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I have been mostly focusing on the combat system this week.

I have added several improvements to the Target Gui, such as more information, and background highlighting.

I have also improved the players scanning tool to make it easier for them to find important objects in the world, and I fixed some bugs related to the persistence system.

I have also been working on adding quite a few new weapons to the game. These are quite simple visually, but should add more variety and depth to the gameplay.

The enemy AI has also been slightly improved, and I have more improvements to work on later, when I have finished adding the rest of the weapons.

The weapon scripts have not got support for both “spread” fire (Shotguns, etc) and “automatic” fire. These options can be turned on and off easily for each weapon.

In future, I could allow for fire selection and alternate fire modes, etc. The problem with doing this now is that the right click button is already being used for interacting with the environment, so I would need to break convention and use a different key for fire mode selection.

I have added some new features to the story generator and dialog system for SpiritusAstrum.

It is not possible to have certain “locked” dialog branches that can then be unlocked as a result of the players actions. These dialog branches can also trigger in-game events, other dialog options, etc.

I have also added a simple text GUI to the game to allow the player to determine the stats of enemies that they are pointing at.

Currently, this GUI is only displayed when the user right-clicks on a target. This was done for immersion purposes, I want to keep the main screen as clean as possible. In future, I may add the option to always display the GUI.

In addition I have improved the combat system and random NPC spawning system in the game to allow enemies to spawn in more places. This means that random objects that previously could only contain friendly NPCs, can now also contain enemies too.

I have also tested and fixed some other minor issues with the AI system.

There is still quite a bit of work to do with improving the combat system, it still feels quite clunky. I may add more randomness to the AI’s stats, and possibly add different damage types, etc, etc, in the future.

Finally, I have discovered an asset HERE that allows LLM’s to be loaded into unity.

This functionality could open up powerful new possibilities for my project, particularly for NPC dialog, and random quests, etc, etc.

This is something that I intend to experiment with in the future.

This week, I conducted a full retest of the new story for Spiritus Astrum.

There were some issues found, but these were all minor.

I made some minor improvements to the story system, including better support for saving and loading, and persistence, etc.

There were also other minor issues that I had that were also fixed.

One of the more serious issues that I found was a problem with the code that generated a unique ID for each objective. This was not storing it’s values persistently, so id’s were being duplicated between runs (Ie, starting at 0 every time the game would resume), which caused issues with logging and viewing the quests. This has now been fixed.

I also finalised the changes and improvements to the PGD website.

Finally, I made several improvements to the story sequences in the game.

The main problem now is that the story may be too short. I may need to add more gameplay elements to it.

I also need to add more story elements, and possibly more interactive features to aid in storytelling?

I will look at these issues next week.

This week, the main goal was to finish working on adding the new features to the story. This has now been done.

I have added the ability for multiple vehicles to appear during the story events, however, even though Spiritus Astrum has support for multiple vehicles at this point, but this support has not been properly tested. It does work, but it is not quite ready for release, and so I will probably stick to just one controllable shuttle, rover, ship, etc, for the moment.

I have also added improvements to the navigations and beacons/markers systems in the game. It is now easier to track and find items and objectives, etc.

It is also possible for the player to convert harvested minerals into energy (In addition to items, etc), which they can then use to craft advanced items.

I have also made some changes to the ending of the most recent story, to allow the player to continue on playing if they choose to. In the future, it may be possible for the player to play multiple stories in a row, effectively choosing their own endings, etc.

Finally, I have updated and improved my website. This is not 100% done yet, there may still be some slight issues, but I am quite happy with the results.

I have added support for more advanced scanning, and improved the navigation beacons, etc, in the game.

I have also been working on improving procedural objects, etc, to allow for easier and more powerful integration into the story system.

I am relatively close to finishing the improvements to the new story. At that point, I want to test it much more extensively, and then add AI dialog, etc.

I can then work on the next main story quest.

It is now possible for the player to craft more advanced objects and buildings by converting harvested items and minerals directly into energy.

This basically unlocks a new “advanced” tier of constructable objects.

The next goal is to improve the scanning system so that I can not only detect cities that have not paged in yet but actually place beacons, etc, at their location to guide players.

This should not be too difficult.

I am still working on the new story.

I am adding more new, more complex elements to it, which require improvements to the story generator and supporting mechanics.

This should allow for the static and dynamic story generators to be substantially improved in the future, as more and more elements are added.

So far, these new features are progressing well.

The new story is going quite well.

I have added quite a few new events to it, and some new features, etc, too.

I am hoping that the basic building blocks of the story will be done in the next week or so, and I can then focus on adding the dialog, art, and other improvements and features.

There are still some bugs and issues, and a lot of testing to do, but I am making good progress.

I have made several improvements and additions to the story, in addition to some minor improvements to the core mechanics of the game as well.

I have improved the “scanning” system so that more information can be obtained from planets in systems that the player has not visited.

This is extremely important, because the procedural story system uses this scaning feature to determine where to send the player next.

I have also modified and improved the ground cover for non-earthlike worlds.

I am now working on the details for the second story campaign.

I am adding a lot more content, objectives, etc, and testing these.

The artwork is relatively basic for the moment, but I can improve this later.

The goal is for each of the campaigns in the game to have about 3-5 hours of gameplay.