Research panel is comming

Now that the conference is over, i could get back to work on Alone in Space. For now, I'm creating a custom window management to handle the game panels (Research, Freight, ...). For this purpose I'm using some viewport tricks but the input is not well handled yet.

The idea of using a viewport is to ease the construction of the panels and also their management. Yna allows to use game states as full screen of as popups. That's what I need : some kind of popups on top of the current Vision.

When the panel system will be operational, I'll be able to start working on the research tree and also the other panels later.

The research panel will give informations about the player's discovered technologies. On this panel, the player will also manage research programs with a (I hope) realistic approach. Technologies will be shown as a big tree. I want to create a really big one so it won't fit on screen. Here are some things I want to do about it :

• Drag the tree to show hidden parts.
• Scroll to zoom in / out and show more or less tree nodes
• Use colors and symbols to distinguish researched, available for research and not available nodes

No screenshot for now.

Natural resources

Tonight i worked on the natural resources extraction. That's it. The core of the game.

Zones will have a starting amount of resources from 4 types :

• Carbon
• Metal
• Gas
• Antimatter

Each of these natural resources will be differently distributed according to the zone type (space, planet, asteroid...). Randomly distributed of course. Natural resources will have to be stored in warehouses. And those warehouses will have a maximum capacity. Gathered resources at max capacity will be wasted. Oh and by the way, all structures will need energy to operate (produced by special structures).

Yeah, Alone in Space will be hard to master. And also hard to code. :-)

It's all about architecture

Yesterday i could throw away some hours in developing Alone in Space. The game core engine is created, even if it's still empty. I designed it to be used in multiplayer / solo. The multiplayer management is not handled yet, i'll take care of that later but the actual structure makes it possible to handle it.

I also worked on the universe generation. Yeah, generative content is sweet. It gives some depth to a game by getting some randomness. The global generator structure is here, ready to be used. For now, it can generate all kind of visions in the game :

• Zones
• Regions
• Sectors
• And the galaxy itself as well

Natural resource repartition is still fixed but some random will show up later. This will make the exploration more interesting for the player : will i find an awesome gold mine of just another junk world?


If you're discovering this project, let me introduce the concept of "vision" in Alone in Space. First, the game takes place in space. That's huge. And barely impossible to represent in one simple scene. So i decided to cut the gameplay in visions. Each vision is a representation of space at a different zoom level :

Zone < Region < Sector < Galaxy

The galaxy is separated in sectors. Each sector contains regions. Each region contains zones. That's like russian dolls. Each vision gives different possibilities, according to the zoom level :

• In Zone vision, you will build structures, harvest natural resources, create advanced components
• In Region vision, you will explore and colonize new Zones
• In Sector vision, you will explore planets, asteroïds (represented by Regions)...
• In the Galaxy vision, you will explore deep space, find new sectors, worm holes, black holes...

Now that "containers" can be generated, i'll be able to go forward and  create the Zone management with :

• Building structures
• Harvesting natural resources
• Creating advanced components
• Handling catastrophies