Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, etc, etc

Hey everyone, I hope you had a good Christmas (for those who celebrate it)! Since Christmas was this week, the dev team spent a lot of time watching old holiday movies instead of being in the office, but we did get some work done before the holiday passed. A lot of work went into the backend of the game, primarily focusing on saving and loading instances of stellar systems. As well, we have two new developments that I can take pretty pictures of.

Regions

This week dev Ben focused on prototyping galactic regions! This is the first iteration, with a grid system that is determined by the size of the galaxy spawned. We will be continuing to tweak the look and spawning of these regions up to the release of Kepler, and for now it is primarily just a visual effect. This will be very important ground work for the future, however - dividing up the galaxy into distinct sectors will be useful both for devs and for players.

Relative Sizing

That little planet in the middle has twice the radius of Earth and is four times as massive.

Celestial bodies in Glorious Dawn like planets and moons now visually scale relative to their actual size. This isn't a totally accurate scaling, of course (and neither are the orbits for that matter) - if it was, stellar systems would be very difficult to navigate as small object like Earth would be a few pixels wide and a significant amount of scrolling away from any other object (here is a useful way to imagine that). The scaling here is merely to act as a visual aid so you can better understand the size and scope of each stellar system in your galaxy.

That's all for this week. The dev team here at Big Owl is currently participating in the Historically Accurate Game Jam and will be working on that until next Sunday, so we likely won't have a lot to report then on Glorious Dawn. Or we'll all be in the office at 1 am coding both games at high velocity. Who knows.

See you all next week!