TL;DR of the Week
- The fiasco of trying to take on the task of creating a video for the game intro by storm
- Morale rehabilitation through bug fixes
- Death comes for your ships
- It’s never too late to learn something new
- Take a look at current deployed version s0.4.0/c0.3.3
A video for the game intro
This week started with an attempt to produce a video for the game intro — I decided to try building a full intro sequence using AI tools. After experimenting with fancy stuff like Veo 3.1, I quickly realized I’d go bankrupt before even figuring out how any of it works. So I moved on and assembled an open-source I2V setup using Wan2.2 14b and ComfyUI. At least with this I can experiment without dropping a hundred bucks per scene.
But, as it turns out, being a video content creator “from scratch” only works effortlessly in the advertisements for those services. Either that, or I’m simply too dumb for it at the moment A failure? Well… more like a localized defeat. The task turned out to be too big to brute-force. So for now it goes into “background mode”: I’ll poke at it from time to time, learn the tools, and gradually build experience. Sure, such a video could massively boost the game’s visuals, but it doesn’t block core development — so its priority shifts downward a bit.
Morale rehabilitation
And to recover morale after this little defeat, I went hunting for an easy win. Opened my long task list and started scanning it for something simple but instantly noticeable. I landed on a small UI bug: scrolling overlapping interface windows would cause them all to scroll at once. A tiny issue — but a perfect target for personal rehabilitation after the videomaking fiasco.
After fixing that and feeling the strength returning, I decided to keep going and tackled another small UI annoyance. The code editor window for game scripts would stay active even when the player opened the galaxy map or system navigation. Now everything behaves clean and tidy.
Death
After a couple such victories, I felt ready for something more serious. And my attention locked onto a task with a delightfully ominous name: “Death” Mwahahaha!
Yes — ship death. Previously, destruction was symbolic: the ship would just disappear for 10 seconds and then unfreeze. But now it was time to do it properly: actual destruction, stopping all running processes, incinerating cargo assets, cleaning up every resource allocated to the ship, and finally wiping it from the DB for good.
Then the related question appeared: if the player was piloting the ship, where do we put them? Leaving an electronic consciousness floating helplessly in space felt… inappropriate.
Here’s the new logic:
- When a ship dies, the player’s focus switches to their nearest available ship.
- So if the player runs his a small fleet, losing one ship doesn’t kick him out of the battle.
- If a ship is docked at a station, its station coordinates are used for calculation.
- If there are no ships in the current system but there are in others — the closest system (in light-years) is chosen.
In other words, on death the player is “teleported” to their nearest available ship.
And what if there are no ships left at all? Well… nothing yet. That’s the next task. I need to think through the game design here — should players even be allowed to end up with zero ships? Maybe corporations will provide a basic replacement via contract? Maybe another mechanic? That goes into refinement.
And of course, the explosion. A nice, juicy BOOM — death should look spectacular! Well… as spectacular as my art skills currently allow ))
Learn something new
Oh, and I also started a one-month course on virtual world design. My knowledge in this area is pretty chaotic and mostly based on devblogs from big studios plus my own background in designing complex information systems (but not for games). Hopefully this course will pour a more solid foundation under all of that.