Dev Update 2021-12-10: Radial Menu, VFX, Controller Support and more

10 Dec 2021Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Greetings, Space Travelers!

It has been over a month since the last development update, and there are a bunch of changes and improvements that happened to Stardeus during the time.

The main areas of focus were:

UI / UX improvements
Controller support (mainly for Steam Deck)
Graphics and Visual effects
Performance with large maps
Code refactoring

Radial Menu

If you tried the demo or alpha builds, you may remember a quirky bottom menu that expanded like a tree and was notoriously difficult to navigate. That menu was removed without a trace, and replaced with a much more intuitive radial menu that can be invoked by clicking the right mouse button anywhere. It is, of course, controller friendly, which brings us to the next subject.

Controller and Steam Deck support

The addition of the Radial menu gave me a strong push to go for a complete rework of controller support. Now Stardeus has first class controller support, complete with input rebinding and button glyphs. I managed to play for hours without even thinking about reaching for a mouse, and I am certain that Stardeus will be very enjoyable on the Steam Deck!

Graphics and VFX

Since the beginning of the project, I have always put gameplay and mechanics above graphics and visual appeal. I would rather create more content and deeper mechanics than spend a significant part of the time creating animations, but don’t get me wrong, I want Stardeus to look and feel great. This is why I have recently shifted my focus to spice things up with beautiful visual effects. They are easy to create, they run on GPU, and the game doesn’t feel that static anymore. Lights will blink, broken devices will emit sparks, you will see oxygen leaks and all devices will have some particle effects when they operate, so it’s easy to tell what’s on and what’s off. I believe it’s a great way to bring the visuals alive without spending months on creating individual animations for everything.

The most noticeable change to visual effects is the new electricity grid lines. They look gorgeous, and the arch layout shows connections in a much more understandable 3D-like way.

To compare how far the game went in terms of visuals, here is how things used to look a bit over a year ago, on September 2020:

So yes, I do believe graphics are important, or it would still look this way today.

More interesting starting conditions

I’ve read through tons of your feedback that was collected from demo and alpha playtesting forms, and one of the things that were mentioned quite often was a slow and boring start. To make the early game more exciting, the main scenario will have a bunch of damaged devices and various items scattered across the wreckage. You can repair and relocate those devices to get yourself up to speed a little faster.

Performance with large maps

You might think that all the new visual effects would give performance a hit, but on the contrary, it’s the opposite! The main reason for this is that the project migrated from Unity’s built-in (a.k.a legacy) renderer to their new Universal Rendering Pipeline, which opened up a couple of very powerful tools - VFX and Shader graphs. The VFX graph is something of a technological marvel, and, for example, the new electricity grid displaying 5000 connections does not have any noticeable FPS drop. Before the VFX graph, when it was rendered with lines, displaying 5000 connections would have a significant performance penalty even on high tier GPUs. Now you can do it on a laptop with an Intel HD graphics card.

Code refactoring and reducing technical debt

With Stardeus development I am going for a long haul, and I did my best to keep everything very tight since the very beginning of the project. But inevitably, over nearly two years of development, some bad decisions were made, and the architecture had its fair share of ugly corners.

The project codebase grew to 112K+ lines (excluding external libraries), which is not small for a solo developer to handle, so I started rewriting parts that I wasn’t happy with. So far it’s going great, and I am getting more and more happy with the state of the overall project codebase. It is becoming more flexible, easier to work with, and more performant.

Since focus is now put on visuals, I am currently reworking the game’s rendering system, which was pretty slow when it had to display several thousands of sprites at the same time. Now I can tell that the refactored system will be able to render tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of objects orders of magnitude faster than before, thanks to the access to Unity’s new rendering pipeline tools and to the things I learned over the last couple of years.

Happy upcoming 2022!

This is the last development update this year, and I hope you all are having a great time, and that 2022 will be your best year ever! Last couple of years were really hard on everyone in many aspects, so let's stay strong and persevere!

And let me end with a couple of little things I added to make the game put a smile on your face: