Starlight Path - Dev blog #1

"Puzzle your way across star systems as a courier, a courier of lovers in need of reuniting."

Welcome all, to my new project. Starlight Path, a puzzle game set in space spanning across the universe.

This project came about from a couple of doodles in my bullet journal, coupled with wanting to write a selection of short stories to go with it.

I'd quickly done a prototype of the game-play mechanics, tested it to see how well it could potentially play and started moving it over soon after. It wasn't long until I'd realised that I needed to add a level editor to the project, initially I decided to have it as an internal editor until I had the thought that players may want to be able to make their own levels to share.

The above tweet is the start of the Dev Thread for Starlight Path, upon completing a specific feature I'd add a small video or images to the thread. As you'll see reading through it, there have been some changes in how the game plays and different limits in the game itself.

Firstly, the fuel usage was going to be a percentage, now though it's blocks something along the lines of fuel cells. This was to make it easier to calculate the fuel usage of something like one fuel cell per planet move.

Secondly, the stories which initially played out as the game was played have been moved to the start and end of the levels. Mainly so the player can focus on the game itself rather than having too much going on at once.

More recently things have been starting to get linked together, it's now possible to load pre-made levels which are currently limited to 15. That limit may increase as development progresses.

As you can see from the tweets below, the title screen is a bit more interact-able, both with the options menu and being able to select plus load a level.

My next piece of work will be adding a similar level selection menu to the level editor and make sure the level loading code works with it.

Outside of that, it's going to be bug fixing/feature adding in the level editor and then moving on to the sound effects and the first round of background tracks.

For the moment that's all from me, I'm going to try and make this a monthly post, while there's progress on this project.

If you want to support this project (and myself) in some way before I put the game up for alpha testing, then feel free to chuck me a Ko-fi, I'd very much appreciate it.

Anyway, that's me done for the day, have a good one where ever you are.