After a few months off where I took some time to focus on my personal life (moved house amongst others) it is now high time I return to game development. Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting and building a few prototypes around a new project that I want to build. This is going to be something way smaller than the proejct I was working in January. It will be more focused and hopefully...
We’re nearing the end of what I’ll call the prologue of this series. We’ve covered some basic implementation, some basic physics and there’s two or three more things we need to cover before we can go into building this game. Let’s start with talking about the scale of the game. Given that the goal is to be able to simulate an entire galaxy, with more or less a few...
Last time we went over the orbits and everything nice that comes with it. Whilst implementing the code for those calculations I’ve observed something peculiar. The orbits the objects are following are more or less the same as the ones calculated in the initial state, but not quite.Naturally, I went debugging, and everything seemed fine. Still, the bodies would slowly drift out of their...
We’ve covered a lot of things over the past few months. Mostly about gravity and gravitational attraction. We’re going to switch gears now and talk about orbits. Let’s start with the limitatons of what we’re trying to achieve:– the orbits within a solar system are coplanar (within the same plane)– orbits are elliptical and stable, circular orbits being a subset...
Last time we wrapped up the basic implementation of all the building blocks we need to be able to create a solar system and update it at a data layer level and then render it in Unity. This time we’ll start focusing on how we’re actually going to create these solar systems.The end goal is to be able to procedurally generate them from scratch. Before that though, we need to be able to...
Now that we have the basis set up to start simulating the solar system it is time to get into more interesting bits.I’m going to write a quick updater that will update the positions of these bodies from their start one whenever the game is started. Very important here is to keep in mind that this updater will run in paralel in a different thread than the Unity one. This allows us to decuple...
Last time we left off having figured out what the physics equations behind everything will look like. Now it is time to get to coding. First off, I like to keep my code separated into small classes/components each doing one very specific thing. It is suprising how many complex behaviours can be broken down into these very simplistic components. Let’s make sure we have a way to reference...
In this day and age it is clear that Newtonian physics works well at a small scale but not perfectly when trying to calculate trajectories of planets and such. Nonetheless, it is still a good enough aproximation for a game and as such that’s what I’ll be using for this next phase. Essentially, what I’ll talk about today amounts to creating a solar system replica in C#. For this...
For quite a while now I’ve had this idea of an open ended game. A game where the main point is to just play the game. There is no PvP, there is no end goal just pretty things to look at and a relaxing easy gameplay that you can go through whilst thinking about your day. In other words, imagine Civilizations but without the wars, without the religious victories, no turn based mechanic and an...
Bad pun regarding the name of the game “Stand your ground” aside, I’m starting to develop a new game. Something simple I actually want to finish. In the past I’ve had huge issues with scope creep, starting a simple game only to have it spiral down into a MMORPG with millions of players within a few eeks of working on it. I’m now trying to get around that by setting...