Turbostellar

This is an extra-early demo of the Space Sim/RPG Turbostellar. The gameplay is extremely barebones and is really only there so there's something for you to do while you marvel (or scoff) at the technical qualities of the game's engine.

That said, there is a fail state, so it's not just a tech-demo walking simulator. You can get shot up by the patrol bots, or kill yourself by smashing into the ground at 100m/s with the debug jetpack.

The intention is to one day turn this into a Daggerfall-In-Space kind of RPG. The space simulation elements will mostly be a background feature, while random events and quests will be driven by an underlying faction metagame.

CONTROLS

• WASD to move
• Space to jump - hold it down to control the height of the jump
• Ctrl to "crouch" - there's no actual crouching yet but you can press this to cancel a jump or to go downwards when using the debug jetpack.
• R to reload
• H to holster your currently equipped item
• F to interact
• C to engage the debugging jetpack - Thereafter use the movement controls to direct your movement
• Tab to open the inventory/orbital map - You can also open each specifically with I and M
• Escape to get to the pause menu

TIPS

• You ignore fall damage so long as the debug jetpack is active
• Number keys and scroll wheel can be used to select items from your hotbar
• Items can be picked up and dropped anywhere in the GUI when the inventory is open, or in the world if you're close enough
• There's nothing to actually find out in the wilderness this time around, all of the items, enemies, and NPCs are at the fast-travel locations
• You can toggle fullscreen with Alt+Enter
• If you use the debug jetpack to fly right away from your current planet eventually your compass turns off and you can use Q and E to roll left and right as there won't be any consistent "up" direction for you to spin around up in space.
• It is possible to fly to other planetoids, there is a change in velocity when you enter the patched conic region of the other world but it should no longer completely throw your velocity off-course. Flying between Nicoya and Sampo takes a few minutes but is relatively easy. Flying between either of them and Higuerota is a significant challenge that I haven't even tried doing myself yet.
• The system star is just a big sprite the planets rotate around at the moment, it has no gravitational pull and nothing happens if you fly into it.

POSSIBLE BUGS

• The Windows platform layer gets way less attention than the Linux version outside of Demo Days. In particular the early versions of this demo had critical problems registering input due to how I was interpreting WM_KEYDOWN and WM_KEYUP messages, storing them as a running count rather than as on/off. This should now be resolved and input should work properly on Windows but let me know if you run into any other problems.