08 Jan The Grass is Pinker on the other Planet…
Planet 72 is about colonizing Planets. Space has lots of planets and we want players to be able to really enjoy the limitless possibilities all those planets present with tons of replayability. That means either infinite content or lots of clever hooks for random variables.
Obviously what the planets look like is key, its in the name of the game! We spent a lot of time talking about what kind of variables we wanted to be able to tweak so I made a handy mockup of what I had in mind so Ben could get putting the code together while I tried to cook up this insane shader.
See planets aren’t THAT complicated!
The plan is as many knobs and dials as we can afford so we can generate completely different looking planets from as few components as possible. Which is a) convenient since there are only two of us; and b) a lot easier to generate tons of planets. To the shader web!
Uh, well, math is still complicated.
This is just a snippet of one channel worth of splat calculation and its individual tints. Which totals five, probs too many. But man you can make this happen:
It’s full of colors!
While this is really rad and offers a ton of flexibility per tileset its just super heavy and freaks Unity out. Can I clean up the math and simplify things? Probably, but I don’t think I can do enough to make it work for 6-8 tiles, its just too many properties. My plan is to whittle things down to 2 tints per tile and include more tiles, which is a fair trade.
Rocket telemetry is terrible. You never know where you’ll end up…
As always, more as it develops!
-Allen