documenting my journey towards making my dreamgame

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Documenting my jounry towards my “dream game” where the Player has the “Captain’s Experience” and gets a spaceship with crew and a fairly large universe to explore… set in the year future and lasting for 400 years, a new age of exploration… with semi realistic physics, realistic placement of stars, a lot fo liberties taken with Faster than Light travel… and a whole bunch of stuff I’m not yet capable of doing, but looking over the progress I’ve made in the last year or so makes me feel confident.

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below are my original screen mock-ups for my dream game,I’m calling “Good Morning, Captain” and should be played on a mobile device and last for hours.

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One year and a few months with Unity… really appreciate the unity community, not just here, bbut also on discord and Facebook…

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Don’t undersell it — it may be an exciting game without being a fast-paced game. This use of the mobile and desktop together, with game events continuing while you’re not logged on, is pretty interesting. Of course it implies a server, and one beefy enough to serve all the players.

First, use of real stars in our stellar neighborhood is very cool, and something I’ve always wanted to do. Please take care to put them in their correct positions, and make use of whatever is known about their planetary systems.

Second, don’t sell those red-dwarf systems short, either! They can be quite interesting, like Trappist-1, with at least seven terrestrial planets, three in the habitable zone!

Anyway, no, I don’t have time to join in, but it looks like an interesting project. Good luck!

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Thanks Joe,
that was one of the decisions I was wavering on, and having some feedback solidifies it for me… now, I got 2 “bibles” as far as references for a starmap goes… and… I am making a design-limiter choice and am going to concentrait on art/design for only the first 1/4 of the game’s timeline… .so, I’m gonna concentrait on the nearest 50 stars and the first 100 years… if that can be fun and look good, the rest should just flow along…

now here are my lists, I think.

http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.posted.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20070206082222/http://nstars.nau.edu/

But it will take some “detective” work to make sense and place the info.

  1. GJ 406 1 36 10 56 29.2 +07 00 53 N 4.696 234.6 N 0.41910 0.00210 Y M5.5 V * 13.53 16.64 0.09 Wolf 359

here’s a famous one, from these data sets, I should be able to work out a way to hand craft the stars placements… 50 stars, I could place in a day, 444 stars seems a little daunting… now, I used to have a 3D model of all these stars in an old POV-Ray generated .obj file, so I’ve done it before and could do it again, just data-entry…

So today, my goals are

continue doing the Unity Tutorials, me and my 11 year old son are doing the tutorials together, lots of fun… at the same time I’m making some models of spaceships in Maya… I’ve decided on the “Space Wisp” as the first spaceship to focus on… the Spacewisp Starwisp - Wikipedia

and think some more about how to make stars… and a skybox… (and these are things I can play around with after doing the roll-a-ball tutorial with my kid… that ball is just begging me to turn it into a star… and making a skybox would also be good practice for me)… and here is a tough one… I want to make a realistic skybox… so I was going to use real star imagry and photoshop it… but then… I could have doubled up the 444 stars in the game-universe… I don’t many people would catch that, but it would bug me as being kinda sloppy… so … maybe a skybox without too many background stars that are out of the scope of the game…

well, something like it, much bigger…

the diagrams don’t nessecarily have to line up all one one texture, but can be separate and only put all together if the player if looking at the entire deck (by expanding the mini-map on the Crew Roster or something

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this is an ugly and confusing starmap, but good reference

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I scored music for the game from a good friend, I was loath to ask any friends for help, but he needed a favor and boom, very nice, he is a first class musician, with a masters degree, I think. He was the companies IT person when we worked together many years ago… I’m really happy to have his music (he’s released a few albums now, and had a sales spike in Uzbekistan couple months ago that I like kidding him about, being big in Uzbekistan) I already have a looping background track to play around with and the game will look better over all and more polished with good original music.

My kid and I are making progress through the roll a ball tutorial. and I’ve been playing around with how to make spaceships in Maya…

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so here is modular ship with a command component, then sensors, then cargo, then a habitation ring, then a set of fuel tanks and small set of thrusters… and a very large solar sail… this ship is kinda based on the Starwisp, but I’m calling it Spacewisp, cause it sounds better I think.

modular, I want to make as many different ships as I can using as few unique components as I can get away with… so here is a different ship (same Power Bloc/faction, same design philosophy), but no solar sail and a much larger thuster (actually, its the exact same compenent, I just flipped it around… but it works and I can save time and space doing small things like that…

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so same components, but a slightly different layout and strategy, this guy brings 3 times as much cargo, as the smaller version and 6 times the amount of fuel because hes not using a solar sail. … (he’s also got to bring along some extra crew amenities so they don’t all go mad on the journey)

I’ve been doing some research and narrowing down to like 5 different plausible interstellar engines, etc.

After the kid and I did some tutorial time, I looked around and read up on how to make a skybox for Unity, spent an hour or so playing around in photoshop, watched a youtube tutorial on skyboxes and learned there was a skybox in the asset store that was exactly perfect… a little depressing… so when I started to look at how to make stars… I searched the asset store and got some good info there too.

I have to say, I’m kinda impressed with the Unity community

But, I realized this is not the right forum for looking for a writer… so I’ve gone searching through old school rpg site forums, ones with still a lot of activity

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Just one simple point from a noob. Couldn’t there be a simple download or something royalty free from the science departments etc at NASA and other space observatories, that have created star maps in 3d already. You might only have to edit and delete the extra star points and data you don’t want, or use as is and modify? I’m sure there are pre-made things somewhere? Maybe i’m wrong and they cost though. Just a punt.

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yes and no,

there are some really good star lists out there, most have 99,600 more stars in them than I need. I did find my old favorite star list I used for Pov-Ray, I’d share it, but the forum doesn’t like the file format (being an “include” file for Pov-Ray

there are some good ones… but, really it would take longer, I think and just be an extra step to start with them.(because most of these stars have different names on different lists)… If can design the stars correctly, I’ll just have to plug in some numbers to get the positions and colours for each.

looking at the stars within 15 light years, I can get a list like this

Sol: 0 light-years, class G2 V
Alpha and Proxima Centauri: 4.3948 light-years, class G2 V
Barnard’s Star: 5.94061 light-years, class M4 V
Wolf 359: 7.79686 light-years, class M6e V
Lalande 21185: 8.31127 light-years, class M2n V
UV Ceti: 8.55423 light-years, class M5.5e V
Sirius: 8.60082 light-years, class A1 V
Ross 154: 9.6925 light-years, class M3.5 V
Ross 248: 10.3344 light-years, class M5.5e V
Epsilon Eridani: 10.4968 light-years, class K2 V
Lacaille 9352: 10.7317 light-years, class M2e V
Ross 128: 10.8873 light-years, class M4n V
EZ Aquarii: 11.0817 light-years
Procyon: 11.406 light-years, class F5 IV-V
61 Cygni: 11.4269 light-years, class K5 V
Struve 2398: 11.6366 light-years, class M3 V
Groombridge 34: 11.6373 light-years, class M1.5n V
Southern Infrared Proper motion Survey 1259-4336: 11.7999 light-years, class M8 V
DX Cancri: 11.8246 light-years, class M6.5e V
Epsilon Indi: 11.8265 light-years, class K5e V
Tau Ceti: 11.8971 light-years, class G8p V
Gliese & Jahreiss 1061: 11.9388 light-years, class M5.5 V
YZ Ceti: 12.198 light-years, class M4.5 V
Luyten’s Star: 12.3883 light-years, class M3.5n V
Teegarden’s Star: 12.4008 light-years, class M6.5 V
Kapteyn’s Star: 12.7777 light-years, class M0 V
AX Microscopii: 12.8713 light-years, class M0e V
DO Cephei: 13.071 light-years, class M3n V
Deep Near-Infrared Survey 1048-39: 13.1595 light-years, class M8.5 V
V577 Monoceri: 13.4717 light-years, class M4.5e V
Wolf 1061: 13.9087 light-years, class M3 V
FL Virginis: 14.0468 light-years, class M5.5e V
van Maanen’s Star: 14.1263 light-years, class DZ7 wd
Cordoba Durchmusterung -37°15492: 14.2218 light-years, class M4 V
Luyten 1159-16: 14.5749 light-years, class M4.5e V
Luyten 143-23: 14.6491 light-years, class M4 V-VI
Luyten Palomar 731-58: 14.7578 light-years, class M6.5 V
AOe 17415-6: 14.7679 light-years, class M3 V
Cordoba Durchmusterung -46°11540: 14.7956 light-years, class M3 V-VI

that’s not too much, and since I’m gonna concentrait on the early game, the first 100 years, all I really need are the very close by stars.

I can get all the info I need from this list, like Ross 154,

Proper names: V1216 Sagittarii

Distance from Sol: 9.693 light-years (2.972 parsecs)

Celestial (X,Y,Z) coordinates in ly: 1.912, -8.658, -3.917
Galactic (X,Y,Z) coordinates in ly: 9.321, 1.925, -1.831

What do all these fields mean?

Spectral class: M3.5
Luminosity Class: V
Apparent visual magnitude: +11.00 (increasing to +9.70)
Absolute visual magnitude: +13.63 (increasing to +12.33)
Visual luminosity: 0.000306 x Sol (increasing to 0.00101 x Sol)
Variable type: UV Ceti flare star (eruptive variable)
Color indices: B-V= +1.72, U-B= +1.30, R-I= +1.30
Mass: 0.1 x Sol
Diameter: 0.2 x Sol
Comfort Zone (visual): 0.0175 A.U.s
Orbital period in CZ: 2.67314 days
I am hoping to add exoplanets in the same way, and come up with a believable way to make planets for the star systems… I should add that my personaly I think planets are plentiful, and with only 400 stars in the game, each star should have a good chance to have a nice planet, at least one.

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4 days modeling spaceships in Maya… and wow, Maya has changed little in the last 10 years, but the things they did change make little sence… like, I’m making some interior components of the ship, so that the player can have a little map with an icon of the crew so you an see who is at what station or where in the ship they are… so, I’d start with making a kinda “sickbay” shaped polygon and extrude that up to get a basic room, then I’d “flip normal” on all the faces, so that the room faces inwards like a stage rather than outwards, like a box… .

I couldn’t figure how to flip the normals… and I was too proud to go look it up, which I eventualy did… and they’d changed the function from “flip normals” to “reverse”… and well. just annoys me, since “reverse” can mean almost anything, and “flip normals” only means one thing…

so, I spent 1 day making ship components, like the command section of the hull, or the part of the full that has the fuel pods, or the giant sensor dish, and the engines, and I made them all with about a 10m diameter, thinking that was pretty big… and I made a few rudimentary rooms to fit inside the hull… (for the minimap and for when a laser burns away the hull and exposes the room to space and your crew gets blown out into space… I promised “Evil” Gary from Leaping Lizard that if I ever made a space-game it would have members of your crew being sucked out into space… so I want the player to be able to see that, hull breach, multiple decks quickly filled with flame and light, then going dark, and hearing the screams of those dumb enough to have had their helmets on before being sucked out and now theyt float helplessly away… )

well, I made a scheme where each ship would have like 2 styles, very utilitarian, and sparse (but heavily shielded) or normal, or luxurious and heavily shielded… basically 3 corridor sizes, cramped and makes the crew uphappy 2meters, a bearable 4m size, and a larger size, where you could have lots of art and plants and the crew doesn’t so much feel that they are in a tin-can floating in Space…

and 10m looked really small… and I couldn’t fit in any rooms.

So I started over and spent another day, basically doing the exact same thing, salvaging what I could from the day before, and made everything based on a 14m diameter hull… and that worked out pretty well… then I started looking at this guy’s stuff, http://www.satkinsoncreativearts.com/

and I started all over again and made 16m my smallest hull size… (the plan is to have massive hulls eventually, but for now, I’m concentraiting on just what the player might see in the first 50ish years of gameplay… so lighter smaller ships…)

at the same time I’m envisioning 3 ships I’l have to design for the early game, some sort of colony ship with the barest minimum needs, some sort of ship-killing ship, and a spaceship I’ll have after “Haunted Enterprise” (she was broken up in Bremerton, not too far from Seattle, so I want to include her as a theoretical ship… something as big as they could make in 2100ish, and has a crew of 5000 and is definatly unique… so I’ll have to keep small and large in mind while making up some workflow rules for my ships… … and I can finally make a 3D model of the spaceship what is just 2 top halves of an Aircraft Carrier fused together…

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… and I’m quite frankly stunned…

I was resisting the urge to try and import any models into Unity, because I was certain it wasn’t going to go right and I’d want to ask on the forums, but I didn’t want to look like a poseur and ask something simple without doing the basic tutorials first… (about half way through roll-a-ball)

But, I couldn’t resist after seeing the “send to Unity” option in the menu… so, I just did it and it just carried over, and brought the lights and the model hierarchy and just , well, I’m really impressed.

todays goal, learn how Maya does materials now-a-days, they probably do it all stupid and call it in-materials or something you wouldn’t think to search for in the tool. My idea for materials is simple, I\m gonna use a simple phong shader, based on the components part… like, the gold part of the ship might be coloured with a “goldy” material, and plastic, a dull non shiney material, but they would have different properties,… such as armour when it by a laser…

so, I’m just astounded at how easy it was to move a model from Maya to Unity… and it didn’t take 15 minuets to “cook” and send to to the game engine…

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What a week, boy I learned a lot… the most important thing I learned is to be aware of the creation date of any tutorials I try to do… some that look good, but are 4 years old… helpful, but also frustrating… but I was able to do a lot of problem solving. I feel kinda exhausted, but like now I can move on a bit…

I just made a Warhammer 40K spaceship and gave it some movement and a mouse look and some partical effects and playing around with getting effects and stuff into the game… and my kid and I are almost done with the Roll-a-ball tutorial… it’s taking a lot longer since we are decorating, playing with lighting and (well he’s autistic, so if something doesn’t work right right away he can get upset and need a break… poor kid)… but still loving Unity…

for the realistic ships, I learned how to make stuff like the habitation rings rotate and I’m experimenting with a way to show rooms/corridors and crew within the outlines of the ship… like an x-ray effect to see inside…

here is a link to my crappy untextures or optimized spaceship running around unrealistically in space… but… this is in no way how I want the spaceship in the game to look or fly… I’m just learning Unity right now, while getting the game design sorted out a bit more… got a good “art path” going soon as I figure out the best way to do materials.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pjkrxqyokjwvba2/AADmEiOVYMwhE3ZjiHoQ-KsXa?dl=0

no way to exit that .exe above… I havn’t learned how to make an exit button yet…

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a few days ago, I felt like I was hitting a wall, I was having a lot of trouble just getting some basic movement down… but that wall turned out to just be a bump, and after the bump everything seems a lot easier…

I’m doing tutorials on anything I think I can find useful, and I made a rudimentary gravity effect… but I probably wont us it in the game, since… well, it’s not the best gravity engine, not like KSP… it seems to me that it might be best to place the planets and move them in their orbits using paths… and maybe just have gravity effect the player.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w0cr3mv2mrdrxnv/AADwi5qQkaDTwJot5LMA3nw7a?dl=0

but here is what I got so far… very simple. just the Spacewisp and a few spheres for planets and a star… no angular motion on anything, so they all just fall inwards.

Next goal, is to try and made a planetary system based on Trappist-1 and bring it into Unity… . Scale is my biggest issue/question right now, and I might make a post in “game design” asking about that…

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I find if you are looking for great materials, it’s the normal maps, plus shaders. You probably know all this anyway though. But I’m probably going to pay for crazy-bump, one day? For normal map creation, as it looks so nice. Plus textures.com. Though you probably have these already :slight_smile:

Just thought, is it more appropriate in the space images to use linnear lighting or not? as space is normally very bright or very dark? I don’t think it looks normal on ships as there is no reflection from behind unless a moon or planet is near. Hopefully this doesn’t cause an issue, but just in my opinion it may be useful to use the non-normal lighting path for ships when away from other light sources etc (maybe?) if it’s not too complex?

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Thanks, Dai, I’m only starting to remember how to make nice shaders and materials… but looking through the asset store, downloading some examples, and wow, really nice and helpful stuff there. I’ve blatently borrowed and ripped off from the store, but I’ll be sure to document that kinda stuff when I’m starting on my serious project…

oh, and I re-edited my OP, to include some change of plans, like from here on out for the next few months I might be talking a lot of 40K… I left the original post there, because I like it’s naiievity and I’m hoping that the art will go from kinda crappy to actually looking really good.

So, 20 days ago, and here is what I got so far… W and S apply forward and rear thrust… the arrow keys give you pitch and yaw, and everything you see has some kinda gravity/attractive force… mouse camera … boy a ton of things could be tweaked, but I’m not gonna worry about that until its ready to become a prefab…

here are my current goals; Learn more Unity and make some nice portfolio environments
I got a basic story idea, set in the Warhammer 40K universe… (I’m allowed to include Warhammer art in my professional portfolio, having been an official GW artist back in the day (I have a story about why the DA are really really Dark Green), which will include a “normal space” and “warpspace” … having warpspace is important, because it’s a challenge to me… parts of the ship will blow up on contact with stuff… and “Oregon Trail” style events, at least a couple… also, a bit of a map, and 2 planets, a start and an end location… I’m not gonna give myself any timelines, but… laying out some basic goals here on this thread really helped keep me focused, especially the couple of times that I thought I hit a wall.

um… is it appropo is leave a dropbox link here to my exe and data folder?

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I don’t know if it’s appropriate or not. But i’m the type of person who won’t download stuff anyway. URL-image posts are about as much as I trust any game network :slight_smile: Only because on the app markets there are a lot of shady games etc…Though I should get dropbox myself as I don’t have a URL- point to post images from online :slight_smile: …Can’t be bothered… Just not skilled enough to even post anything anyway, he…

That’s the problem learning everything from home on a laptop without a “class” or group to work in. There is little motivation. Especially since my direction of game is educational and not all personal… I used to be a big gamer, but now i’m put off by too much blood n guts etc…Hopefully it won’t take a decade for me to figure out how to program my simple game etc :slight_smile:

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Thanks for moving my thread… I feel like I have graduated from a complete Unity Noob, to someone with a Basic understanding of the engine after 3 weeks.

very basic, really…

Still working on my spaceship player controller, I got 6 degrees of freedom, forwards and reverse thrusting… a “full-stop” command (nessecary since all the gravity in the scene can make maneuvering interesting… and a “full stop” is appropriet for a space-fantasy setting… maybe it will also work for the more realistic space-sim I want to make…

stil cant beleave how easy it was to add “gravity” to the game… I really thought that was going to be hard… like rocket science hard…

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Yes, I was going to point out mine, but it sounds like you found it already. :slight_smile: We made it for our High Frontier game, but decided to share it with other developers, because more games should use accurate stars.

You’ll find lots of other neat stuff in the Asset Store, too; especially as a beginner, don’t be shy about checking there whenever you need something.

That star map you posted looks busy, but as soon as you start it slowly spinning, our brains will sort out the depth immediately and it will look a lot less confusing. But let me put my advice in the form of bullet points:

  • Implement that star map (because it’s cool!), but always have it slowly rotating.
  • Consider giving more “human” names to the stars — especially any you imagine have been colonized by this point — since the star catalog names are super-dull and unpronouncable. You can always show the official catalog name in the details when the click/mouse-over/whatever.
  • Instead of an exe, consider making a WebGL build, at least as long as your game will fit in that (really big games will perform poorly on WebGL, but you’ll probably be fine for a while). That way people can try it just by going to a URL you provide.

Indeed, the community is one of the best things about Unity!

Cheers,

  • Joe
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Consider adding in a free humanoid model into Unity - or pull the fbx from the asset directory on your local drive - into Maya. This will help with scale for interior/exterior ship designs.

With Unity 2017 there is a direct material/shader import from Maya/Max straight into Unity. Check the Unity youtube channel for info on this process. Very helpful for iterative work.

@JoeStrout can speak about this point more technical and accurate than I can - but might want to start early working out how you are going to work with the vast amounts of scale - traveling from/to different star systems. Game engines - Unity - has float point precision issues that cause inaccuracies the farther away from 0,0,0 the player gets. Although at this point (very early in design) it is not an issue, you will definitely want to figure out a good system to overcome the float point issues before starting to put star systems at real world distances. :wink:

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yes… when I went to art school, they taught us in the “Classical” method, basically they sat us down in museums and told us to “copy the masters”, the asset store is proving to be a great repository of art and knowledge

I took that starmap from some Universities webpage page, I chose it because it’s the most accurate… And… I know enough now to to actually make that map, and have it rotate… I don’t know Unity or C well enough to make a system to place the stars by “punching in the numbers”… but I think we will get there eventually… I could hand craft it today, and work on getting the graphics to look nice… of course

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I’m focusing publicaly only on my “fangame” but, I think if I continue to slog through, later on, when it looks cool, it will be easier to do some recruiting (I got music, that’s a big step… I need another Unity person, and a writer… then, WeIl can charge like 5 bucks for the base game on Steam and everyone can have a dollar from the sales… ((that’s 3devs, a business expert, and Steam)

Today I’m going to scrap everything I’ve done with my player controller… like rotation, and Force… and I’m going to add those functions to individual ship components… for instance, I’m taking the truster model, and adding the script to that prefab… so that if the Thruster is damage, I can disable the model, enable the “damaged model” and get this… make a partical system of “crew sprites” so that you can see people getting blown (sucked?) out into space… also, seeing the decks and stuff inside the ship is a goal for me… and components are he way to go…

that, and I need to learn how to apply thrust through an onscreen button (so that I can set thrusters force, through a slider or something instead of the “W” arrow key… “S” for reverse of course… but see, that’s not how the Captain controls the ship… . the player should be able to take the helm and steer and do all that, but shouldn’t have to…

I need to learn, how to have stuff like an “onscreen” button and HUD… (I assume I’ll just attach any geometry to the players camera)

and I need to learn how to set up an inventory system… but there are tutorials for that… (so I can add and remove shp components)

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I am not quite there yet in Maya for that… um, guilty confession, I never learned about rigging… by the time rigging became a thing, there were enough “specialty” artists that there was an animator, and an effects person, and me, I focused on making landscapes and forests. (… wow, it actually feels good to admit that, I’ve been in denial about it for a while… )

so, in between doing Unity tutorials, I’m also doing Maya tutorials and though… hmm, a lot of these same effects I can built in Unity… but, BOOM, never occurred to me that I can design them in Maya and import the shaders too… of course, I’ve don’t it already, Ive added some simple textures to my spaceship… (though, really, I keep going back to wanting just straight up Phong shading, with very minimal textures… I think it will give the game a nice “clean” look)

and a good list of nearby stars, just so I wont lose it
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/nearstar.html

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and a link to a guy on youtube playing my Warhammer game from 1990s-ish

it got a 5% rating from PC Gamer, and sold 5K copies the first year…

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