Astellar

[queen salmon]

Hi everyone! I'm working on my first kinda complete game and wanted to share that journey with you (and maybe also get some feedback along the way cause I'm still pretty new to this)

Astellar is a 2D space exploration game inspired by some of my favorite games such as Subnautica, Terraria or Outer Wilds

You wake up after your spaceship crashed inside a large asteroid belt, you will have to maneuver in the zero-g environment but also pay attention to your oxygen reserves as your only way to move is by releasing more precious Oxygen from your suit! Better not get lost without a way back...

The game is still rather early in development but so far I already have a map save/load and rendering system as well as the movement, starting ship and an intro sequence as well as some menus, textures and sounds.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1407832897418952834/1452714006992257126/image.png

Here are some clips and screenshots of what I've been working on with the intro sequence and map generator:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1067104029676666911/1406718207024169242/Astellar_2025-08-17_20-59-00.mp4?ex=68a7706c&is=68a61eec&hm=ce343e042a4174d316e0c4ab0446ea8e9733b1b0144460a381394476a7e93335&

[queen salmon]

I've made some plant textures for the overgrown biome

[queen salmon]

And now these plants also generate in the world. Also added some 2d lights to them using the tile attached game objects. I will have to see how well the performance with that is going to be

[queen salmon]

Its actually dark while flying through caves now
I've decided to add a flashlight to the player in order so you can actually see anything
However I haven't decided whether to have the flashlight locked to the direction of the player or have it follow the mouse cursor instead

I think the mouse cursor version would look something like this instead

Actually I'm also thinking about maybe changing the player controls to use the mouse instead
Currently you fly forwards / backwards with W/S and turn left/right with A/D
I'm not sure if using the mouse cursor for that would also be better

[queen salmon]

And here is also a better showcase clip of the overgrown biome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaMfYp2gvRc

[queen salmon]

I've decided to try and participate in the Brackeys gamejam so probably won't have any meaningful progress on this game for the next week

[queen salmon]

Well its been a lot more than one week but also liked the gamejam a lot so ended up doing another 1 week game challenge with a friend

I've now been working on a proper inventory system for the game since there a lot more types of resources with the new biomes planned than before
Definitely still very early and work in progress so the simple list of materials on the left isn't enough anymore
Especially need to think about how to handle equippable items cause I'd like to keep it simple with no stacking and manual reordering

[queen salmon]

I still really liked the old resource display because you could easily see how much you had of a specific resource without having to count everything
so I added a better version of it that allows you to pin the resources you want and always keep track of your current count in the inventory

[queen salmon]

Did not have much time this week but I've worked on a logo in addition to the icon

[queen salmon]

also added the hotbar function, it automatically lists all the tools from your inventory in the hotbar but you can also disable certain tools if you don't currently need them. Still wanted to keep it simple to use so no manually editing the hotbar

the signal locator and terraformer changing places was a bug cause I gave both the same menu order priority, fixed that now

[unique crater]

I love the way you create your inventory !

[queen salmon]

Thanks! Decided that complex inventory management mechanics aren't needed in my game and would just make using it more annoying so I'm trying to take a more unique approach for my inventory. And its definitly also inspired by games like subnautica because I quite their inventory system.

I'm currently deciding how to handle some player equipment items. I'll either have it work similar to the hotbar (so you click on an item to equip it but also remains in the inventory) or I'll go the more classical route and have those as seperate slots (but definitly also with a one click to equip thing instead of drag & drop)

[queen salmon]

This project isn't dead btw 🙂 I just sadly had way to little time to work on it. In addition there were a bunch of smaller systems I still needed to rewrite to account for the new inventory and those aren't really usable on their own, but I've got most of them done over the last few weeks and now just need to connect them together. Should hopefully have some more things to show in the next few days

As a start I've finally made an actual player texture & some animations / physics to go with it!

I've decided to have the player camera a bit more zoomed in now (as you could see me doing at the start of the video) so I will probably also need to revisit some of the textures like the spaceship in the future to add a few more details now that it covers more of the screen

[queen salmon]

Still needs more visuals in the center and for the empty slots but I got the equipment system working
and also made some more textures for the tools

[queen salmon]

Structures now hide the outside world
(my entire pc had some lagspikes during the recording, but not caused by the game)

[queen salmon]

Items can now also be dropped in the world and picked up again!
The item physics react to being in space or in an enclosed space instead too
Behind the scenes this also includes a fully chunk based, serialized and properly saved to file entity system so yeah this was a lot of work but should allow me to make new entities a lot easier in the future

[queen salmon]

And another system is done! I've implemented storage containers you can interact with. These are saved properly and I also plan to add player buildable storages in the future

[queen salmon]

Updated the spaceship textures with a few more details to make them fit the new player style better and also added more depth to the textures

[queen salmon]

Ever since I reworked the map system (which was actually before I started this devlog), the map interaction system was broken because I knew that I wanted to rework the inventory and items

But now that the inventory is working again I was able to finally reimplement block breaking properly
https://youtu.be/956WfFUOWzQ?si=-LyfyedTdBGV5zBS

[queen salmon]

Also redesigned the fabricator menu to fit the new item system
Back in the old system upgrades were just simple stat boosts but now those are actual items too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB7wotn8ENk

[unique crater]

Wow, that's amazing! Did you do all that? I mean the art, the coding, etc.

How did you make the Mechanical Fabricator? I would like to learn how to do it

[queen salmon]

Yup it's pretty much all made by me since I'm working on the game alone

The only thing not completely made by me are the sound effects.

I made most off those by editing some sounds from free sound packs I had or sites like freesound.com

And one of the soundtracks is an edited version of a track a friend made

[queen salmon]

For the fabricator do you mostly mean the mechanics behind it or the gui for it?

[unique crater]

Yeah I mean the gui for it (the green square where you select objects)

[queen salmon]

Well actually thats pretty much a normal gui using the unity ui system.
All the item buttons are just instanced prefabs that send the confirmation and selection commands to the crafting system for their designated item.
And the crafting system provides a list of available resources to the gui window script

[queen salmon]

Oh and for the recipe management, I just define each one with a scriptable object with fields for the result, required ingredients and categories