Surface Caves

My worlds curved surfaces have so far been defined by a 2d graph curve.

This was quick to implement but a pain to edit, the gap between editing the curve and seeing the surface change made even small goals like creating a sand dune near the beach take way too long.

Getting ready for playtesting I decided to update the moons surface to test out different shapes and ideas like having half pipes for players to do tricks on. Here's an image of the half pipe area I'm testing on the moon.

This was taking a long time to edit, so it was time to upgrade how I define surfaces. There was also one critical flaw of the old curve system. It only let me define non overlapping curves. No overhangs, no caves.

I ended up coding in a Bezier curve system that not only let's me update the curves in place on the surface but also define any surface shape I'd like. As long as it's a continuous surface, I plan to improve this in future to support islands which would allow caves to have multiple exits.

This sped up my workflow 100x and let me begin adding caves you can fly through with your rocket.

These caves are a great way to raise the skill ceiling for flying rockets. Flying rockets has always been my favorite part of the game, so I'm excited to see how players will use these caves to do tricks and fly through them as fast as possible.

The pixel rocket I first developed is nimbler, smaller and honestly way more fun to fly. So I've also overhauled the artwork.

I love it, I kept the aesthetics I liked from the Pixel Rocket and was inspired on the redesign by the YF-23 tech demo fighter jet.

In other news. Playtest Keys will be issued very soon. The playtest is on Steam, I have the keys, I've switched to a self-hosted mailing list service. I'm just waiting on Amazon approving me to leave sandbox on their email service and keys will begin going out to anyone who subscribes to my newsletter.