:}:

To be clear, this game will absolutely have it's own Identity and have distinct differences from founding sandbox games. Ironically I feel like the genre is lacking in innovation, and very susceptible to tropes.

I want to make it known that I'm expending a lot of mental energy to not fall into these same traps... Those familiar with Starbound know how much of a disappointment it ended up being, not just due to willing incompetence but also the opposite too... There was certainly potential that was lazily unexploited. So even if some paths are retread, I have a calm conscience doing that. I also have a calm conscience not exploiting unpaid child labor and preying on a fanbases' enthusiasm.

Perhaps it's too early to talk about this since we have a long way to go as far as system dev is concerned, but here's a couple teaser points to give you an idea!

THA IDEAS!!

Tropes like "You spawn in a green forest and can walk left or right" will be actively avoided. Biomes will be made unique as much as possible and the highlights of traditional side-scrollers will be used as inspiration for world-gen (Platforming and verticality may play a greater role!).

Planets will be larger and more stuffed full of content... Perhaps controversially, travel between planets will be more difficult or expensive than Starbound. Encouraging the player to really take advantage of all the resources at their disposal and also encouraging us through development to give each one as much love as possible. Each planet should feel like a 'Mini terraria world'.

Also controversially, I might not include many randomly generated creatures (as seen in No Man's Sky). Though depending on how people feel this is definitely up for debate as it's a staple of Starbound. Procedurally generated creatures is either extremely bland on a fundamental level or has only ever been poorly executed... I am not sure which. If it's the former, I would like it to play an extremely minor Role, if one at all. I would rather hand-craft as much content as possible for each biome and planet (like terraria).

Okay well... What's finished?

Fundamental Lighting shaders (at least on-par with terraria, though we've set up nicely to create something akin to starbound).

Some world generation brushes and basic commands.

Hard and soft-loading of chunks to save on as much memory and CPU usage as possible.

Setting, Story baseline, and conceptualization of the first 3 playable species. Each race will have a different starting planet, and immediately different playthrough.

And honestly that's all so far! The next big important hurdle is being able to save and load a world. This will also apply to chunks out of render distance (unloading and saving to disk), and those entering render distance (loading from disk). This is actually not my first time making such a system and we've already put lots of elbow grease into making the chunk format very very optimized (using similar systems to Minecraft), so this shouldn't be bad at all! :)

Then after that is probably generating a test world, I suppose...? Then putting a player in it to mess around... Then everything comes naturally from there! Hm... And for Transperancy's sake.

CONCERNS

Multiplayer. While I have made an online multiplayer game before and it's definitely doable for this game, it would require some practice in a one-off test game to be fully confident. It would also take a LOT of time.