picture of the new part in the Vehicle Assembly Building.

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I made a KSP mod, just like old times! But this time it was made in days instead of months. I call it “Augmented Reality (AR) Docking”

I’m putting these pictures up for use in the tutorial

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Getting my Android screenshot up early today!

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Had to capture this majesty from Nexter’s Lab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQETmAj1zUY

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Play Cosmic Crew by clicking here! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.HooliganLabs.Interplanetary

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New feature graphic for Cosmic Crew!

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The UI Team here at Unity has been hard at work getting the new UI system ready for release in Unity...

I’m a noob!  So A YEAR AGO Unity added a really sweet GUI system.  I had started working with Unity back when its GUI was really bad...  Which is part of why my GUI looks so bad now.  I’m really looking forward to using this!

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A very common complaint with the last design was that people could not tell that the spaceship was an asteroid!  So this was redesigned to use a much more obvious asteroid of the main body.  This shot has an updated UI as well.  ISS shown nearby for scale (though much higher than it should be at 3 million km altitude).

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A little pre-alpha gameplay, very subject to change!  Many of the basic resources are displayed here.  The ground is highlighted blue where water is being supplied.  However, in the absolute cold of space things like light and heat can be as important to a city as water or power.

Currently, two of the most important resources are limited at the start:  People and fuel.  One goal is to reach the destination star system with as many people as possible.  This can require careful management, especially since more people use more fuel as they go about their modern lives.

This is intended to give a realistic challenge to the voyage.  Not only do day to day needs to be met but also you must plan ahead to make sure you have enough for the entire voyage.

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So, what progress has been made lately on Interstellar?  I took a break from prototyping game code to put some pretty stuff in and test graphics.  This is ENTIRELY concept and up to be changed.

At the top is the new front of the ship.  You can see it’s not fully man-made now...  It’s a smoothed Type C ice asteroid with some additional spacey stuff.  The ISS is shown next to it for scale (though this is at 3000 km altitude, much higher than the ISS is now).  The propulsion unity has been doubled in size from before, and what is on the front is a slightly modified “Sci-Fi Space Stations Pack #1" by BulkyStuff.  I tried putting EVA astronauts into the picture but they’re too small to see!  ^_^

Below is a picture from inside the asteroid.  Its rocky interior has been hollowed out and the ground covered in soil for growing things.  Some people next to an Apollo lander are at the bottom, standing thanks to the artificial gravity from the rotating asteroid.  It is completely dark inside, illuminated only by a spotlight before artificial lighting is added.  I’m working on adding buildings, lakes etc but they don’t look nearly as good as this yet.

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Update: New “Spaceship City” design making progress!

Sorry for the lack of updates, especially pictures, but I still am focusing hard on nailing gameplay this time.  Interstellar has expanded into the second dimension.  Rather than being a single hall of a ring-shaped spaceship, now it is the inside of a hollowed, spinning asteroid.

The scale has increased significantly.  Before, the largest ship was 1 km across with perhaps a thousand people.  Now, I am experimenting with far larger ships and populations which can house entire free-standing buildings.  Eventually it may be possible to have ships as big as the asteroid Juno, with a livable area larger than some countries!  As it is enclosed this includes having an atmosphere so there are orchards and water reservoirs. It almost looks like a normal city...  But wrapped around inside a cylinder!

I’m writing this because I’ve gotten to the point where resource sharing is working in this three dimensional state.  Because the ship is much, much larger now there are limits on how far things like food and people can travel.  Remember, there are no fossil fuels in space, so no cars or trains quite like we have on Earth now!  When a building is covered by resources it needs is begins to produce useful things.  For example, an ice mine that is powered and peopled will bring up water from the asteroid’s frozen outer layer.

My next major step is to handle limited resources on the ship.  The coldness of space and limited power reserves need to be modeled.  I’ll talk about that more sometime soon!

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Interstellar isn't dead!

It's still going, actually I'm working on it almost every day.  I've just come to realize that good strategy games are really, really hard to make.

I was getting worried, because with all the content I was adding the game wasn't getting any more fun.  Just weirder.  Then Extra Credits did a segment on Minimum Viable Product, and it confirmed to me that I was taking the wrong direction.  I had to start with gameplay first.

I read a lot of interviews with the people who made FTL, Civilization and Roller Coaster Tycoon.  Last night, for the first time, I had a result.  That is a screenshot of the super basic gameplay above.

Year by year for 148 years, the population lived and died in the farms and living quarters.  But then parts of the ship would break and require special science, security or engineering teams to fix.  So suddenly two dozen people would be starving because a farm would break.  And then you had to chose what you would give up to fix it... Even if it meant more people would starve in the meantime.

And, for the first time, playing it was kind of fun! :)

So all the assets I've made are still there, and someday the art and gameplay will come together into a complete prototype.  But for now, I'm still working at making sure this is a game worth playing.

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I have most gameplay features implemented now in the generation ship simulator!  Ship conditions affect life (and death) in lots of ways.  But even after tripling the death rate, and making it so critical rooms can take up to a year to fix, a handful of survivors often make it to another planet....