December 2021! Year End Update!

The end of the year is always busy with holidays and routine illnesses, and holy shit was 2021 pulling no punches. 

As of this writing my little family and I have Covid-19, and even with vaccines and boosters, let me tell you, it is absolutely no fun. I found out a good buddy, the voice actor who played Elsdragon in New California, Eddie Bolero, passed away after a battle with cancer where he also contracted Covid early in 2021. Kent and his family had it last month, accounting for a loss of productivity and being locked out of the office for two weeks, and Allegra had it back in 2020, meaning the entire Radian Helix team has caught it now at some point. 

We also lost one of the company dogs, mr. Boog, to old age. Which has been a serious bummer and he will be missed on our routine voice calls. 

Despite all the delays, injuries, sickness, and setbacks, we have managed some progress to end the year.

We've cycled through several styles for our World Map, ultimately settling on the paper and ink style. The photo-real map was interesting, but performance intensive and ultimately didn't fit with the style too well. 

My hope has been to create a style that is fast to render, easy to intuitively read, is fun to look at while traveling between towns and coordinating fleet/army maneuvers, and keeps things open as to the setting's sci-fi and medieval lore mixture. I wanted a setting agnostic world map so it could still remain flexible as we introduce more and more advanced and alien technology to the mix, not getting stuck in that tribal/medieval setting too hard. 

We still have a ways to go, generating convincing terrains from our noise layers and dialing in the scale of the icons to make travel feel good on foot (think of the Banner Saga's world map or Star Sector's hyperspace map, how traveling there felt.) We'll introduce vehicles and aircraft later in development, so it won't always be wagons and marching, so it's got to be scaled for both while pacing for the default being fun. 

We haven't got as far as coding this feature, I'm racing ahead while Kent continues pounding away at the local map's features. But it's good to look ahead to future development milestones and at least lock in some early crucial assets and get the scale right. 

That "realistic" map test was cool though. 

Allegra has been hard at work on our Skill Group Icons and Banners!

The Skill Groups will each be represented by an icon and a big banner. The above is our "Warden" skills, which relates to tending animals and handling farming related tasks. Anything from Taming skills for various types of animals, to bonuses to crop specialties that provide bonuses to yields and growth rates when planting & harvesting that type of plant.

The icon vesrion of these images will take over the colorful circles on the left, which are temporary assets.

Like so.

We'll also be using them at the higher resolution on the Skill Trees page, where you unlock those individual icons with the stars. 

Here is a slate full of our upcoming tasks for Allegra's work!

Combat!

Crafting!

Building!

Social!

Warden! 

(seen that one above!)

Medicine!

Intellect!

Each of these skills has a larger Skill Tree to unlock, which will also be our research tree, meaning your town's ability to construct special building types and items will be based on your character's knowledge they've inherited from their origin story and unlocked through the course of studying and leveling up. 

Morningstar will be the type of game where characters have no set classes, and ther limits are set not by hard definitions, but by available time to perform said tasks along a track, bonuses unlocked through special quest events like raiding a Solus Data Store, finding a blueprint, or reading a book.

It's possible to master one or two skill groups by mid-late game, but that character will probably not master them all (Passion for a skill group goes a long way!)

It will be important to keep you best crafter of weapons focused on their weapon smithing skill track. They gain cross-skill bonuses if they have combat experience and crafting combined, and have fully upgraded workshops. 

The more of these item upgrades you keep on their Workbench, the better quality items they can build with their skills, and faster. They gain more experience and mood bonuses working on these passionate skills in a fully upgraded indoor workshops vs a bare bones outdoor shop. 

The goal is to create specialist characters you can grow attached to as you invest in them, making their mood and life events meaningful. Something Morningstar focuses on more than most games -- makes the procedural characters memorable and really stand out.  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTuyyGkJ4D8 

It will be cool to finally have all this tied together in the early part of the new year, as Kent continues merging the UI project and adding in the widgets that we will be using long term. This new UI system will let us define UI fields by XML tags, so modders can also add their own menus and sub-menus with custom graphics later on. 

It's a huge amount of investment in moddabilty and future proofing, even if it does take a lot of time compared to just hard coding the UI (which would be easier, but slightly lazy.)

Looking back at 2021!

2021, was tough. We made it through with a pretty decent prototype, but the combination of SOS2 taking up 4 more months than the expected 6 weeks really hit us in summer, along with a major life upset for me that resulted in moving homes. We battled sickness and exhaustion, a life after lockdown becoming a work from home way of life, changes offices, losing loved ones, and lots of other issues.

But, the big UI project iceberg and the gameplay prototype iceberg are merging as I type this, and the new Plastic SCM vesrion control is going to allow us to add more seats to the team in 2022 where we plan to hire another coder to help fill in gaps in our knowledge and accelerate progress towards a playable vertical slice.

We're all excited to work faster in 2022. 

The biggest cinch in our pipeline is just the rate at which things are being coded. Art can currently be made faster than Kent can keep us, as his work outside of RHX keeps us funded to work full time. Once we add another full time dev, we are going to be blazing fast, as the temples we've established mean the major tech risks have been outlined and we've made at least the first iteration of our tools this year to make all that work fast and clean.

The biggest boons are the Symbol XML system, with the serializer and loader, which is what all our items, skills, traits, and the vast majority of the game is encoded with. The Visual Animation Toolset, which is XML based, piggy backs on that, as do all our terrain tiles, all our chracter outfits, and the weapons. This syetem is a huge improvement over similar games we've modded and our game is inspired by, such as Star Sector, Fallout 3 & 4, and RimWorld. This will be accessible to modders and our new coding partner alike.

The art style has evolved from concepts to production templates usable in game. The whole UI was established this year along with how we tackle faces, bodies, hair, and outfits of all kinds. Tons of items, buildings, and plants & animals were created, along with our pipeline for how to render these. Again in 2022, we will be blazing fast at iterating on these files now that a standard has been set.

I'm looking most forward to a playable demo in early 2022, probably around March, where we can start showing what we are up to in monthly update videos.

If you'll excuse me, I still am 2 days into a covid infection, and I'm about to pass out, haha.

Take care, and we'll see you in 2022!