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...
2021-12-31 04:18:38 +0000 UTC View Post
If you've been following Morningstar since the beginning, you'll remember that the PENTA Stats are the core of our game just like SPECIAL is at the heart of Fallout.
PENTA was original conceptualized and work-shopped using Pen & Paper with my friends who are more familiar with GURPSs and D&D systems. Called PENTA just because it was a 5 stat system that used together created a mixed personality matrix to motivate a character's role. Fully intended for a computer calculating the ...
2021-11-28 23:56:18 +0000 UTC View Post
October and November were all about changing standing deficits in our pipeline, both technical and personal.
For many years I'd lived in a tiny one room box out in the middle of nowhere in Catalina, AZ.
Catalina is a beautiful place, and the mountains especially have inspired a lot of my work, and 2021-11-28 23:03:31 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been getting asked this a lot by the users who have come from our mods Fallout: New California and Save Our Ship 2, "what is Project Morningstar?"
Project Morningstar is a blend of inspirations from StarSector, Rimworld, and Fallout 1&2. ...
2021-09-30 22:29:07 +0000 UTC View Post
The four main factions in Morningstar are established with hundreds or thousands of years of history, religion, and culture by the time you arrive. Each faction has a unique style, but not every member of the population has the same status or level of wealth.
To display that, we've begun drawing concept art of the outfits our various tiers of each culture wear
Allegra once again carried the torch, and we got to see a ton of great concepts for our various cultures.
To start with, she made all these excellent glasses and hats for us, so your Earth origin and advanced industrial civilizations with glass grinding can fix eye problems caused by injuries or negative health traits.
We also got a couple terrestrial hats to start the game with. A Baseball cap and a cowboy hat.
I also made an Acavii helmet, one for officers and ...
2021-09-30 02:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
September was a bit of a slow month with the team dealing with various personal life struggles, but we managed to be a little bit productive nonetheless.
One of the big tasks this month was to get our Bow & Arrow working. We lost most of July to SOS, and a big part of August recovering from June & July. September is ending with a lot of little fixes to the arrow system to get it up to snuff. I wanted to show a video but we just didn't get the new texture filtering operation done...
2021-09-30 01:54:43 +0000 UTC View PostToday, we'll talk a little bit about how we replicated the art of RimWorld's storytellers for SOS. Allegra has written a really cool guide for how she approaches replicating an established style and doing justice to the original author's work.
[Allegra]
The first step to creating new pieces for a project is to give credit where itβs due - the original artists. Their remarkable hard work and design choices are something to be admired. In this case, we have game artist ...
2021-08-18 06:42:51 +0000 UTC View Post
SOS2.5.11 is now up on Steam! (That's 11 updates for this month!)
New Splash screen is be me (Thain) on the background (planet, planetkiller, weapons fire, composition & shading) and πΈπππππ£π ππππππππ£πππ£ did the lineart and color...
A feature we've wanted since the beginning is a common Sci-fi trope: sentient holograms!
This is one of the final wishlist features from the initial design document, right up there with ship eating mechanites and the Archotech Endgame.
Holograms are colonists who have had their brain extracted to become one with the ship's computer core, and a force-field projecting solid light into their immediate environment.
2021-08-07 19:41:21 +0000 UTC
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Can you guess what it is?
2021-08-04 05:05:40 +0000 UTC View Post
July was all about setting up visually what will be tackled in August.
Back at the end of June I took a 3 week trip across the US while we updated Save Our Ship to 2.5 (which as a huge undertaking, and lasted 6 weeks thanks to RimWorld 1.3 swamping us with issues and breakages, and needing to redo some code from scratch.) That didn't leave a lot of time for Morningstar work, but Allegra carried the torch with excellent art on the Scabbards, Quivers, and updating Backpacks, along w...
2021-07-31 22:23:32 +0000 UTC View Post
First, for our new Patrons, welcome, welcome!
Link to Steam is here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1909914131
Thank you to all our test group members on Discord!
Invite Link: https://discord.gg/GK7nqgu
Not only does this update to 1.3 of RimWorld (which was a bear an...
2021-07-24 06:27:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Getting attack animations and the coding for really good feeling combat is something we've been working on all year. We're actually very interested in hiring another programmer/developer dedicated primarily to establishing our combat and finding the fun balance within it.
Because we are isometric 2D, animations are hand made, not using 3d bones. But because we have such a massive diversity of weapons, from swords to spears, and rifles to slingshots, there is a ton of ground to cov...
2021-06-21 02:54:59 +0000 UTC View Post
This is our *Experimental* crafting system. Really early, not remotely working yet, and might end up a cut feature depending on a lot of factors later on in development. But it's a feature we'd like to try.
It has a trait inheritance and mixing system where each ingredient is tagged as a type of substance. A <bulkIngredient> forms a base, and donates some properties like a base nutrient value and a trait like "bland food" or "dry powder." Those combine with other ta...
2021-06-16 03:26:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Quick demo of the overall composition and flow of the UI, from the temporary splash screen through to character creation and a mock in-game menu with temp assets.
You can see the general flow of the UI and its accessibility. Morningstar is a game where characters have moods, health issues, motivations wants & needs, faction and religious beliefs, and relationships. All in addition to production workshops, jobs, and inventories to manage.
Making that easy an i...
2021-06-09 19:35:27 +0000 UTC View Post
We finished May with a complete character generator, with every feature at least outlined and ready to implement.
We might cut the inventory editor (or leave it as a dev mode option) and instead just have all gear set by your career choice instead, which makes sense and makes chagen much faster. That may be less flexible, but at least then we don't need to gamify trading gear points or story points for items, leading to what Kent rightly called, "I traded my intelligence for b...
2021-06-03 18:46:50 +0000 UTC View Post
The only panel missing now is the equipment manager (where you would spend points on gear that isn't attached to your starting origin story: such as adding a pure water bottle to a librarian, or swapping the hiker's backpack for a knife.) I have a lot more work to do making the inventory system performant which is whole can of worms, so I'll leave it til implementation later on.
But the layout is there, even with loreum ipsum in place for a lot of the XML elements that are awaiting a fi...
2021-05-24 18:43:23 +0000 UTC View Post
There is a lot of information each character is carrying around with them in Morningstar. When and where they were born, what faction they belong to, their name, age, sex, appearance -- even their language and religion, let alone skills and stats.
That's also a lot to throw at a first time player!
Trying to avoid it feeling like a form being filled out at the DMV is a cha...
2021-05-09 04:11:36 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm trying to come up with a system to communicate to players that they can:
A -- Build whole "prefab" structures by dragging them out.
B -- Build individual walls, roofs, floors, doorways.
C -- Swap the individual parts of prefabs for whatever material they like.
It's a lot of information, and I *think* it makes sense already. But does that confuse anyone here?
2021-04-27 23:01:31 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the cool things Patreon and PayPal donations have helped fund are the prints of two prototype card games: STAVE and GUNNAR.
Stave is now Art Ready, with a couple gameplay quirks to work out and 2 cards that could use a different wording, and GUNNAR is in its first pass of physical print with temporary art assets and rules in flux.
With Project Morningstar dominating most of our time each day, these two card games are a nice break from the digital grind.
Th...
2021-04-24 17:00:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Not fooling around, that's actually what we're up to. Lighting rooms using lighting volumes, installing doors and their collision geometry, and setting up the navmesh to adapt to it.
2021-04-01 20:08:59 +0000 UTC View Post
This week has all been about breaking down barriers and building them back up.
Destructible walls is a huge deal in a game like this, where navmeshes (the areas the computer has marked as being traversaible by characters) need to be dynamically broken.
This also suggests that lighting can change as well, so we can't just precompute lighting volumes and call it a day.
It also means that when buildings are generated or built, we can't just build them into sta...
2021-03-28 17:56:44 +0000 UTC View Post
We've continued work on the UI visualizations and iterating on vertical slice necessities.
This time we've overhauled the Main Menu, the Skill System (which was previously all text, but I've since added some rudimentary first draft icons to establish a style), and our Outfit menu, where you can assemble a standardized clothing & weapon set and copy/paste it between characters.
A lot of these features are things we've found helpful in other genre related games, espe...
2021-03-28 17:45:07 +0000 UTC View Post
In order we have:
The Hethinn Tribes
The Gehen Empire
The Acavii Empire
The Vyn Mahali
Each faction has a belief system they ascribe to which sets their Diet, Schedule of Daily, Weekly, or Yearly Rituals, and their preferred Holy Items and Forbidden Items.
As your characters get deeper into their faith, they will inherit traits along the path to devotion. Some characters will be only tacitly involved, going through some motions for occasional positive mood ...
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 objec...
2021-03-12 23:02:52 +0000 UTC View Post
We've been busy after the last update on SOS. We've set up the standard scale for buildings and established our first building kit. These are both Inside/outside, and will allow us to dynamically enter buildings from the outside but just turn the roof and south walls off.
Cliffs are also coming along and will now function the same way as buildings, with interior cavers and mines. We plan on having several types of stone: Marble, Granite, Slate, and other types. We're not sure if t...
2020-12-10 07:04:19 +0000 UTC View Post
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 m...
2020-12-01 21:53:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Morningstar hasn't been too sleepy while Save Our Ship 2.4 has been updating either. The last iteration of out terrain is ready to implement, and we have new UI elements ready to go in game and make the WIP prototype look good.
It is now time to watch the grass grow, the crops develop, and then burn it all down and bury it in snow. Allegra has done great work on our plant life stages, which you'll be able to see grow and die dynamically, effecting the climate and biosphere as the worl...
An absolutely massive update, SOS2.4 radically improves, optimizes, and re-balances Save Our Ship.
Adding 4 brand new Asteroid Base New Game Starts and 8 Starting Space Ships, SOS2.4 will let you live our your colony's dream of adventuring in the stars from whence you came.
The past performance bottlenecks that left large ship battles a slideshow are gone, the major improvements to threading, light layers, and pathing have abated most end game throttles, and new explosion &a...
2020-11-09 03:07:28 +0000 UTC View Post