What am I doing?

I have an idea for a game. Actually, I have a lot of ideas, but this one in particular is more fleshed out and I decided to actually make it happen!

General gist is: the player is stuck in an escape pod on a planet and can’t go out (because it’s not safe), so they build drones to explore the surroundings and gather materials to build more drones and upgrade them. I’m not sure what the main goal will be, maybe something with sending an SOS message.

Originally the working title was supposed to be “dronesploration” (drones + exploration), but I’ve switched it to “Remote Space”, which might actually be the final title, who knows. Let me know if you have any other ideas.

I hope I’ll manage to keep the infamous feature creep under control, but I think we all know how it ends. Right know I’m aiming for a demo/MVP with the basic functionality (controlling drones, gathering materials, upgrading).

If you’re reading this far in the future: Hi! I hope this didn’t turn out to be a cautionary tale of lost dreams and that I actually finished this. Maybe it even went big? I don’t count on that though. Hope you’re doing well!

If I’m reading this far in the future: I really hope you stuck to it and finished this. And I hope that you appreciate these devlogs. I wonder what you’re up to now. I bet you have even more ideas. I hope you also have more budget.

Anyways, enough with the hoping, let’s see how it’s going so far.

How’s it going?

Current commit history:

1* a914e14 Noise shader WIP
2* 04649e0 Terrain addon, some wheeled drone improvements
3* dc05cfe Good enough, for now
4* 8ab8752 I think its better now
5* a0165a4 Remove demo car
6* 496bf68 Kinda working wheeled drone

I started with creating the controls for the wheeled drone. One important fact about me: I am obsessed with movement in video games. So naturally, I already spent quite a lot of time on that. I figured I’d try out Godot’s VehicleBody3D. But it was much harder than I expected. I fought with various settings and values for hours and nothing seemed to work. First I didn’t have any collision, because for some reason the wheels don’t work with trimesh colliders. After I got that solved (i.e., used some different mesh), it was working, but weirdly. The drone was either very wobbly or the springs would not work or it refused to drive. A total mess.

Finally I directly copied the car from the official demo and tweaked some things and it worked. One might say that it worked good enough. But there’s no such thing for me. So I spent another few hours exploring the several-dimensional parameter space of stiffness, damping, travel distances etc. Then it was “good enough” for me.

So I started working on terrain. Because the terrain model I imported from Blender had aforementioned collision issues, I decided to try an add-on I’ve heard about: Terrain3D. And again, more issues: the textures would refuse to load, because of wrong format (even though it seemed fine). But luckily a simple convert texture.png texture.dds did the trick, thanks ImageMagick! With that solved, everything was working!

So I tweaked the vehicle values some more, because it was impossible to resist. I added an environment resource to add some more life and it’s starting to look decent.

In-game screenshot of the planet surface