Well it may be a new year but that doesn’t mean I’m going to scrap my once a month update schedule. As a result of this endeavour, a little over a month after the release of version 0.27.0 the 0.28.0 update is now out and ready for testing.

What’s New?

To begin with as this is a new year I thought it was time for a rather more substantial change and in this case that meant the games title. From the time when I first started developing this game I have called the project Stelestial Contact: Solar Storm which I have to admit is both a mouthful and not exactly easy to remember and by extension, market. As a result of this I’ve been trying to come up with a new name and have for now at least settled on the name Stellar Odyssey: Galaxy at War. I’ve no doubt I will probably need to change this name again at some point in the future considering there is already another game called Stellar Odyssey, but for now at least the new name will work and hopefully help me better cultivate an audience.

Now then beyond deciding on a new name for the project I also managed to get a rather substantial amount of actual work done for this update the first of which is a new headline feature, ground battles. While they are still in a very early prototyping stage I was surprisingly able to implement more than I expected to. Thanks I think to the work I did rewriting some of the backend code the past couple of updates which in turn allowed me to reuse much of the same logic I use for space battles.

All of this means that for this update you can; load into a ground based battle using the custom battle screen. Select your faction owned planetary outpost from which you can recruit a ground unit. After which you can then call them onto the battle map using the same reinforcement UI found in space battles. Once on the battle map said units can then be moved in much the same way as ships can in space battles, allowing you to destroy the enemies planetary outpost and thus win the battle. As you might have expected there is no AI yet, but for the work of a single update I am happy with the amount of progress I was able to make. Based on what I was able to complete in time for this update I expect to have functionally equivalent combat to that of space battles in around 2-3 updates/months time.

Other than the headline feature of ground combat I also took the time in this update to work on a long forgotten feature, that being the tutorials. For about a year now the tutorials have been in a pretty broken state thanks to my porting the game to Godot 4 and then never getting around to fixing the bugs and issues caused by said port. This however is no longer the case as I’m happy to say that after around a million bug fixes (actual number of fixes in changelog may differ) the tutorials are once again working and able to be played. I still class them as somewhat experimental and if you start doing your own thing instead of following the listed steps then I can’t promise that they won't completely break. But should you keep to the listed steps then you can now at least complete them in their entirety as I originally intended.

As with all my updates 0.28.0 also comes with a whole slew of other miscellaneous changes and fixes such as the unit and buildings guide button now being accessible from the tutorials screen instead of from the main menu. The option to keep the current battle setup screen settings so you don’t need to re-input everything when you want to quickly restart a custom battle and updates to both the objective and message boxes so they match the theme used by the rest of the games GUI’s.

Update 0.29.0

So then, with the 0.28.0 update behind me my thoughts now turn to the 0.29.0 update and what I’m hoping to achieve by the time of its release. For one, as you may have guessed I’m hoping to continue my work on ground combat by implementing a new kind of unit in the form of a squad of units. In theory I should be able to reuse some of the code and concepts I used for the space based squads of units and as such the implementation should be done fully in the 0.29.0 update.

Other than a new type of unit I’m also hoping to create and add a bunch of new building models so that each faction has a unique look for the planetary outpost and depending on how well that implementation goes I may or may not also add counterpart units to the human jeep for the rest of the factions. In addition to new units and building models I’m also hoping to do some work on the terrain used for ground battles. I’ve no idea yet what this could consist of but at the very least I want to update the terrain to support uneven surfaces, water, vegetation and some more realistic looking floor textures.

Beyond just the changes and updates to the ground combat 0.29.0 will also include some work on the campaign map in the form of alterations to how planets work and how you go about building on them. As I make use of the planetary outpost building in ground battles to determine which team wins and which team loses, it's kind of important for said outpost to be on all planets for the sake of ground combat. As a result for 0.29.0 I’m thinking of transforming it into a sort of government building which is needed before other buildings can be built on a planet and depending on how much I’m able to get done on the models I may or may not also add the same tier system used by space stations to it. Meaning you may need a specific tier of planetary outpost before you can build a given building on a planet.

Last but not least 0.29.0 will also include the usual collection of changes and bug fixes which can be found in all my updates. In this case though I will be paying specific attention to some of the visual aspects of the battle map such as the asteroid field, nebulas and the looks of both kinetic ammo and missiles. Additionally I’ll also do a small amount of work on the campaign map which I think could benefit from some more background models and props to make it feel less like a lifeless void.

Closing Thoughts

While the past couple of updates had felt smaller in size and scope than I would have liked, 0.28.0 turned out to be kind of the opposite. Did I get everything I wanted implemented completed in time for the updates release? Not exactly, but I did manage to make a lot more progress with the ground combat than I expected and as it was the last missing major feature I needed for the 1.0 release I’m over the moon with the amount of progress I was able to make.

So in an effort to keep up with that momentum I’ll end this devlog here. As always I’ll be back in around a month's time with the 0.29.0 update and hopefully a more complete implementation of ground battles.

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:

• Added support for loading ground based battle maps
• Added support for spawning planetary outposts in ground based battles
• Added support for recruiting ground units from planetary outposts in ground based battles
• Added support for calling reinforcement units into ground based battles
• Added support for moving units in ground based battles
• Added support for attacking targets in ground based battles
• Added a image for the 1 v 1 ground map to be used by the battle setup screen
• Updated the main menu and load screen to reflect the projects new name
• Updated the main menu disclaimer to reflect the new materials licence
• Updated the battle setup screen to support switching between space based and ground based battle maps
• Updated the battle setup screen to remember the previous settings when the screen is loaded a second time during the same game session
• Updated the battle setup screen to have a reset button to reset all inputs to their defaults
• Updated the settings screen to have tooltips explaining what each of the different settings do
• Updated the settings screen to have an option for keeping the current battle setup input values in memory
• Updated the message container used by tutorials on both the campaign and battle maps to match the new GUI theme
• Updated the objective container used by both the campaign and battle maps to match the new GUI theme
• Updated the reinforcement and unit containers on the battle GUI to have a shaded background
• Updated the guide page to be accessible from the tutorials screen instead of from the main menu
• Updated the pause GUI quit button to say quit instead of retreat when in either a tutorial or custom space battle
• Updated the planetary outpost building to have a destroyed animation which plays when it has been destroyed
• Updated the human jeep to have a destroyed animation which plays when it has been destroyed
• Updated the battle hazards (asteroid's and nebula's) on the battle map to highlight their effective area when the mouse is placed over them
• Removed the old popup style tutorials from both space battles and the campaign map
• Fixed a bug where the tutorials couldn't be loaded because of the new layout for how different scenes are loaded
• Fixed a bug where the space battle tutorial no longer highlighted the correct part of the GUI when explaining what each part of the GUI does
• Fixed a bug where the space battle tutorial no longer detected when a unit had reached its destination
• Fixed a bug where the space battle tutorial didn't generate a battle manager meaning the players UC income couldn't be updated
• Fixed a bug where the space battle tutorial didn't generate a enemy manager meaning there was no one for the player to attack
• Fixed a bug where the space battle tutorial didn't wait for the squad unit to be destroyed before advancing to the next stage
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map tutorial no longer highlighted the correct part of the GUI when explaining what each part of the GUI does
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map tutorial no longer detected camera inputs
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map tutorial no longer detected when a fleet was renamed
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map tutorial no longer had any options for building any buildings when a planet was selected
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map tutorial didn't load the correct planet information
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map tutorial didn't generate a enemy manager meaning there was no one for the player to attack
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map popup GUI's were displayed infront of the message container used for tutorials
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map popup GUI's remained visible when the pause GUI was shown
• Fixed a bug where the campaign map GUI would show more then one fleet as being selected at a time
• Fixed a bug where the game would fail to generate a new fleet or army when they had finished building
• Fixed a bug where the game would fail to fully merge two fleets or armies together when using the fleet manager if all units from the selected fleet or army were moved
• Fixed a bug where the research tree zoom level couldn't be changed if the mouse was placed over a research button instead of the background
• Fixed a bug where units wouldn't move into range of the next closest subsystem when attacking a target
• Fixed a bug where units were not all cleared from memory after a ground battle had conclude