March 2021 Update

While not a lot has been going on where it can be seen, a ton of work has been going on behind the scenes at RHX. We've been tackling business & employment stuff that just comes with having an LLC with multiple members, international and spread across the US, and working on the UI and sprite sorting layers for the game. 

Sprite sorting an Isometric game is a big challenge, as you kinda have to imagine the world is actually 2D -- not 3D -- but it looks like it's full of 3D objects.

Something as simple as having a character walk in and out of a door to a building is actually an extreamly complex challenge in isometric. 

Say you have a doorway. That door is made of 3 layers: 

A Mantle (above all layers)
A Left {southeast} Frame (Bottom)
A Right {northeast} Frame (Top)

Basically as your character approaches this doorway  moving south to north, they are in front of all the frames and mantle pieces. As they cross the threshold, that has to switch to them being behind the Left piece, but in front of the Right. As the cross to the other side, now they are behind the Right piece. 

But what abut the mantle? The mantle crosses Left and Right. So when do they cross through it, so they sort behind it?

So answer that question, and many dozens of other like it, and you have Morningstar's biggest initial hurdle. After that has been collision geometry (so walls become solid and impassible, and take damage when hit -- something which itself is very complex in isometric as we have to pretend the wall has height when it's still flat, meaning an arrow fired at the wall hits the middle of the wall instead of the 4 edges. And then Navmeshes, which allow the character to know where they are in space and where they can or can't go. 

All of these are pretty significant hurdles to vault before we can move on to much more exciting things that look visually pleasing enough to post on Patreon. 

In the meantime Allegra and I have been working ahead on concept art for the factions we haven't implemented yet, the Gehen Empire and Vyn Mahali, as well as rough sketches for the Faith thumbnail images that appear on the beliefs tab of your characters. (Because the characters you encounter have Religious beliefs that impact their motivations and daily life, and it's nice to see those visually represented.)

The UI is also doing really good. Still a lot of Loreum Ipsum for the formatting while we hook things up from one project containing the backend to this new front end, but the progress should really begin accelerating with this formatting done. 

Morningstar is very very information dense. Modding for RimWorld on Save Our Ship taught us an awful lot about how to manage this much information, and we've taken the best lessons from that experience and translated it to our similarly information dense game. 

Characters have specific health needs with the ability to lose limbs (and gain them!), diseases, fevers, broken bones and damaged organs -- all of which needed to be displayed in an engaging way. Enter our Wound Man (and Woman) which shows locational damage and healing progress. 

They also have complex relationships with one another, the big factions, and different religious beliefs. 

All this on top of classic role playing stats and skills, and a complex inventory system. 

We've show most of this data in the form of rich text with iconography and art. And if that's just not doing it, the "behind the scenes" numbers all live in a MISC tab where you can review every stat and condition that effects every system in the game related to that character. 

It's been a complicated journey but it's cool watching things begin to chip out of the mist.