Stellar Cartographer

A work-in-progress space exploration game which seeks to present a somewhat simple, puzzle-like experience akin to most space exploration games, whilst presenting a variety of planets to discover, anomalies to analyse, and events to experience. 

From the alpha release devlog: "An alpha release is an important milestone, but I do not wish to present the game as more than it currently is. Right now, it is more of a foundation - everything works, but the intrigue to keep the player engaged is not quite there yet. I estimate that it has about thirty minutes to an hour of playtime before it becomes dry (not including the tutorial) - beating the game takes two hours, so I definitely have work to do."

Current development outlook: I'd like to release version 1.0.0.0 before the end of 2025, as significant changes in my life around that time might leave the continued development of this project in question. In order to achieve this, I will have to lean heavily into creating dialogue and gameplay, and creating systems and practices to better optimise writing dialogue.

Change-log (0.2.0.0):

• Added a 'total score' counter, which is used to rank the players performance at the end of a run.
• Added a system for managing achievements (twelve added in this update).
• Added a system to sequentially show achievements in banner form when unlocked.
• Added a list of locked and unlocked achievements, accessible from the main menu.
• Fixed 'comparison operators' (greater than, less or equal than, etc) in dialogue management.
• Sub-bodies (moons) radius and mass may now only be 0.75x the radius and mass of their host.
• Removed 'Terrestrial' and 'Silicate' planets.
• Added 'Iron', 'Nickel', 'Sulfur' and 'Coreless' planets to replace now defunct 'Terrestrial' and 'Silicate' planets.
• A planets type is now given tree access during planetary anomaly dialogue.
• Added a new dialogue query type: 'FULL_BEST'.
• Rule criteria values which are 'false', and do not have a corresponding key within an incoming query, will now match.
• Added two new star-system naming schemes: 'TREK' (use of roman numerals), and 'SCIENTIFIC' (gibberish inspired by real astronomical naming schemes).
• The player can now use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out on the system map.
• Replaced a long standing placeholder in the station UI.
• Barycenter Visualizer blips are now darker when out of range of the players current LIDAR arc length.
• Visual improvements to the main menu and stats (end of run) menu. 
• Added a dialogue interaction for disabled (red) wormholes. 
• Added custom tooltips for different parts of the UI, as players routinely missed the default tooltips.
• Body names are now no longer passed through the String capitalize method when being shown in-game.
• Added a cool looking 'typing' effect for dialogue text as its being appended.
• Scenes are now loaded in a seperate thread.
• Added a loading screen with a progress bar, visible while scenes are being loaded.

Change-log (0.2.0.1):

• Migration to Godot 4.3 for editor improvements and sweet performance increases. 
• Fixed several graphics related bugs caused by the migration to Godot 4.3.