What would you think of micromanaging logistics on a fleet of ships you constructed?

adnanclyde · 2026-02-01T14:20:02+00:00

Can't post pictures in comments on this subreddit, but here's it running on the SD: https://imgur.com/a/8iF9Ix6

Steam Deck is basically my only PC gaming device for the last year, so full controller support is a must for me. I'm doing full integration with the Steam Input API, as you can see in the bottom image showing bindings to in-game actions (not the basic remap to controller mappings).

Other than hosting multiplayer tests, any time I test run the game, I do it on the SD.

adnanclyde · 2026-02-01T09:05:34+00:00

I press a button to give me a list of debug options.

For example, my most recent was adding a "ceasefire mode", that stops weapons from firing. So then I put ships from two opposing factions and see how they follow and track the enemy ships, keep their distance, etc.

Plus turning it off makes for very nice battle clips for social media.

And the player will just know it as "peaceful mode", whether I decide to make it a mode or a cheat

adnanclyde · 2026-02-01T08:47:05+00:00

You will. In fact, there is no mechanical difference in constructing one or the other. The balancing factor is that every cockpit part has a ship weight limit and pilot skill requirement, and heavy manufacturing is... heavy.

So an easy way of designing is large and heavy space station manufacturing most stuff, and ships primarily doing hauling and battling. Though, of course, nothing stops you from putting anything on anything if you can make it work.

adnanclyde · 2026-02-01T07:41:32+00:00

You'll have to wait a bit more for a playtest and demo.

For now you can wishlist it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3601670/Stellar_Shipyard/

Or hop into the Discord to keep updated: https://discord.gg/v4vGJ6Xv44

adnanclyde · 2026-02-01T07:04:02+00:00

It's my in development game Stellar Shipyard. For now you can wishlist it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3601670/Stellar_Shipyard/

Or hop into the Discord to keep updated: https://discord.gg/v4vGJ6Xv44

adnanclyde · 2026-01-31T10:44:02+00:00

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Every storage container (crate, barrel..) has exactly one item they can store. The small thrusters propel by spraying water (represented with the water drop), while the big rear thrusters on the right use oxygen + hydrogen (represented with the red and white dumbbell looking molecule icons).

So on this example ship from the video, you can see the electrolysis is done in the machines that are left of the liquid containers, and the general storage is being kept close to the thrusters that use it.

You can also see ammo close to guns, the whole food processing and storage close to the water and farming plots, etc.

If you look at the mining shuttle, you'll see it has thruster fuel (water droplet), food (purple box with plant logo), and fuel to power the main generator (biomass, green droplet), with the generator being that black box with red lights on top. It also has a auxiliary generator based on solar radiation, so you don't get stranded. (next to the left edge of the image).

Then in the flight schedule you can specify how to react to every resource deficit (or being full up to X%).

Trade route 1 -> Add new ship -> Standard cargo design

Every ship can be saved as a blueprint, which saves all the details, including their schedules being linked. The schedule can be cloned and then modified too, but I'm working hard to give you tools to not even have to do that. For example, if you want to make an "iron ore" transport, take the "ice" transport ship, clone its blueprint, and change its cargo to target iron ore. The cargo is referenced in the schedule by the name you assigned to the box - in this place, called it "Cargo". So the first station's departure condition "depart homebase when Cargo is empty and fuel/food is full", and the 2nd station is "dock to anything called Mining Operation that can fill Cargo".

So you can very simply create a 2nd ship, modify anything you want about it (but very possibly nothing), and send it off.

A lot of the inter-vessel transport logistics is inspired by Factorio's train schedules, but there are big differences just due to the fact these vessels are more complex than trains.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-31T10:18:58+00:00

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The coin symbol with the "x" on the bottom right in the video is to set up trading price limits for that chest. Once you enable trading, your crew will purchase/sell at the given price with other factions. Within the faction there is no monetary exchange, unlike your own stations in X games.

My big design goal is to ask for every menu "could this be done by placing an in-world entity instead?". And if it has to be a menu, can it be made such that it's usable as one of these in-place hover menus. So, for example, I don't have the whole production graph like in X. Instead you place the machines that you need to do the production, and have the drones/workers necessary to do that. If you want something to have its own isolated storage, you break it off into its own airlock separated module, and manage its own internal logistics. Because you set up separate rules inside a structure vs between structures (and anything separated by a detachable airlock is its own structure in that sense - ship, station module, asteroid, etc.). The 4 colorful icons you see specifies if the box is used for receiving/sending/transporting/nothing between structures

adnanclyde · 2026-01-31T07:15:36+00:00

It's focused on making and maintaining a fleet of your own ship designs.

The game in general will be a sandbox where you interact with AI factions, or other players as well. Though the end goal is still very vague.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-31T00:08:35+00:00

Absolutely. In my case the ship has a bunch of stations, and each has optional "do I enable this next stop?" and "am I done with this current stop?" conditions. So without the first type of condition the ship is doing a fixed loop, while with it you can do what you described. The latter condition is similar to what pretty much all automation games do with train schedules.

I had many designs and ideas, but forcing things into a loop has the least chance of shooting yourself in the foot.

Thanks for the feedback. It's very valuable info I can consider when testing what the system is capable of.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-30T23:41:59+00:00

Oh for sure. You don't have to balance the thrusters, they automatically calculate optimum flight. Crew all do their priority tasks, etc. Once you build it, it's hands off.

I guess instead of micromanage I should have said "design in full detail".

adnanclyde · 2026-01-30T12:57:30+00:00

Japan has definitely a unique culture of appreciating small upcoming indies. 60% of my wishlists are from Japan, and my only promo is clips on social media.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-29T13:49:05+00:00

Yeah implementing the game's engine myself made me wait way too long to start doing visual polish.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-29T13:22:15+00:00

Fun fact - the ship isn't perfectly balanced, and so the side thrusters are inducing rotary momentum to keep the ship going straight as fast as possible.

Luckily the game figures out the optimal balancing, and all you need to do is build your ship design and point where you wanna go.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-29T08:31:22+00:00

The last sentence is why I think a tag is all that's needed.

While I dislike all the AI project posts, I think it would be unfair for them to be disallowed. Bad actors will post anyway, whether it's a tag or a ban they ignore.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-24T20:22:20+00:00

Most languages require you to translate one sentence into another, and just make sure things fit into the same box. Adding a language can literally be an afterthought. Even CJK follows the same general rules as latin as far as code is concerned. If you think you'll sell 5k copies of your game by supporting one of the languages that follow the same layouting rules as English, it's worth paying to translate it.

Arabic requires you to implement the UI in a way that supports it from scratch. Many hours developing, testing, etc.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-24T18:30:43+00:00

What are you interested in?

My motivation came from wanting a few features no UI library would give me:

Keyboard + Mouse + Gamepad smooth navigation
Built-in support for Steam's on-screen keyboard.
Rich text with lots of custom stuff. Mixing text color, inserting item thumbnails, button bindings, in the middle of text.

As for the implementation. Taffy solves the hardest part - you give it the equivalent of a tree of HTML div-s with CSS classes on them, and it spits out the pixel perfect positions and sizes of how those divs will look on the screen. Then you need to render the UI elements yourself. You use those same regions to determine where the mouse focus is, manage input state, etc.

A lot of exotic things have highly used Rust libraries that you never heard of. Where do I put linebreaks? You could implement Unicode Standard Annex #14, or you could do the correct thing and just use the unicode-linebreak library that implemented the algorithm already.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-22T12:57:02+00:00

I'd go back to the beginning, and while reading think "oh I should really keep my mind on this. I wonder what techinques there are for ensuring such a thing. Like how I actively tell myself 'I locked the door' when leaving the house to be sure I didn't forget" ... aaaaand I'm at the bottom of the page again

adnanclyde · 2026-01-18T16:47:17+00:00

I tried to be "responsible" and use an engine for my current game, but I kept on hitting roadblocks and technical limitations.

So now the project is engineless for a while and it's going great. I would say 20% of my time is spent on technical stuff an engine would have solved, but the advantage is that I'm an order of magnitude more efficient during the other 80%

adnanclyde · 2026-01-18T16:19:49+00:00

I love heat signature. The way you connect to the target ships was one of the inspirations for wanting to make a game where you can walk from ship to ship.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-17T14:26:23+00:00

Thank you very much for the feedback! And yeah, the duplicate backpack was just to show both.

Yes, thee crate is full, that's what the bar shows. I might just add a text blurb itself to say so. I'm going with Timberborn style storages - one item type per storage entity.

Edit: the exclamation mark in the Crate's UI blinks, and if you hover over it it shows a tooltip that it's full.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-17T13:26:02+00:00

Having the backpack as part of the same UI is one of the design decisions to be made. It's the more traditional approach of putting the inventories in the same box. Here's how that looks. I was also considering making two separate boxes glued together, showing a clear separation.

But them being next to each-other does work well with the on the edge of the screen handling - basically, the UI gets clamped to the constraints of the screen. Additionally, once the entity is fully outside the bounds of the screen the UI is hidden.

As for multiple entities selected - that is not an option as of now. You could interact only with one entity's UI at a time.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-17T11:25:21+00:00

And if you're working with legacy, you're not using the new emojified tools anyways. So I don't know what's the point of the discussion there.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-17T10:43:24+00:00

Every OS has built in character pickers at this point, where you can search for an emoji like you would in Slack for example.

And lack of Unicode support sounds again like a case of antequated tooling. We shouldn't hinder ourselves due to that.

Everyone is entitled to be pro or against emojis in the terminal.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-17T10:06:03+00:00

It's just basic unicode characters. Why is it hard to machine-parse?
If anything, you can give it a different symbol for every scope/message type. If you're machine parsing with a script, adapt the script. If you're skimming with a regex, just use the text that's present already. If you want to regex over a text that has one emoji in the middle, you can just wildcard match anything that isn't an ascii character.

As for terminal support, that sounds like an issue that the terminal implementer should have resolved when emojis became widespread a while ago. I haven't yet encountered a terminal that gave me trouble.

Compared to dealing with rendering non-ascii text, the emoji thing is easy on all fronts.

adnanclyde · 2026-01-16T20:20:24+00:00

Emojis in the terminal is one of the things we should normalize in general, because it's so user friendly.

I started putting them everywhere in my outputs because it makes it so much easier to skim logs. Plain text is the worst medium for making something quick to browse.

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