Retrospective

The first commit to the Stellar Cartographer repository was on the 7th of June 2024, roughly seven months ago; I am quite proud of what I have managed to accomplish in those seven months, within 228 commits and 151 completed project board cards. Stellar Cartographer is my first project which follows pretty much all Godot best practices, e.g. the concept of 'signal up call down' - because of this, I feel like the games base is rigid, and that I will easily be able to expand on it in the future. I enjoyed tinkering with systems that I wouldn't usually integrate into my games in order to build Stellar Cartographer, e.g. star system procedural generation, the branching dialogue system, and the use of embedded windows. Overall, I am happy with the progress and excited to continue developing the project.

What to Expect

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.

The hope is that a majority of the crashes I've encountered during testing are a result of me modifying memory during runtime, but I would not disregard the prospect of crashes - save often. There shouldn't be too many bugs. 

Due to all of this, the game files (on both Windows and MacOS) contain a debug terminal. Additionally, two debug keybindings have been left in - N to reveal all bodies in the current star system, and B to reveal all wormholes in the current star system - I cannot think of a legitimate reason for their use, as all star systems SHOULD be beatable in a reasonable timeframe, so use discretion.  

Last Devlog Goals

I managed to achieve a majority of the tasks planned in 'A Tutorial, Polish & Space Coral'. I added mini tutorials for modules bought from ports (plus module descriptions within ports), export presets, an options menu, and smarter wormhole traversal generation. I failed to add visual improvements for all menus still sporting the default Godot theme, but have made small steps towards building a master UI theme as a fix. I also failed to add more in-game random discoveries, which is a running trend. 

What Next

I would like to focus on visual improvements and code re-structuring for a while, rather than adding completely new features. I think I have developed the game too fast, and have left many aspects of it behind. I would also like to ACTUALLY add more content via dialogue. The following is a few main objectives which come to mind:

1. Visual improvements for anything with the default Godot theme.
   
2. Wormhole traversal context enhancement - e.g, visual improvements to portray danger.
3. Consolidation of how audio is played, probably with a class dedicated specifically to managing audio.
4. Improvements to station upgrade handling.
5. More body names (especially for wormholes) plus different name schemes for entire systems.
6. Finishing writing 'The Researcher' random event.
7. Graphics options in settings. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this.