Hello and welcome to the first proper devlog for Solaria, the minimalist solarpunk city builder where the city builds itself! Please excuse the long gap between posts, this is what catching the plague does to a project.

Before we get started then, I am obliged to mention a couple of things:

• You can now officially wishlist the game on Steam!
• And if you prefer video devlogs, you can watch this process in a bit more detail here:

Everything on the Steam page is very early days but having it up probably won’t hurt, and if it does that’ll be an interesting thing to learn! We shall see :D

Anyway. One of my favourite things about devlogs is seeing ideas develop right from the very beginning. So on that note today we’re looking at how I went from this:

To this!

Since I was only just learning Godot for this project, my usual approach of planning everything out step by step wasn’t going to work as I had no idea what those steps needed to be. Before I could even really think about gameplay and whatnot, there were three things I needed to make sure I was able to do:

• Grasp the concept of generating and working with a hex grid
• Learn enough basic Blender skills to do the game justice
• Get comfortable working with Godot and GDScript in general

None of which would be easy because a) I’d never done anything like this before and didn’t have a clue, b) I ain’t no artist! and c) I’d chosen to go straight for Godot 4 (ignoring sage advice to the contrary) and every tutorial I tried to follow needed to be translated to the new version first!

It took an entire day to get that hex out of Blender, into Godot, and actually instantiated in my scene. Seriously.

Thankfully once that was done and I’d picked up some absolute basics, things got a little faster! I followed this tutorial by jmbiv on generating hex grids, and made one tiny change at a time until I’d made the grid work in the way I needed it to, ie starting in the middle and working outwards in all directions.

Eventually I figured out how to calculate the next available hexes, and the player could select one to build! City builder, basically complete! Now I just had to decide on, like, an actual aesthetic. And I’d been putting this off for ages because frankly I had no ideas at all, so decided to ignore it just a bit longer and put in some basic demand bars instead.

The first version was easy enough to build, but it took a little while before I figured out how to actually apply any styles which was quite embarrassing but such is life!

Now back to aesthetics.

Luckily a combination of solarpunk communities on Lemmy and cool concept art on Pinterest served as inspiration, and I realised solarpunk was actually the perfect fit for the smaller-scale, stripped-back and slow-paced gameplay I would eventually be going for.

Without any further ado I dove into the world of Grant Abitt Blender tutorials and ended up with my first set of placeholder models, which as you can see make a huge difference to the vibe of the game!

There may still be no gameplay at this point, but the models are very simple so they didn’t take long to make, and having them there was actually quite inspirational in terms of generating gameplay ideas and cementing the overall vibe I was going for.

These quick placeholder models have attracted a lot of compliments (and as for the occasional bit of criticism, they’re placeholders, I’m just ignoring that) and I think that’s because of two main things:

• The consistently minimalist style means they all look like they belong to the same world
• The consistent colour palette (nabbed from Lospec) looks a lot more professional than just picking random colours

Introducing the central hub building that honestly, I still don’t know the full purpose of in-game but time will tell…

Houses, with no doors or other identifying features but we’ll ignore that. They’re a vibe…

A market that doesn’t look anything like a market but I promise it will…

And these super cute solar panels that I am super chuffed with for some reason!

At this point I’d worked on the game on 31 separate days. Sometimes for hours, sometimes just for thirty minutes. But it’d taken about three calendar months!

You often see especially with younger gamedevs they’re able to put sooooo much time into their projects and make such impressive progress, but that’s not my life and it’s probably never going to be, so slow and steady is going to have to be good enough.

On that note then! In the next devlog we’ll look at adding citizens, generally bringing the world to life, and the absolute nightmare of pathfinding I had along the way. Hurrah!

See you next time :D