Games Void Surfer (Formerly Spacecraft) [RELEASED!]

Been a little while since my last update. I've decided to set a cut-off date for the game. It's not going to be perfect but I'm looking forward to releasing a PC game

The cut-off will be the end of March, so expect to see a release on Steam some time around then!

I've made quite a few changes but I'll try to summarise them here and show a short videos which covers a couple of the changes:

• 7 new missions
• 4 new preset ships (AI ships)
  
• Updated the Main Menu
• Updated the HUD
• You can now Save/Load multiple saves. Autosaving and Quicksaving included
• You can also start a new game instead of just continuing
• Added a wormhole scene between solar systems
• Added 3 new modules
• Tidied up the scenes to make them consistent and share a UI/Hud prefab
  
• Many bug fixes

 

I've overhauled the ship module creation system to make it easier for myself when creating new modules, so hopefully I can churn out a huge arsenal for people to play with!

I've also added in a requested feature "Mirror Mode" when building. You can choose "Horizontal", "Vertical" or "Both" and your selections will be copied on the opposite side of the dotted line accordingly.

You can also paint the modules Primary, Secondary and Lighting colours for a touch of extra customisation. I also added a little feature to copy the colour of the core module when you add a new module.

Check out the video here:

 

Looks neat
I like it.
Just that blip, when you select things, is a bit ... well too blippy to me.

 

@Antypodish Thanks for the feedback.
I definitely need to spend some time sorting out all the audio.
To be honest I didn't even listen to the audio on this video!

 

For anyone interested, I've set up a Twitter account where I'll be posting videos a bit more regularly

 

Just wondering what's your philosophy behind the movement of the ship? I made a prototype a while back very similar to this (top down space drifting game). I found the hardest part was making the movement fun, but that once I did it made the game a lot better to play. I ended up even removing all the other mechanics from the player because of how much I enjoyed drifting the rocket. It looks to me that you've gone with a much different style (faster and more agile) movement than I did, just curious how you ended up with that.

 

@RavenOfCode Originally I had rigibodies on every module of the ship and they were connected to their neighbors. The thrusters would apply force to themselves which in turn affected the rest of the ship for turning etc. This felt pretty good but it resulted in some weird physics glitches and performance issues.

I ended up removing the rigidbodies and only having 1 shared rigidbody on the core module. The thrusters now apply force to the core module rigidbody using AddForceAtPosition and the position of the thruster.
Now that's a little pointless because I also changed the turning/aiming of the ship to simply rotate to the cursor, meaning there's no need to add turning thrusters as the ship will just fly toward the cursor.

When you add a module, it has a "mass" on the module settings and I take that mass and add it to the core module, so more weight still means a slower/heavier ship even though that module doesn't have a rigidbody.

So the current implementation is actually really basic, but I think it makes the ship easier to control and requires less tweaking with the thrusters when building the ship as you don't have to worry about the turn speed.

 

@Serinx That's interesting, I definitely think that less complex can be better for almost any game (I'm a big fan of nintendo so that's probably why tho lol). It does make sense to drop it down from a lot of rigidbodies down to one. I've found the collision physics to always be a bit wonky when a lot of them start to collide. I do like that change though, between using the multithrusters and tweaking them for turn speed into just using the mouse for aiming. I think the combat gameplay is a much higher pace because of it.

I wonder though if having it lerp towards the cursor might be a way to add some tanky type ships back in? Something like based on the weight making it rotate slower. As it stands it doesn't seem like the heavier ships have a huge downsize if they can just aim well at everything, though that might be intentional design?

 

@RavenOfCode yeah in the end gameplay, performance and stability wins out for me. realism has to suffer but I think it's a reasonable sacrifice.

The turn rate of heavy ships is slightly hindered. Small ships can pretty much instantly rotate to the cursor, although I added a lower limit to the rotation speed due to player feedback because massive ships would take way too long to turn around otherwise; making them sitting ducks!

There is also a "gyroscope accelerator" module in the game which increase the turn rate of your ship - so you can actually have a massive ship that turns quickly, at the cost of some constant power drain.

 

I finally released my game to Steam! It's been a big challenge getting everything together and jumping through all the Valve hoops but I've finally come out the other side.

I definitely learned my lesson in scoping small and scoping tightly! I wanted to add a bit more content before release but I don't want to just keep delaying it.

In it's current shape it's a fairly short game content-wise, so I'll continue to add new chapters, modules, and possibly a free-roam/infinite mode as I had originally intended.

If you want to check it out, here's the steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1579690/Void_Surfer/

Thanks for all of the feedback and support I've received from the Unity Community! I'll be sure to start up a new project soon after I take a nice break... NZ<->AUS borders are opening up soon so maybe I will actually be able to get away!

Cheers