How to add it to the game #1: Planetary Missions 🪐

[Pinanas]

Welcome to my new series, in this episode, we will start with the planetary missions, in the future parts, we will do with some other features (wave editor, purchasable hats for chickens, 2 player games locally, etc…).

Without further ado, let’s start our topic.

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So I talked before about how to generate the planetary missions randomly.

CIU version 155

So, I got an idea about how planetary missions would be implemented, Yeah, I know that was suggested multiple times but this one is a bit different from this topic. Basically it would generate connected lines with random rotation degree. Something similar to the DLC downloading screen but more arranged. [image] And then replace the lines with the terrain and add decorations. [image] In decorations, just add a random sprite every (2-5) dots. But for the waves and the enemies: I think abou…

However, after some research, I found out that’s not possible to make it into the game the way I thought about for how the terrain is limited (details on later sections), but I thought a better way to make them, making them longer and more arranged.

How to generate the missions

Before we start the missions themselves I want to separate them into 3 different missions for simplicity:

• Deep Exploration, similar to Epsilon Thalassus (water planet), Gamma Chathon (cave planet)

• Basic Exploration, similar to: Eta Astropelecae (the frozen planet)

• Atmospheric Entry (The Earth)

Now let’s start with Deep Exploration, the most complexiest out all of them.

Terrain

Let’s start with the terrain, it looks so complicated but it’s easy, the only problem is to find out the way, I’ve made these pics to explain how we make them:

So here, the that explains how the terrains are made, as I said there are limitations as I said, the reason why my first idea was not possible is that the terrains work very differently than I thought.

I thought it was a using a way similar to this but it turns out it uses grid wrap, also grid wrap is limited and it can’t make transition through multiple directions, it needs to be separated, rotated.

Back to our image, in before the last section, the first and the last terrains are connectors to connect the terrains and the middle is the terrain itself and they can be in any amount (preferred 2-5) and each one= 1 wave including the connectors but no how do we make them slowly go to another direction (e.g left → downwards) now here’s our second image and why we made the connectors in the first place.

Connecting the terrains

Here the way I got this from is the CI5 planets (especially Gamma Chathon). And then the first direction is chosen randomly and then the next chosen terrain will always be chosen from the 2 nearby directions, I chose 8 directions for simplicity but There will be more directions (e.g between right and downright) in game.

Ceiling

And the last of this section “ceiling”, how we would make the ceiling? Well, My idea is that is a copy of the floor version but rotated 180o, you know there are sections which doesn’t include ceiling so we make the randomizer ether create or not create a ceiling for that floor.

Waves

As I said before in the “terrain” section, we will have decorations and rocks, this also includes the enemies.

I think it’s easy to make them, just make some waves and add them into the terrain. And with the rotated terrains, the waves will be rotated too.

That’s it.

Bosses

Our last section of the terrains, the bosses. So to make the bosses, we have to make the boss arenas, so we have 4 Bosses and each one has their own direction,

• Up, Heart of Darkness
• Down, Fly the Coop
• Right, Terror from the Deep
• Left, Ice Cubed

And as we said about the directions, bosses are selected depending on their direction too, These bosses are placeholders for now until we get a boss for each planet, we can re-use the bosses from the normal missions with empty arenas as other placeholders until there are suitable bosses for these planets and add them there.

Mission Types

We’ve finished the first mission type “Deep exploration” It’s too long as it needed general rules and the later missions will slowly lose some of the “Deep exploration” mission features.

Basic Exploration

It’s almost the same as “Deep exploration” mission but it now doesn’t have any ceilings and apply more themes rather than underwater, cave. they will be themed depending on the planet type (hot, ice, earth, etc…)

I’ve already made custom themes as mods, you can check them out here:

Mod installer and public mods

So in the past days, I’ve been working on a mod that reskins the planetary missions like what if the planetary missions were added to CIU, I made every single mod for a certain planet type (frozen wasteland is not included as it’s already seen in Eta Astropelecae) Screenshots + some limitations explained

Let’s go back to technical:
And for the directions of the terrains are now limited now it never goes up or down, no matter their direction is.

Atmospheric Entry

The final mission type, this one is veery easy to implement. It only needs the same way we said about adding waves + it’s only in one direction and it’s always to down, it doesn’t need any terrains except for the floor at the boss fight (boss arena),

As for the assets that’s also easy,

We just need one huge gradient sprite for the planet sky + some clouds (if it had) and these clouds get recolored automatically depending on the clouds colors.

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Conclusion

And that’s it for this topic, I know it was a long one but hopefully this time this will make stuff easier, Feel free to post any suggestions or improvements.

and…

Thanks for Reading!

Check the other parts of the series:

• How to add it to the game #1: Planetary Missions 🪐 Current Page
• How to add it to the game #2: Wave Editor 🛠