We’ve got (some) graphics! They’re not here, they’re in the game! But if you want to take a quick look for what to expect, look at the patch notes, or at the new screenshots of the title page of the game!

In all honesty, I’m as surprised as you are they are already here! I expected it to take longer than a month. But LibGdx is a solid basis, so something as simple as static backgrounds really isn’t any trouble. But I’m still surprised I got the whole rework of the challenge layouts and the bloody stalks done as fast as I did. Some might be surprised that given how the game now looks I’m singling out the stalks, but in all honesty, they were the most difficult thing in all of this (apart from making the image itself, obviously). An additional element that was absolutely never considered in the previous layout manager that had to be shoehorned in there. And if there’s one piece of code in this game that smells, it’s that layout manager. It’s too chaotic to be really predictably modified, and at some point I’m probably going to throw it out and rewrite it from scratch. But for now, I got it to do what I wanted it to do.

Now it’s a menu, now it’s a world

The stalks are important, though. Background graphics are all well and good, but if there’s one major mistake that I see games making, especially those that also need to run on consoles, it’s that they don’t integrate their backgrounds with their menus enough. The result is… a menu, with a background. While done right, it becomes much more than that. It becomes an actual part of the game world. A representation thereof. If you want a one-v-one example of what I’m talking about, take a look at the old wing commander privateer, and then take a look at Rebel Galaxy Outlaws - which is an almost perfect privateer clone in almost all the aspects but this one. But privateer didn’t have menus. It had worlds you explored with the mouse cursor, you interacted with by a click. Rebel Galaxy, while having just as cool images for its menus… has menus, where you click on a menu item on the bottom of the screen, unrelated to the scene rendered above it. It’s such a minor detail, but in atmosphere, I find it’s such a huge difference.

Another game that comes to mind that demonstrated this beautifully was the old X-wing sim, where you felt like you were stationed on a calamari cruiser. Simply because the menu was a calamary cruiser, complete with animated doors when you clicked on them. It was functionally a menu, but atmospherically, it was part of the world.

Unfortunately, both privateer and X-wing had an advantage over orbital margins in this regard: Predictability! In this kind of menu, it’s very important that the options are always in the same place and that they are clearly visually distinguishable. That’s a bit difficult in orbital margins, where it’s never quite predictable what is currently on the menu and what isn’t. A purely visual style like these two examples would not work well. But there was another game in my childhood that had fascinated me mostly by an entirely unique world. I remember getting the shooty bits of the actual gameplay out of the way just to look at those fascinating menu backgrounds again, hoping that some more options on them would get unlocked that would tell me a bit more about this world.

That game was none other than Archimedian Dynasty, the first game in the Aquanox series before it was the Aquanox series, and it walked a middle ground: It had sweeping shots of the exteriors of its locations, with the menu options… just having stalks pointing to a part of the image, giving it somewhat the appearance of one of those site maps at a theme park or somesuch. It really wasn’t a big deal, but… it worked. It somehow successfully fooled my brain into imagining that this was more than a menu. That there was a world here in which things were happening, rather than a menu from which I chose options. And so, I knew I needed stalks in my game to root my dynamic menu options in the background, in the hopes it would fool your brain into not realizing that it’s just navigating a menu.

Citizen sleeper is a more recent example of this, from which orbital margins also borrows the mechanical concept of a prerolled dice pool. You might not have noticed it, but citizen sleeper is… really just a long, nested menu. But it’s a menu so well presented by visuals, sounds, music and text that your brain just doesn’t notice. That kind of deception is, in the end, what I’m hoping to achieve here, at least in the long run, at least to some degree. Am I at least partially succeeding? My playtests told me that I’m moving in the right direction, but ultimately it’s you who are the judge of that. It would be immensely helpful to have your feedback!

The trouble with space stations

Right now the backgrounds are just static. Nothing more was planned at this point, but some animation could be even more effective in creating the illusion that you’re doing more than navigating menus. However, there’s one big issue here: Most of these backgrounds will be space stations, with significant parts rotating. Slowly.

LibGdx doesn’t do 3d. One can make it do it, it’s based on OpenGl. But it would be quite some effort, especially for somebody that is woefully inexperienced with 3d engines. And even if I did… could I really get that look that I’m striving for? I doubt it. Putting in some 3d code is one thing. Writing efficient shaders that can get you a certain look in real-time… That’s quite another. I don’t think I would stand a chance in hell. And I’m not going to invest a lot of time and effort to make it look less nice. No, 3d is right out.

But 2d animation for these space stations sounds… impractical, might be the right term? Their centrifuges rotate slowly, usually between 1.5 to 2 rotations per minute. A fluent animation requires 24 frames per second. I might be able to get away with a bit less. But I need that for up to 120 seconds. That’s a lot of frames, and each frame will be somewhere between 0.5 and one megapixel in area. That is not a sprite animation. It’s a movie! And integrating movies into games… well, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. There’s a lot of platform-specific stuff involved, and could potentially get nasty.

I have some other tricks that might help. Decades ago, when RAM was still counted in Megabytes, I did a sort of sprite compression that was capable to mash the 6000x10000 pixel large sprite library that my friend threw at me into less than a megabyte of memory footprint, efficiently enough that I could still unpack individual frames into a texture surface in real time. The conditions are not the same, and the result of the algorithm wouldn’t be as good for these images, but it might still be something. But that’s another thing that’s going to take time. It’s not like that code still exists anywhere but in my head. Or at least the concepts on which it was written.

What I’m trying to say here, I guess, is: Don’t hold your breath for background animations. I’m not sure the game will ever have them.

Depots full of ideas

Another surprising thing happened during this month’s development. Do you remember that last month, I mentioned that I might throw in a couple of depots to make it easier and more profitable to get around, and to give some more planning options? Mostly placeholder locations, I said, without any lore or deeper meaning attached to them. Yeah, that didn’t happen… quite that way. Don’t get me wrong there are indeed three new locations, and they are small depots without many other services or anything. But oh boy, did this make a thread come lose that my brain couldn’t stop pulling on.

Obviously, to place the depots, I had to analyze the current connections to decide where they should go. That already started triggering some mild relocations. Then I put some depots into the places they seemed to make the most sense, which is not as easy as it sounds. See, there’s not that much worldbuilding yet, but since it mostly takes place in the real world, there’s actually already quite a lot to to influence these things. And then, once I had them, my brain wouldn’t stop thinking about why they were there, who would build and operate them, and from there it spiraled out, seeking connections to the bits of world that I already have, starting to integrate, but also to change it.

And of course, now that I had an actually functioning logistics network, I needed some way to let the player know about it. Among the ideas to facilitate this was a map, but not an orbital map, that wouldn’t help so much. No, it would have to be a network map. And once I had envisioned that, it suddenly turned into a kind of delta-v map, and suddenly I knew what the game absolutely needs to make navigation more intuitive and easier to handle. Quite frankly I was wondering how it was possible that I didn’t have this idea before now. It’s so obvious once it clicks in.

Be that as it may, there’s no delta-v map just yet. Sorry if you got your hopes up. I’m not that fast. No, what this whole hijacking of my brain resulted in was an entire codex section titled “Orbitography”, containing the whole background on how the orbits in the game (and, partly also in reality) are divided, the advantages and disadvantages of specific regions, why there are gaps in the network that are more difficult to overcome (spoiler: Because radiation belts), what the most common trade routes are in the network… In short, a whole lot. The planned codex entry for this month had been the big bust, but that’ll have to wait for the next release. Instead, you get a pretty thourough rundown of how space in the game is organized and how to use that to your advantage.

But that’s not the only ideas that lodged themselves in my mind while going about this. One problem was that the job generation is completely unaware of the network. I’ve put in some stop-gap solutions so you should still get decent jobs, but it’s not great right now. So that whole part is pending a rework. While I was doing that, I noticed how awfully convoluted delivery jobs currently are. Rate per DvT? It was a nice sentiment when I started, but I only ever look at how much a job pays and how much remass it requires to estimate how unprofitable it’s going to be, so there’s some streamlining waiting here. And why are jobs completing or failing so silently that you don’t eve notice half the time? There should be a summary, with numbers and rewarding/punishing sound effects and all, kinda like there is after a delve in darkest dungeon. That would make jobs much more satisfying to conclude, so there’s another idea I don’t have time for right now.

Full steam ahead!

So why don’t I have time for all these really good ideas? Well, there’s a plan in place… I have to get to spacecraft upgrading and an actual character progression system, that’s the main goals for this year. Along with the graphics, which are now largely implemented, but creating the images will take up to 20 hours out of my budget each month. And I also promised there’d be a new codex entry with every release, so that’s another thing. And then there’s this monthly summary, too, of course. I’m starting to feel spread a little thin with all this different stuff I need to do kind of in parallel.

But it’s good. Right now, it’s highly motivating. It’s much better to have good ideas with definite implementation goals in your backlog rather than worrysome issues. Having a ticket called “make navigation more user friendly, no idea why” is somewhat dreadful, and you don’t like thinking about it. Having a ticket called “Implement an interactive DV map”, on the other hand… that sounds like so much fun you want to get started with it right away and have to keep yourself in line and stick to the plan. If there’s one thing I can recommend to any developer, it’s this: If in any way possible, put solutions in your backlog, not problems. They’re much more fun to work towards!