I can't believe we're a week into the countdown already! Today I've been polishing and refining the random colour palette generation for the planet-gen, and largely just making sure that it doesn't spit out absurd-looking planets. When you give it free rein to roll the dice as it sees fit, you end up with some truly awful results like this:
The best solution I've found so far is to define a number of colour schemes that work well, and then randomly tweak the numbers on those specific themes within set boundaries. For example, here are a few random results from the "Dark mountains with white plains" colour scheme:
As you can see, you can still generate a lot of random variation despite working within some value restraints. I'll probably make about a dozen colour schemes to begin with, but really we can just keep adding as many as we want over time for ever-increasing planet variation.
Hopefully, I'll be able to get those done within a reasonable amount of time tonight because the clock is ticking away rapidly and I've got an entire demo to finish :)