I have seen the work of other people who try to re-create Starflight, to the point where it is unrecognizable and completely different from the game that I have come to know and love. My intent with this project is to do a faithful reproduction of the game when it comes to the gameplay feel and mechanics, but modernize the graphics as if the original developers were building it today. While the graphics would be far more advanced, you should still be able to instantly recognize it as being utterly and purely Starflight.

For example, compare the screen shots below. The first three were captured from the original Starflight game, and the last three are my re-creation in Unity.

Also – I have an ultra-wide monitor with a 21:9 aspect ratio and I have been disappointed with many modern games not being able to run properly using that aspect ratio. Haven’t we learned from our mistakes with building games for 4:3 resolution when 16:9 became the new standard? When designing the UI for games, it should work with a reasonably comprehensive range of aspect ratios, including those that don’t exist yet! Fortunately, Unity sports a very robust UI coordinate and scaling system and I am making the game work in any aspect ratio from 5:4 through 21:9 and beyond.

Speaking of screen shots, why can Unity not take screen shots of the game window? This seems like a given, considering that showing off images from Unity would be a great way to promote this game development platform. But nope, I have to use the Windows Snipping Tool, bring it into Photoshop, trim the bits off the sides, and export as JPEG. I think I am going to create a page to keep track of all my Unity gripes.

Welcome to my Starflight blog!

Allow me to start off by giving you a little background about me. I used to be a game programmer. Starting in 1996 and ending in 2010, I was a game programmer for much of that time frame. The first company I worked for was Bethesda Softworks. While I was there, I worked on several games, including Battlespire, Redguard, PBA Bowling 2, X-Car: Experimental Racing, and Burnout: Championship Drag Racing. The last game company I worked for was Rainbow Studios, which was a division of THQ. At Rainbow, I worked on Cars: The Video Game, Cars: Mater-National, Deadly Creatures, Dood’s Big Adventure, and several other unreleased games.

So now you know I am a bona fide game developer with many published games under my belt. My specialty is the game engine which includes graphics, artificial intelligence, physics, sound, music, networking, and so on.

It’s been 7 years since I have done any real game programming. Recently, I discovered that Unity Technologies have made their game engine available to hobbyists for free. I decided that it might be fun to get back into game programming by learning Unity. What better way to learn Unity than to remake one of my favorite childhood PC game: Starflight.

Starflight came out in 1986. I was just entering high school. I was quickly amazed and enthralled by the planet generator that this game uses, and it was the source of much fantasizing and inspiration for me. This game is deceptively simple – after all, it shipped on only two 5 1/4″ floppy disks. I spent many man-weeks exploring the Starflight universe and wondering at the technical aspects of it. I never did beat the game.

So, now that brings us to today and this website. I intend to chronicle my journey remaking Starflight with Unity, and sharing my experiences here. Hopefully, someone will get a kick out of this.

I fully intend to give credit where credit is due for all the things that I find on the Internet that I can use either in the game or on this website. For example, I found the box art image, that is displayed here in this post, at http://otherelectricities.com/neckdeep/starflight.html – an interesting web page. This is the exact box art for the version of Starflight that I have sitting on my desk, which I have had in my possession for 30 years.

By the way, this post has been made sticky so it will always appear first on the home page. All of the posts following this one appear in reverse chronological order, so that my frequent visitors are able to easily keep up. If you would like to start reading my posts from the beginning in the correct order, go directly to my next post which is over here.

If you would like to contact me, send me email at marvin dot herbold at gmail dot com.