Gaming Orbital Margins

Finally got around to making a decent background image for the station with which everything started (i.e. of which I made the first primitive proof of concept to see if I could actuallly get anything halfways visually appealing done): Argosy colony, the stanford torus in high earth orbit. Well, mostly stanford torus. They replaced the mirror with a sunlight collector, because that just works a lot better for actually getting the light to all the places it is needed:

argosy.jpg

I have to say, it does look quite a bit better than that initial proof of concept, though there was quite a bit of luck involved. I only ever have a vague idea of the mood of the final image (let's make this one yellow! Huh, I guess I could make this one a bit greenish!), and for this one I was aiming for pale, desaturated blue going a bit into the 50ies, but couldn't really get it. So I started playing around with the angle of earth light (can't play around with the sun, has to hit the collector from straight above), and suddenly was hit in the face by this without ever looking for it. Looks very 80ies now rather than 50ies, but that's ok. It does look hella cool, I think. Couldn't pass that one up.

Next update will be due later this month, but it won't contain more than this new graphic and probably a bit more in the codex (got to start giving those factions some background...). The big thing, an actual character system, is still going to be in the works for a while.
 
I'm finally starting to put down some codex entries for the factions, and I thought I'd take a bit of a different approach than with the history articles. Rather than a "word of god" style explanation of the factions, I think it might be fun to have a few outtakes of in-universe prose discussing them or related to them for each. Gives them more ambiguity, but also provides more opportunity for hints at relations, issues, culture and flavour that I just couldn't get in any other way.

Here's an example from the faction page of the "Confederatio Holocrata". That's the guys "owning" the space stations in HEO:

"My dear colleagues

I apologize for addressing all of you directly without going through our local lead link. After the resounding absence of feedback to the study on the economic trajectory of the confederation submitted through the regular channels by my team in the Circle of Science and Education, I feel it is worth the trouble of upsetting all of you in exchange for somebody in the Confed Circle actually reading the damn thing! They received the complete study weeks ago, with an amount of hard data attached that should be sufficient to build the radiation shield for a second Stanford Torus. That is, they received it for the second time at that point. The first time they received it 7 months ago. The third time was this week, and yesterday I was politely asked to drop the matter.

Since apparently our esteemed leads can't understand numbers, I find it prudent to address each and everyone of you directly and explain the gist of the study in very simple terms, though you can find the data attached, just in case you're an intelligent human being and not a descendant of some experimental monkeys they sent to space. In short: there are a few fundamental resources required for a human civilization to survive in the long term: Ground to build on, a source of materials to build things on that ground, and a sufficient supply of water and bacteria to turn that ground fertile for agriculture. Add to that the one thing nobody on earth ever thought worth mentioning, which is air to breathe!

There have been civilizations in human history that have made do with the absence of one of these, if they had firm control over the others and access to the missing one by trade, force or ingenuity. No area lacking more than one of these has ever been successfully settled. Earths deserts are still uninhabited, its oceans still unsettled, it's skies unbothered by permanent residents. I did not think the obvious needs pointing out, but apparently it does: We lack control of access to not one, not two, but ALL of these. There has never been any kind of permanent settlement with such a complete and devastating lack of control of the vital resources that make live possible.

Note that I'm not talking about having a supply of the resources themselves. I know we have trade agreements, I know we have reserves, I know we're not doing that badly right now. In the long term, that is insignificant. What we lack is control of that supply. All we have we have through trade. And we trade for the resources we need for our very existence with services that are merely convenient to our trading partners. Our services are becoming less convenient to some of them, because they are getting to a state where they can get the job done themselves. Our mere existence becomes less convenient to others, and they have an interest in making trading with us less convenient for some of our partners. Sooner or later that balance will tip in our disfavour, at which point, and you will have to forgive my technical terminology here, WE ARE redacted!

The study and the data clearly show this in much more indisputable ways than mere words can, and in a much more impartial, polite way than me. It also clearly shows that there are two options in our future, and two options only: One in which we manage by some stroke of genius to acquire control of a supply to at least three of the four named resources, and one in which we will be gobbled up by the Intercorps because we won't even have the materials required to keep the little ground we have right now from being reclaimed by cold, hard vacuum. I sincerely hope that this letter gets enough people to understand our predicament to get the utter smegheads in the Confed Circle finally talking about how we're going to pull off another miracle and preserve our independence!"

- Asha Ekwensi, "an open letter to whomever our future may concern"
 
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It's been decades since I played it and I hadn't thought of it while writing, but now that you mention it, I can totally see that! :D
 
Another one in the pipeline. This one is significantly smaller, in fact the second-smallest currently in the game. It’s an industrial station in LEO. The high-precision ultra-sterile type of industrial, not the greasy-grimy type. The one that benefits from not having to put things on a surface.

Also, this one is nuclear, not solar (reactor not visible in the picture), as are most stations built by the intercorps, and especially in LEO. Large solar farms in LEO are quite uncomfortable due to friction and debries.

calfast-zero.jpg
Still have some codex entries to write, so not quite up for release yet.
 
March update is up, containing the new graphic above, as well as codex entry for Goldenrod Inco and the IOA.
Here's the patch notes:

Here's a little teaser of the new codex entries:

"The International Orbit Authority is just about the last international organization where career politicians from major nations still have an even playing field against Intercorps representatives. You can easily tell by how silly it is. Now, it would be a disservice to denounce the valuable and tireless work the IOA is doing in organizing and clearing our ever more crowded orbits, especially considering they have to put up with the liberal chaos monkeys from outer space flinging the orbital equivalent of poo down our way. But at every opportunity, IOA leadership is proving that their operatives are succeeding at doing so despite them, not thanks to them.
So what devious plan have they come up with this time to sabotage their own mission? In a bold step towards strengthening the organizations reputation as "the vacuum authority", they announced plans to build a Gunship! With Railguns! With the typical anti-logic Politicians use to justify spending other peoples money on personal phallus enhancements, they argue that the organization has a mandate to guarantee peace through military presence, and that therefore they should have a ship with guns on the outside instead of the current ones that merely have people with guns on the inside.
Never mind that except for that one time in Kroonhaven (which luckily was resolved by arrests and crowd control, rather than turning the station into swiss cheese), all missions their craft have flown so far have been emergency responses. "I'm unsure", an anonymous member of the force stationed at Empyrean Core said, "if carefully nudging damaged spacecraft back to the nearest station with hypersonic slugs is a valid option, but I'm definitely certain that my buddies at the debris control division will have relevant opinions..."
- Article from the satire magazine "Is Potato"
Click to expand...

And here's this month's state vector, in which I give a little rundown of the character system currently in development:
 
New update! This one is all about character development, introducing a trait-based progress system that also introduces hard goals for the first time. At the current stage those goals are a bit rigid and generic and mostly focused on things you need to do anyways to survive the early game, so it kind of doubles as a bit of a guiderail. Complete the goals to earn XP, spend XP on traits to make certain things easier. It’s as simple as that when you boil it down.

You can also select your nervous trait at character creation now, while before you just had a fixed one. And then there’s the customary new graphic and codex entries, introducing two new factions. Go here for an overview and to try it out:


This constitutes the feature set that will be released in the first steam demo. If anybody is inclined to help test the current version, which undoubtedly needs a lot of tweaking to be ready for that auspicious event, I would be much obliged. Mostly interested in inputs on balance, but of course bug reports are also very welcome.

You can read more about the planned road to steam and the future of the game, such as it is planable at the current point, in the new state vector:

 
Wow! This is my first time seeing this thread, and I'm pleasantly surprised.
I love the art in this game; the space stations look fantastic. I briefly tried it on Linux, and so far, it works perfectly. I confess I'm not very good at playing games, but just watching a developer recount their journey is interesting to me.
I recently tried making my first 3D game (C++, OpenGL, SDL3, and ImGui), and it gave me a real sense of how complex it is to program something like this. My premise was quite basic; let's just say it was more of a physics experiment—rolling dice on a table with ReactPhysics3D—than a game. But it gave me an idea of all the knowledge, talent, passion, and perseverance needed to create a real game. And that's exactly what I see here in your project.

I wish you the best of luck with this very promising project. By the way, the dialogue animations are very good (they're very fluid and easy on the eyes), and the background music and sound effects feel very harmonious. The only suggestion I can think of is to change the font of the dialogue, because I found it a little difficult to read (perhaps making them larger?).
My screen resolution is 1366x768 (16:9 laptop screen).
 
Thanks for your kind and encouraging words! :cheers:

Matias Saibene said:
The only suggestion I can think of is to change the font of the dialogue, because I found it a little difficult to read (perhaps making them larger?).
Click to expand...
Yeah, I've been thinking about that off and on. One problem is that there's some weird scaling issue in libgdx that I hadn't had time to look into. sometimes letters get truncated just a pixel or so. But it's not the font, in other places they are fine. Making the font larger might help with that too, but it might also force me to reconsider some layouts. I guess I should try it out and see what happens...
 
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