It’s been a while since our last Solaro post. We’ve done a few small things with the game lately, but mostly our time has been focused on a large contract we started last month. It’s going great, and we’re hoping to have it completed ahead of time!

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The last few days I’ve spent on Solaro have been cleaning up the ship editor. I’ve made the editor much simpler, but kept all the features. Reorganizing the UI has eliminated big rows of text buttons that were difficult to mentally parse. I’ve also removed the second “inspection …

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Here’s a quick art post. We’ve recently licensed a set of buildings for Solaro. Here’s one of them in game:

Getting the controls just right for Solaro has been something we’ve put a lot of work into. So we’ve continued to refine how you control your ship in order to maximize the fun for everyone.

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The first five minutes of gameplay is responsible for hooking your user. And within those first five minutes you need to teach your player about what’s going on.

Becoming hooked on a game relies on engaging the person. You have to show off the start of the game and show that there’s …

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So one item that we knew we would have to do eventually for Solaro was some sort of broadphase for the the collision detection. Up until now, collisions were processed by checking every object against every other object. In computational terms, this is O(n^2) meaning that every time you double the …

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Scott and I have spent much brainpower on the matter of deciding what elements of our universe collide with what. Our primary question is: Should ships collide with other ships? There are both gameplay and technical considerations here.

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One thing we’ve been focusing on while creating Solaro is to tell a story without large paragraphs of text. While there’s no denying that a rich world can be created with just text- but it’s not the experience people are looking for in this sort of game.

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We’ve added a faction system to Solaro. I hinted at it in a previous post, but now I’m ready to explain it in more detail.

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With a lot of the core gameplay of Solaro roughed out, we’ve started work on generating some content. This step is key in figuring out the “flavor” of the world and direction of the game.

It may have seemed quiet for the last week or so, but it’s because we’re working on some great new AI behavior for Solaro.

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Up until now, the AI in Solaro has been pretty simple. It was basically always attacking, and had no concept of avoiding obstacles. Quite often the AI would simply repeatedly slam into asteroids like a fly trying to get out a window. Humorous yes, but it obviously won’t do for the final game. …

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Our demo of AI controlled enemy ships is finally ready. We’ve got a basic playable where it’s you and two escorts vs. an endless number of hostile drones, bent on destroying your way of life.

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I don’t know how it happened, but Solaro has 37 custom shaders in the project!

We’ve got a lot of variety in our shaders; some are full screen effects, many of them are for special UI effects or weapon effects, and we’ve also got special shaders for weapon and shield effects. So …

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Here I’ll do a visual walkthrough of how I make planetoids for Solaro.

First, paint a heightmap with the fun shape you are looking for.

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Today we’re showing off a few new features. There’s a bunch of new flight controls stuff, and we figured the best way to demonstrate that was to throw together some player-commandable escort ships.

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Since we’ve been pretty busy these last few months, we wanted to share what we’re currently focusing on with Solaro. Solaro: Skirmishes is a space flight simulator action game that focuses on arena based combat. As you win each arena, you are awarded new components, such as weapons, …

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The last few weeks of work have finally resulted in something playable! In this demonstration, you can construct your own ship and then click “Fly Me!” to try it out!

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Here’s a teaser image of the almost-completely-working ship. I made this quick ship in our ship editor, saved it, and loaded it into the game to fly around.

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Today I got ships successfully loading from the JSON string! I created three simple save slots for persisting ships using Unity’s player prefs system. I don’t want to spill the beans before we’re done cooking them, but I’m hoping we’ll have a blueprint sharing system at …

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As we mentioned before, player-built ships are a big part of our plans for Solaro. You’ve probably noticed that the other builds feature a stock ship model that doesn’t look particularly configurable.

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We believe in showing off our work early, and we don’t want a game that isn’t fun until the very end stages of production. So we’ve thrown in a few example ships with some placeholder AI, a few explosions and weapon effects I threw together, and the zooming and nebula drawing. You …

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Since Solaro is a big game, the key is to avoid being bogged down in extraneous junk while making the core gameplay great. So we’ve decided to focus on three key features and be sure they are totally awesome. (That article is a great read, by the way. Focus on the real essence of what you are …

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We’ve been working on allowing …

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Great things happen on a great canvas, right? Scott’s been working furiously on some neat effects for drawing backgrounds in Solaro. Coloring the nebula in the background differently based on the area you are in is a great start in keeping the world memorable (which was one of our key goals). …

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With the large and dynamic scale that we have planned for Solaro, the game is going to need to work with relatively high velocities. We’ll want to allow ships to travel fairly fast so that they can get around the world, and bullets will have to travel even faster so that you can hit things. …

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