Hi!
During January a lot of progress was made. The game looks completely different from what it was previously. Here’s a small comparison:
Current
Previous
So let’s start by what I started doing in January!
Graphics
The idea behind choosing this art style was to contrast with the gameplay. A complex gameplay with a simplistic graphic style. This art style will also allow to focus much more on the code that makes Rocket Engineer alive while delivering a great variety of parts and features.
The hardest part of defining Rocket Engineer’s style was to find the right colour palette. Here’s a few early screenshots before the final colours were found:
The ground was obviously too green
Depth was missing and colours weren’t right, especially for the sky
The decal was just trying to mimic grass...
Pretty close, but the gradient wasn’t in the good order
Another difficult Rocket Engineer’s specific challenge is the fact that the parts doesn’t always have fixed sizes. A good example are rocket’s fuel tank which width and height are determined by the player. That meant that I had to implement a script that would automatically scale and position the shadow accordingly. It is still in progress but gave good results so far. Another thing that has to be done due to this scalability of tanks is that I have to sometime hide the rounded corners of the tank if another tank is on top of it so that the visuals are consistent.
UI
Following this iteration through the design of the visuals, I decided to work on the UI. UI for this type of game have to be intuitive and really good. My goal is to have as little tutorial as possible by having a very good UI design. I have still not yet reached that goal but I am getting closer. The main challenge is to give as much information as possible when the player needs it in a good way.
Such example is the fuel tank UI which is in the world space:
The reason for making it world space is that the player actively need to look at it while filling the rocket and sometime several of them are acting at the same time. The gauge helps to quickly see if the maximum volume have been reached.
Speaking of gauges, you might have seen that they were not present for the fuel tanks connected to the rocket. That decision was made because the UI is not world space and has much more little space to work with. However, as feedback will come in, that might still change.
At the right of the screen you can see the rocket UI with its stages
Once the UI reached a good quality I started working on the animations. Honestly, it did a massive difference and I even ended up pressing a button multiple times just to see the animation going on. Adding animations added a lot of depth.
Particle Effects
Particle effects are super important for Rocket Engineer. They allow to visually communicate the state of objects and provide a direct feedback to the player. A good example is the venting on the fuel tanks (as seen in previous screenshots). This communicates that the current state is either gaseous or really cold (LOX). Moreover, I wanted the venting to persist on the ground as we can see for different rockets launch so I tweaked it a bit to really get this effect. In the end it also adds a dramatic effect to your launch and makes the rocket look more alive.
Of course, another important particle effect is the engine’s plume. It is still work in progress but definitely makes the game look more alive. In the future, when more propellant combinations will be in game, the colour will varies depending on these. Here’s a look at the engine in action:
Finally another effect that was added were explosion, but it really is still in progress.
I’ll link a video at the end if you’re interested in seeing more.
Other Small Artistic Progess
Some other small things that are still in progress is that I started adding sounds which adds even more depth and button clicking addiction than animations and makes static fires sounds nice. For engines, I activated the spatialization of audio, meaning that the static fires will be heard more or less depending on how far you are from it, which I think sounds very nice.
Progress on the coding side
Prediction and timewarp are now much more reliable than before. Drag was added back and improve the experience significantly. The transfer from a celestial body to another caused significant bugs and is now working reliably. The fuel system was fully reworked to be more stable and static fires, which were full of bugs, are now much more stable.
Testing
A first version with these visuals improvements was sent to the testers and the feedback really helped to determine the priorities and know what was right... or wrong. Thanks a lot to them!
So... what’s next?
Currently, I am focusing on improving the audio experience and adding more variety to the engines parts to have a trailer ready. Around end of February or March I plan to publish a first public demo. Lot of work is still required but at the pace at which I’m progressing it is still very possible. That will allow to have the first “large-scale” feedback and first impressions.
Thanks for reading! If you haven’t done yet, wishlist Rocket Engineer, it really helps. If you want to follow the development more closely, join the discord server: https://discord.gg/4khHZyPaKp
Here’s a small gameplay video that was sent to the testers which might interest you. Note that it was a while ago and the bugs seen were fixed, it really is just there if you want to see more:
click here to see the video!