Across The Galaxy

Testing Your Luck: Avoiding Bugs in Procedural Generators

I’ve been cleaning up the star system generator and adding little features here and there. I built the original version “write only” — I just kept adding code until it worked. As you might expect, this resulted in some…

Building the System Map: 2016–10–12 Dev Blog

Previously, I wrote that I was working on procedural (scientifically-based!) star system generation. That work is (almost) done, and so now I’m working on the star system overview / map.

System Generation is Very Close: Dev Blog 2016–09–19

I finished up an initial draft of the physically-based system generator over the weekend. It appears to work:

Stories and the Galactic Guide (Update 2017–01–25)

It’s been awhile since the last update. I’ve been just focused on getting some core engine work done, and it is the kind of stuff that doesn’t show well until it is “done” (when you make games, nothing is ever 100% done). I’ve finished that…

Grid Spiral Search Formula

For Across the Galaxy, I looked for a function that will “find the closest open space on a grid in any direction.” It took some google-fu to find it, so I’ll document it here and save someone else (or future me!) some work.

Across The Galaxy Dev Update 2017–08–01

It’s been a long time. Too long, friend.

Development Update 2017–08–01: Galaxy Generation, Planetary Guide, and More

Making Skyboxes Directly in Unity

Here’s how you can create skybox assets directly in Unity.

All the tutorials I could find were actually for creating skyboxes in Blender and importing them to Unity. They all follow the same rough procedure — use the blender vertex painting…

Walking the coastline: why adding multiplayer to No Man’s Sky is no stroll on the beach.

In case you missed it while it was making the rounds on “games twitter”, there was a widely circulated screen cap from a player asserting that Hello Games could have added…

Dev Blog 2016–09–15: System Generation

I wanted to do a quick update on what I’ve been working on.

The main push right now is the “system generator,” which is the bit of the game that makes randomized star systems for you to visit.