Space Goblin Diaries

DevDiary

I've made some progress on Foolish Earth Creatures this month, although most of that has been filling out chapter structures with placeholder text so there's nothing very interesting to show. Unless you find this kind of thing interesting:

PLACEHOLDER: You draw one of my patrols into an ambush and destroy them. BUT, now you are pinned down, and the cyborgs try to flush you out with grenades!

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Far out in the dark reaches of space, beyond the orbit of the Earth's moon, where your doomed planet appears as a fragile blue-white pebble, you at last approach my space dreadnought. Even from this distance, you must be able to see the vastness of my dreadnought and feel the power that it emanates. The crackling bubble that surrounds it is its neutronic ray shield, impenetrable to all conventional weapons. And within that bubble, a dark edifice of neutronium hyper-alloy, bristling with ray gun batteries, from the observation cupola in its nose to the hyperspace engine in its tail. Behold the yawning maw of the main hangar bay, from which a thousand cyber-fighters and invasion shuttles can issue forth to conquer new worlds! Behold my command spire, from which I can oversee my armies and observe the fall of my enemies! Are you not impressed, human? How can you look at the sheer scale of my fortress and entertain any hope of victory?

Early dev diary this month as I'm going travelling tomorrow and don't know if I'll have time to do any writing until next month.

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Once again I haven't had a huge amount of time to work on the game this month, and what I have done has been routine filling in of chapters so I don't have anything very interesting to share. But I'm committed to doing a dev diary every month, so here's a companion piece to my post about space villains, this one about the space heroes who oppose them.

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Your engineers work around the clock in your Space Force HQ's engineering lab, while outside the frightened population wonders what new doom I will unleash upon them. At last they unveil their creation: a sleek silver spaceplane, a miracle of compact, efficient power. Its engine combines all your top scientists' experimental propulsion ideas, while its body is optimised for rapid manoeuvres both in atmosphere and in a vacuum. Beneath its graceful wings are twin laser cannon similar to those of the interceptor you piloted in our first encounter. Its cockpit is engineered specifically for you, with controls so perfectly calibrated that the ship will seem almost a part of your own body. I will grant you this, human—when you need to, your species can create some truly impressive pieces of technology. The ship your engineers have created is almost worthy of a place in my space fleet! A ship this impressive deserves a name. What will you call it? Where would a space hero be without their trusty spaceship? On the ground, that's where.

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This month I've revised the overall structure of the game and come up with something I'm happy with, but I haven't had a lot of time to work it so I haven't getten back to the writing yet. But the project was actually in a good place for me to step back and let it “lie fallow” for a little while, so taking a break at this point will hopefully help me overall.

But that means I don't have anything to show in this diary, so instead here is a fluffy listicle of some of my favourite space villains who inspired the game, and my personal crazy fan theories about each of them.

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Enjoy your victory while you can, human. I, meanwhile, must watch impotently from my escape pod as you dismantle the wreckage of my dreadnought and repair the damage my forces did to your planet. Curse you, Ace Quasar. You win this time... ...But we will meet again! Big milestone this month: the game now has one path where I can play all the way from start to finish without encountering any placeholder text.

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I've been thinking about the design lessons I've learned from Beyond the Chiron Gate now that it's been out for a few years, and I thought I'd do a little post about one topic: achievements.

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And now we come to the final confrontation. On the other side of this huge ventilation shaft is my dreadnought's command spire. Capture it and you have control of the entire starship... But to reach it you must cross a narrow, exposed bridge—and on the other side of the bridge stand my remaining elite shock troops. Progress has been slower this month, in part because I'm now working on the ending of the game, and endings are hard.

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Game Over: Restart chapter / Select chapter / Quit I have defeated you, human! But what happens now...?

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In the echoing passages of my dreadnought you will hear the robot before you see it—a metallic clattering sound that must seem to come from all around you... But that sound cannot prepare you for the sight of the robot when it appears at your feet! A mass of razor-sharp blades and glowing red optical sensors faces you, behind which stretches a long, flexible body that clings to the wall with dozens of twitching legs. It regards you with a cold intelligence, its adaptive programming prepared to react to anything you might do. That mass of chittering blades will be the last thing you see, Commander Vortex! The hunter-killer robot coils its body and prepares to lunge... Happy midwinter celebrations, Earth creatures!

I took a break from working on the game for a couple of weeks over Christmas, but earlier in the month I did some work on a chapter in which the hero braves the air ducts of Vorak's space dreadnought and must face a hunter-killer robot and a whirling fan of death.

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