We've been working on lots of boring things these last 2 weeks, but there are finally some screenshots that we can show.
We realize that we've been very quiet on social media, but there's a balance between gaining popularity and actually making Starmancer.
New Hairstyles
Many of you get to design a colonist and add it to the game. We're currently working on the designer, but we're not sure when it will be finished.
Our plan is to put it on our website where anyone can use it. Everyone will be able to create a colonist, but only those with the proper reward will be able to submit their colonist to the game.
Victor designed a bunch of new hairstyles for the designer. All of the hair styles share the same color options, so there's a lot of variety.
Saving
Tyler and Evan have been working on implementing saving. We finished the first pass, and you can now save and load placed objects (floors, walls, doors, etc). You can't save colonists yet.
Here's an ugly gif to demonstrate the saving:
Internally, we abstracted this quite a bit.
Our goal is to make the save files very easy to edit. Right now everything is stored in plaintext xml. We might change this later, if it doesn't stay feasible with extremely large stations.
Basically, we don't intend on deliberately obscuring our save format, but we might have to for performance.
In case you're interested, this is what the save file actually looks like:
Agents are what we call the placed objects (we would call them "GameObjects" but Unity already uses that term).
You can see that it's fairly easy to modify any component on an Agent.
We're also generating a library of all Sprites, Textures, Materials, Agents, and Prefabs so that they can easily be referenced in a file. You could easily change the floor blueprint so that it places a door instead (I don't know why you would do this, but you can).
Here is the file that contains all of the Agent references:
You'll notice that we haven't implemented saving for all of the components in the game yet, but that's what we're currently working on.
We're also going to simplify the names before release. Right now they're literally the c# class names (with namespace).
Upcoming
In the next few weeks we'll be releasing the Colonist Designer and finishing up saving. We'll then move on to the User Interface.
Thanks for reading.
If you have any questions direct them to Evan in the Discord (this link should work).
