Hurray! Hurrah! It's Weekly Update time!

Alright to kick things off we are gonna start with an overview of what was worked on and where effort was directed on the project this past week, following launch on Tuesday.

Bugfix-Friday

On Friday we launched the first of the recurring weekly devlogs known passionately as Bugfix-Friday. In this devlog we covered a few of the bugs that we had isolated and fixed, as well as some that we had yet to reproduce.  With the posting of a BFF devlog, the team will also be uploading the updated build to the itch.io page. Features that are in development for the next milestone version will not find their way into an updated build created for Bugfix-Friday. They shall remain within development branches and will be available for testing for the relevant patreon tiers.

Launching Copernicus

This was probably the biggest thing that happened this week. Some could argue getting a large double M&M blizzard from DQ the day before was a more momentous occasion, but I'd rather not open such an arena of debate.  Regardless, at midnight on the Tuesday the 15th of September, Glorious Dawn was released to raucous applause from audiences around the world, or so I've been told. Most of the time spent since has been directed towards a variety of post-launch concerns the largest of which was... oh... is this a segue? 

Marketing

It was a segue. Not a particularly good one, however.  

As it turns out marketing anything is somewhat difficult and EXPENSIVE. This being so, the vast majority of our efforts were aimed at Reddit. There isn't much to say here so I am likely just gonna move on. Though I suppose if anyone has any pointers on how we can better market the project to interested individuals feel free to hit me up with a PM or comment.

Research

As with star and galaxy generation, our intent is to deliver as scientifically plausible a simulation as possible, as a foundation. Then, as is needed for gameplay and/or as the player dictates, the simulation can be overridden with criteria and preferences. Do you want more habitable worlds than would naturally spawn? Say no more. Habitability distribution will be overridden as is needed to satisfy the player's request, after which the generator will return to scientific plausibility.

So it follows that our implementation of planetary systems and other such celestial objects, would be based upon genuine research and cosmological findings. To this end early research has begun into stellar systems and exoplanet distribution. Further effort must be given to provide our generators with proper distribution models, but we are on the road to such findings and it is only a matter of time. Our current interest is in the correlation between the metallicity of a star and the exoplanets it hosts.

Progress

The first implementation of the stellar system view is currently under development and is coming along well. By the end of the week the team hopes to have a prototype of milestone Kepler's main feature, the stellar system view and celestial orbits. 

Funnily enough the thing that gave the team the greatest hustle was double-clicking. As it turns out Unity does not natively support double-clicking, at least not as we could discern. So it fell to us to develop our own solution. Double-clicking is a staple of 4X and strategy games of every sort, so it should be no surprise that Glorious Dawn would be in sore need of such a feature. 

As it stands, double clicking on a star rotates the player's camera to look at said double-clicked star. After the camera has aligned, the player's camera then begin to move towards this star, and as it approaches the star will begin to fade out, going completely invisible once the camera has gotten close enough. At this point if the feature was complete, which it is not, the stellar system that the galaxy star represented would come into view centered around where the now faded star sat. The player would be able to observe all the bodies in the system, see their orbits about their host star, and review their properties and data. The player would then be able to press a button or simply fly out of the system. The stellar system would then shrink and fade out of view, becoming obscured by the now reappearing galaxy star. 

This is how we intend to implement stellar system views. No loading screens, no different tab. Just a seamless transition from galaxy, to stellar system, to planet, to tile. All the way down.  

GitHub

Unity teams has served us well, but we believe it is time to move on. It doesn't currently support separate branches for builds, something that we need given that we intend to bugfix builds that are out of date, in terms of what the team is actively working on (i.e. bugfixing Copernicus when we are working on Kepler). So we have made the decision to start migrating to GitHub or some other repository where we can more easily process version control, instead of operating on a single development branch.

Conclusion

Well that basically sums it all up. If you made it this far, I congratulate and heartily thank you. It is people like you that will keep our spirits high and help us whether the storms of development. Thank you all for joining me on this Weekly Update Sunday, and remember that a still more Glorious Dawn awaits!

Sincerely,

Bryon Karger