Before I get into the tech stuff, Mike made some awesome concept art for the five plants we’re starting with. Really looking forward to the sprites!
Ordering stuff from the Constellation Factory…
For the non-techies reading, note that there are a bunch of classes in the UML diagram above to describe the content of the game, specifically stars, planets, plants, and meaties. It’s a common pattern in software development to separate out the code that generates classes like these into a separate class, called a “factory”, which I can tell to randomly generate these things as I need them.
After getting a start on the SimulationManager class and creating a bunch of blank scripts in the Unity editor, I wanted to reach a first testable milestone for my code, and that milestone is the part of the constellation factory class that generates the stars.
As hinted in the pictures above, I’m limiting the game to 7 systems for now, and while most of them will be randomly generated, I have a few constraints. Check out this star classification diagram from Wikipedia
So that players can easily
tell them apart, this game will only have class M, K, G, and B stars.
In game fiction land now, The Galactic Department of Agriculture (GDA) divides the four star classes into a set of Space Plant Hardiness Zones (this is goofing on the USDA scale):
Class M and K: Zones 1-3
Class G: Zones 4-6
Class B: Zones 7-13
The zones are based on the minimum amount of photons a space plant can receive (shhh, don't think about the physics too much)
The following plants are hardy to these hardiness zones:
Apogee Apple, Solar Strawberry, Waxing Watermelon are hardy to Zone 1
Ozone Orange: Zone 4
Lunation Lemon: Zone 7
Time and space allowing, we’ll add new plants into these zones.
So there's a sense of progression and challenge:
-Create ONE class M or K star (PLAYER STARTS HERE)
-Create ONE class G star
-Create ONE class B star
-The other stars can be whatever class
This way, you start in a system with a small and dim Class M star with a few plants, and you can buy farmable planets in other star systems to grow rarer plants like the Ozone Orange and Lunation Lemon.
I just finished getting the random generation code done for stars in Unity. I’m going to back up my project next and get started on planets!