Well it took a short while and there’s still quite a bit more for me to fix yet, but after 4 months of off and on porting work the 0.20.0 update is finally ready for release.

What’s New?

So normally at this point in the devlog I’d perhaps go over some of the new features, or talk about some of the changes I’ve made in the new version. However as you could probably already tell from the changelog below, there isn’t really anything new or even that much which has changed during the port to the new version of the engine.

Having said that, while I don’t have any specific changes to talk about you’ll probably still notice a few differences when comparing 0.20.0 to 0.19.2 and below (not counting the large amount of bugs currently present). For one I had to rebuild a lot of the UI and as a result some areas may look smaller and take up less of the screen than they did before. A possible trade off of this being that the entire UI now looks alot more crisp and no longer looks like it is being passed through a filter first.

Additionally you’ll probably also notice that some of the particle effects and materials look different. With particles in particular being much more vibrant than they were before, thanks in part to the new Vulkan renderer in Godot 4. Though on the flip side of this, the new renderer has also resulted in some artefacts and rendering glitches, this is most evident on the plated ship materials and the asteroids on the campaign map. Both of which now have a slight shimmer which wasn’t present in previous versions.

Before moving on I should also mention that for this update the save system has been disabled. Considering its somewhat broken state as a result of the porting work and the better understanding I now have with regards to building a save system (thanks to the work I did on my new game, Rise). I’ll be using this as an opportunity to revise the save system to use JSON instead of the built in Resource type. Not only will this allow more flexibility, but it should also prevent me having to rewrite the save system should changes be made to the aforementioned Resource type in the future.

Update 0.20.1

Though I’ve reached the point where Stelestial Contact: Solar Storm is stable enough to not crash on startup or while playing most of the currently implemented game loop. There are still a number of areas which need more work, both to bring them up to par with where they were before the porting process and to refine them to a point I would be happy with.

With this in mind the next planned update will not be 0.21.0 but will instead be 0.20.1 with a .2 and .3 likely to follow. It took longer than I would have liked (as seems to always be the case) but now that I once again have a (somewhat)stable platform to work from I think it’s the perfect time to take a step back from developing new features and content and instead focus on refining and perfecting what’s already there.

To that end the next few updates will likely be smaller with the majority of my dev time focused on working on a small handful of features, compared to the large array of additions and changes I normally make. I have no idea how long this kind of thing will take but at the very least it will continue until I feel confident enough to actually start advertising and promoting Stelestial Contact: Solar Storm instead of just posting publicly available builds.

Closing Thoughts

With that, it’s once again time for me to end another devlog and get to work on the first polishing update. As a quick aside, if you’re interested in seeing what I worked on besides porting this game for the past 4 months then feel free to check out my other game, Rise.

As always if you have any questions or queries then don’t hesitate to ask and similarly if you have any feedback for existing systems. Or indeed if you have any ideas, features or changes you would like to see implemented then also don’t hesitate to let me know.

As with all of my updates a full list of the changes made can be found in game, with the changes and additions pertaining to this update listed below:

• Ported the game to Godot 4