I’ve made some progress on Chiron Gate this month. Most visibly, I’ve added icons to the system view to represent the planet traits you’ve discovered, and I’ve revised the selection of ship upgrades that can reveal them.
Here’s what the system view looks like with all the scanner upgrades unlocked:
From left to right, the icons on the highlighted planet represent moderate temperature (i.e. the range at which water is liquid), an icy surface, moderate gravity, thick atmosphere, liquid water, and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. (In the game you can hover over any icon to get a tooltip saying what it means.)
Most of the icons are from game-icons.net, but some of them I modified or created myself using Inkscape. For example, the icons I’m using for very high and very low temperatures are from game-icons, while the ones for intermediate temperatures are my edits. The icons for atmospheric pressure and composition are all mine, and I’m aware that they look pretty rough compared to the others, but for this month I didn’t want the quest for the perfect icon to distract me from getting a full set of icons into the game.
(Also, I’ll add code to make sure they always appear in a consistent order–right now they appear in the order the planet generation code adds them, which is usually sensible but can lead to oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres appearing in an inconsistent place.)
The traits represented by icons are revealed either by visiting the planet, or by purchasing the relevant scanner upgrade. I’ve removed a few of the scanners as I thought there were too many, and I’ve added an icon for each of the remaining ones. This screenshot shows most of them:
In another improvement from previous months, all the ship upgrades now do something. Scanners reveal things in system or universe view, while others stop certain events from happening or give a bonus to certain skill checks. The whole life support mechanic is unlocked by buying the life support upgrade, without it crew members who would go on life support just die.
This month I’ve also made a lot of improvements to the planet generation code and the description code. The game now generates far fewer impossible planets such as gas giants with oceans or tiny asteroids with thick atmospheres.
I’ve also rewritten the description code. I’ve added some more flavour in places (such as the first sentence describing the ship resting on the planet’s surface differently depending on its terrain), but most of the work here was under-the-hood refactoring that doesn’t much change the output but will make it easier to work with as I add more content.
My plan for next month involves adding more stuff: more planet traits to discover, and more events to trigger when you explore them. And maybe even some more icons!