Hi there,

welcome to my spiel on my latest updates for Orbital, v0.3.

This helpful infographic illustrates this release.

After procrastitidying my script folder structure and running my game, I found it no longer worked. At all. I learnt the important lesson that moving scripts screws up their references in the game objects. Reassigning them back to their correct objects was a long enough job on top of the refactoring I'd already done for this version, I can only tread water for so long before I need to crawl towards working on actual features.

The technical debt to pay;

My first target was my ark class, which was bloated to an uncomfy 700~ lines and had a hot mix of controls, whilst some UI functions were held in ArkLabelManager EVERYTHING else was taken care of in ShipControls.

After reaching out to a brainy Game Dev pal I was advised to go with a ArkGameManager class, which adopted functionality handling population, velocity, events like loading population onto the ark, ship collisions, remaining UI functions got tidied into ArkLabelManager. All that remains in ArkControls are ark controls, WOW.

Next up was dealing with too many properties & my million and one references to the same few classes. So, AudioController, NBodySimulation, CameraController and UIController were given static instance properties like below.

This has got me well on my way to 

a) reducing uneccesary referencing and 

b) add reused UI prefabs to new levels without having to worry about references

For v0.3 I also popped out two new features, upgrades and random events. Whilst I'm content with the upgrade system as a first pass the random events I underestimated as not only did they take a while to conceptualise. I create a few different components to store them, RandomEvents, RandomEventChoices and StatusEffects. So that translates to the random events which can have 1-3 choices and these choices can have status effects which are applied to For instance, if you choose not to repair the ark immediately, you will now lose 20 crew per second.

Not only that but also triggers for random events can be complex, for now I've opted to only fire them off randomly upon ark launch and landing but plan to expand this to randomly throughout the playtime and also the different objects they can effect (currently the home planet and arks).

That's all for now, I hope you folk have a lovely weekend.