Over the past weeks I have been putting a bit of time into developing a space sim / game with Unity 3D. Space and science fiction fascinates me and is always something I enjoy working on, or interacting with. When it comes to developing games, it is always the first thing I think about when it comes to deciding on a subject matter – (just take a look at Cosmosis, a 2D space shooter I created for iOS)
At this stage I am not sure if I’ll take this further or not, as developing a full on game in this kind of setting requires a lot of work – something I just don’t have the time for being a hobbyist games developer. However, so far I have managed to implement the following:
- Perlin noise based procedural planet generation (three types so far: Earth, Ice and Fire like)
- Planets generated with various properties to determine their name, population, random asteroid belts, etc…
- Fully controllable player ship with starfield movement and thruster effects
- One weapon – simple dumb fire missiles
- Planet stats overlay GUI when hovering over planets
- Destructable planets and asteroids
- Basic resource mining via a mining laser – not sure if I am going to use this for anything at this stage or not though.
I need to have a think about direction and gameplay mechanics if I do really start to get serious about developing this further though. Here is a demo of some of what I have achieved so far. The player spaceship model I am using is a freebie I found courtesy of //www.solcommand.com/.
If anyone is looking for skyboxes for their own games/projects, the skybox galaxy scene you see in-game is one of the skyboxes I created and am selling here.