Simple GH pages blog i use to talk about starland's development process
The group behind starland has been renamed from "StarLand official" to Lockpick Interactive. I've updated the website and moved the game over to the official roblox group for simplicity purposes. The game is in development again and we're working out all the existing bugs so we can keep going again. Lots of features are super basic right now but i'll post a demo video later of some of the new features that we've got working now. The in game music has been changed and at this point i'm going to be providing absolutely no certainty and no release date as i'm struggling on keeping game work balanced and school. Riley's working on the buildings at the moment as well.
StarLand has been on an unoffical development hiatus for a few months. In the last month or so it has gotten a complete Development Reset, where some of the main parts of the game were modified. We are no longer using fixed camera movement and it moves like a normal roblox game now. The scripts are a lot more optimized and the game looks a lot nicer. Me and Riley (the builder) are working on mainly the Donut shop and the Pet shop right now. StarCade is next on the list. Also, i've been working on starland's side projects such as Rbx2Source. I've personally had a lack of motivation the past few months with being busy with school and family stuff. But, i'm working on it again and will continue to work on it for the future. Thanks for being patient.
StarLand's new buildings have been officially moved from the development branch to the production branch and i'll consider posting screenshots soon. For now, i'll work hard on trying to actually finish the game, we're in the final quarter (I think, unless something goes completely wrong.) There's one or two things that need polishing or needs to be moved from a active feature to a beta feature due to the amount of bugs that the game has right now, It's pretty stable but there are 5-6 major game-breaking or otherwise exploitable bugs that i'm working on fixing as we speak. Edit: great moderation
Today, i'm going to try to finish and perfect the gamepad controls to work well on all platforms, but i feel the hardest to master will be the Gamepad platform. In the settings panel, there'll be a button to change the brand of your controller and if none is chosen it will assume that it is completely generic. It will show a glyph of where on the controller to press instead of what button. I'm also going to autoset the controller brand to xbox if the payer is ona console as xbox is the only brand roblox is officially on (as a console) Update: Still working on this 3/25/22
Right now, i'm trying to work on cross-platform compatible controlsets and making the settings GUI presentable. Right now i'm focused on getting proper input glyphs for all platforms. These buttons i've found are amazing, so i'm going to end up using these. RIght now i'm also setting up on screen touch buttons to interact and scaling them because by default they're in a really small shape in the ocrner of the screen. Today i'm also going to finalize the backpack system and finish with the gear system, which uses the GearDB system.
Currently, i'm in the middle of testing StarLand for Xbox now that point and click will no longer be a default form of input. Update: XBOX input seems to work, changing some GUI to be console friendly.
StarLand's "Point and Click" mouse movement mode will no longer be the default form of input. Moving forward the default movement mode will be WASD/Arrows and the Point And Click functionality will be moved to the settings as a beta functionality.
This morning i was working on how pet purchases are handled as well as currency values being changed. 1 StarCoin was worth too much, i'm changing currency values to better reflect other games. I've also gone and serversided the way pets are purchased and changed the scrips in the GUIS to be local like a normal person. Still waiting on riley to finish building the exterior of the petshop so i can reveal it to the public. Will update this post as the day goes on
Yesterday i posted "a leak" on my twitter and there's a new plaza in development. It won't look like a preschool art project like the current one you've seen. It was made by riley, the builder for the game and it looks super nice so far. I'm going to remove the physical "StarStore" from the plaza and make one just via a GUI for now, most likely will stay that way and i've tried it in the past but it wasn't very nice looking and i'll try to make one look "okay". I'm no GUI designer.
Today i've setup cloudflare on the main website, as well as google analytics. I installed a cookie consent applet and google analytics so i can see what's going on behind the scenes. I don't want to setup Google Ads right now, but that might be something i add in the future. Update: Google Analytics are now setup on all subdomains
I do wish that i'd have started this earlier, because so much development has gone on before now. I recently published the new website and it looks much nicer than before where it was just basic HTML. I was originally considering doing bootstrap but just ended up using w3.css. I'm currently working on a PVP arena type thing, where kills equal StarCoins, i'm not trying to make it so the only way you can earn starcoins is waiting 15 minutes or microtransactions, i'm no EA. My builder, Riley is currently working on a lobby for this arena as well as most of the buildings in the game being redone. There are still lots of minor and major bugs within starland's code, and some of which are game-breaking. The biggest issue is there's a 25% chance that the camera will not initialize properly and it will attach to the character rather than the CFrame of the camerapart. I've been writing a list down of all the bugs currently known and i will start cracking down on them shortly. Development has been inconsistent recently as i've had to be working on school. Edit: I accidentally deleted the A & AAAA record for the main website and it should be fixed in like 5 minutes