Resources!

After a busy year of school, I’ve finally got time to bring attention to another update. With the changes to the style of the game, the name “Voxilius” didn’t seem fitting. Our new working name is going to be “Star Settler” for the time being. Possibly for the rest of development. But now, onto the update details!

A few major things happened in this update, and I couldn’t be happier with the results!

First and foremost, trees now generate with the world! This has been something I’ve wanted to get done for a really long time but have not had the time or ideas to accomplish it. Thousands of trees can now appear on screen with fairly minimal impact to frame rate. With this, I have also added a few different tree and foliage models; two of which can be seen in the image above (Oak and Pine). They also all work from the same texture and can change palettes easily.

Next up is similar to trees; world objects and other resources. The fancy purple crystal with the base is the world core. It spins, but not in the image. This is where you will spawn and start your base. You must defend this with your life, since if it gets destroyed you will lose your planet to the opposition. What you may also see in the image above is an orange crystal. That is a copper crystal. Crystals are the primary source of metals for Star Settler, spawning all around the worlds ready to be harvested. There are many different crystal types, each with varying rarities. In the future there may be types specific to certain world types. Currently the only type that is specific to certain parts of the world is salt, which only spawns in deserts on salt flats.

The final major update is water! As you may have seen in the picture, water is a lot less flat than it used to be. It now reflects sunlight and moves around!

All-in-all I’m incredibly surprised with how this game is going so far, and how well it performs in Unity. Next up is character models and expanding the RTS engine further. Currently it has a future but it doesn’t necessarily function how one would expect.