Hello. I've been working on Sunderstar for a while, but this is the first time I've written about it here.
Sunderstar is a multiplayer top-down space shooter I'm making solo in Unity. Players share a persistent team arena, break asteroids for resources, improve their ships, and fight over personal and team score.
The idea sounds fairly simple. Building the multiplayer foundation was not.
Much of my work so far has been on things that are hard to show in a short video: the dedicated server, authoritative movement and combat, reconnects, team admission, and resource ownership. None of that makes a dramatic trailer, but a multiplayer session falls apart quickly without it.
What can you do in the game?
The current prototype lets you:
- connect to a dedicated server;
- fly with arcade-style movement and a small amount of inertia;
- aim manually or switch the whole ship to automatic fire;
- destroy asteroids and collect the resources they release;
- improve ship stats and unlock new hulls;
- fight for your team and compete for score;
- respawn at your team's base after being destroyed.
Team bases also have AI-controlled defenders, so the arena still has some teeth when only a few people are connected.
It works, but it is rough. Balance, presentation, audio, and parts of the interface are still changing.
What am I working on now?
I rebuilt the connection screen and player HUD with Unity UI Toolkit. The network and gameplay behavior stayed the same, but the new interface is easier for me to maintain and expand.
The interface now supports English, Russian, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. It selects a supported system language on the first launch, and players can change it manually.
These changes are in the development build. The client currently available on itch.io may be a little behind the footage in this post.
About the playtest
The Windows client is still an early closed test build. Joining the server requires an access key.
Expect bugs, uneven balance, unfinished presentation, and systems that may change between builds. At this stage, I'm trying to answer a few basic questions:
- Does flying the ship feel good?
- Can you follow a fight when several ships are nearby?
- Is collecting resources satisfying?
- Can a new player work out what to do without a long explanation?
If you want to see where the game goes, follow the project here on itch.io. I'll write the next devlog when I have something worth showing, rather than inventing a weekly update out of thin air.