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Here’s a quick mockup for the level I’m working on now. It is similar to the Bernal Sphere space colony design from the 70s, but only one of the poles is exposed. The other pole serves as the base of a spire that functions as the colony’s space port that extends through the center — this port will be crowded with all kinds of ships not unlike a crowded sea port today. These ships, cargo containers, and businesses located around the port will make up the level players actually interact with.

The shell of the colony will serve as an interesting backdrop for the players. The colony’s megapolis living surface spends most of the time in darkness, so the night life in this fictional colony thrives. As one gets closer to the poles of the colony, the gravity would be weaker — there will be sports arenas and water to take advantage of this lesser gravity. To clarify though — the shell is merely a backdrop and players won’t interact with these things mentioned in this paragraph (the players will be on the other side of the artificial ozone with all the ships using the port). I just want to make sure that, even if it’s not 100% realistic, things make sense.

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I’ve redone the code for the machine gun. Originally, I had used simple raycasts to detect whether or not a player shot another player. While simple, this method produces unrealistic results — implied projectiles hit their target instantaneously from any distance. I’ll probably still use raycasting for the long range sniper rifle, but for the machine gun I wanted something more visceral and realistic.

Now, bullet objects fly through 3D space — which means you can actually see the bullets and it’ll be harder to hit players at longer distances. When I make better art and effects for the bullets, I think it’ll look really neat.

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I’ve started making the team bases that will house respawn points and the team flag for capture the flag. It has proven challenging designing interior spaces for a zero gravity environment, so I’ve set that aside for a bit to work on other things. For the time being, I’ll have to leave them looking like Super Mario pipes haha.

You can also see something I’ve added to make it easier to spot players and differentiate between teamates and opponents (green vs red) — diffraction spikes (those colored lense-flare crosses). These also play into the stealth mode players can utilize.

Here’s an image showing how going into ’stealth’ mode will make you much harder to see (look where the red diffraction spike was). I want sneaky/stealthy gameplay to be a viable way for people to play if they choose so — there’ll be advantages and disadvantages to using this toggled mode.

I’ve also been working on more network code and have started adding sound effects to my game (yeah, the game takes place in space, but I’m going to have sound anyway and come up with some fictional sci fi tech to justify it). Going into stealth mode makes the audio a little more realistic, but not entirely silent — just heavily muffled. I may have a weapon that temporarily disables audio completely, but it’ll definitely be very temporary — a silent game is just boring, but I think using space’s silence as a gameplay mechanic could be fun.