Morningstar Progress

After a crazy weeklong holiday for all of us, and one of our members falling ill with COVID, we're back to work on Morningstar. 

A lot of the complicated stuff behind the scenes I won't show here today, but we've made strides getting our XML def system designed. It will be a robust, modular, easily moddable system that allows users to add new items, weapons, armor -- even whole factions and biomes to the procedural generator with incredible ease and interoperability between those mods.  

Since Morningstar emerged from modding Fallout, RimWorld, and StarSector the lessons learned in those environments has gone a long way in informing what we're doing on a big architectural level, letting us avoid pitfalls those games fell into when supporting our future modders, and even our own inevitable balancing, feature iteration, and QA. 

The UI for our Inventory and Trade menus is coming together. All the graphical elements re in place even if the features behind a lot of those buttons are still a ways off and uncoded. 

The philosophy behind the Trade UI is to make quality of life features default. Adding a search bar for when inventories are deeply crowded with all your gathered stuff you picked up while raiding towns and scavenging ruins will be at your finger tips, with filters to see various party members, your crates back in a town you own, and whether or not this is a profit to sell or not based on the price paid for it. 

You'll also be able to haggle & negotiate prices and recurring trade deals for your automated or manual caravans. (We plan on letting the player set up their own trade networks with AI leaders and guards, as opposed to making the player do everything personally. We've done no feasibility on that yet, since the world map feature is till a ways out, but it's on the planning if we keep this feature or not.)

We've also begun establishing the logos and iconography related to our Factions. The Acavii and Gehena are the first to be done, with their Eagle and Eye imagery. And the Heathinn and Vyn are close behind. We'll only be implementing the Acavii and Hethinn for the vertical slice, but it's good to have the other two ready. 

Finally, we've begun the task of establishing the exact scale of characters relative to world tile sizes, door height, and that will also inform our combat system quite a bit. 

We chose to reduce characters at 400pixel units tall, so we have more room to fit our items and workshops on screen within the wall footprints. It means we go back to basics on that combat model and our movement rates, but that's fine, since we planned on that changing drastically. 

We'd still like to find another Unity Dev with Hack & Slash combat experience to join our team. We haven't even begun to look at the animations for that game module since it's outside of our expertise. But if we can find the right person willing to join our project, we can start that sooner in the new year than later in development. 

If you know anyone with that experience, we'd love to talk! We have budgeted for them and we can fit in 1 more person full time without too much stress before we go for major first round funding. 

It's pretty relaxed around here as we settle into a full time groove getting the art and code architecture established. ow would be the ideal time for someone to think about joining us to hop in and get acquainted with the early designs, direction, and assets.