STARDUST 0.4.1

"May all those that live their fate find happiness. To all those that defy it find glory."

Art Fight: Game Jam

STARDUST: CRYSTAL, is set in a fictional world of my own creation. Inspired by climate fiction and modern fantasies like Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere1. So much so I would even call my world building philosophy Cosmere-isque. I would love to build a world in which the marriage of magic and technology thrives when put to the use for the communal good, and lashes out when used for wealth-hoarding means. But the skills required for that are out of my reach, so instead I challenged myself to make a video game.

Art Fight2 is an annual, challenge/game that takes place in July for one month. The "fight" is attacking other players by drawing their Original Characters. I have been apart of this game for 5 years now, but haven't really participated until now. The benefit of this challenge in my eyes is the distance created by drawing someone else character. You could instead of getting bogged down in the minutiae of translating your stories created in your mind. One could re-imagine the information given to them by a random stranger.

The next ingredient for STARDUST: CRYSTAL, is the popular Game Jam format. Game, coming from the conceptualizing of a board, card, video game, etc. Then Jam the musical jam session. I've seen so many of these on itch.io. They even have a Gantt chart like calendar to organize overlapping events.

The last component of this venture is comes in three parts, that I would like to summarize quickly before discussing the actually game.

Endless Sky3: An open-source game created in C++, that I have been so opposed with I finally dropped trying to learn HTML, and downloaded a C/C++ compiler for my computer. Word of advice just use Linux, Text Editor, & the Terminal.

GB Studio4: This is the engine used by me to create this project, it is a drag and drop visual engine that uses C and SM 83 instruction set. To emulate Game Boy games on a Virtual Machine. Currently my new obsession because it narrows all my ideas down to a $160x144$ window.

C/C++: I am trying to learn how to program as an escape from doing MLT homework. It's quite the undertaking, but a lot healthier than playing Endless Sky for endless hours at launch. So far I've been reading "C++ Programming; Precision and Performance: the C++ advantage."5 The best this book has offered me is an understanding of software jargon.

0.4.1

I honestly don't know what more to say. 6 Using Tonsky's satiric Pride version as a grading scale Pride.Default.Shame . STARDUST: CRYSTAL is incomplete on purpose, the goal was to create something legible, and communicate my ideas for a fantasy setting. While I have pride in myself, I still want this project to look better, and that's something I'll work on in the next year when I rebuild this project from the ground up. Five different versions of this game have been built and release with only one being the shameful same day patch for a glaring bug.

Moving forward I'll be taking documentation seriously, recording bugs and bad builds.

I don't have much to say, this development log was due mid-July and I'm struggling to type right now.

PAWN STAR!!!

tune in next time.

Footnotes

(2009, July 31). Brandon Sanderson. Retrieved July 28, 2025, from https://www.brandonsanderson.com/ ↩

How it works. (n.d.). Art Fight. Retrieved July 28, 2025, from https://artfight.net/info/about ↩

(n.d.). Endless Sky, an open source space trading and combat game. Retrieved July 28, 2025, from https://endless-sky.github.io/ ↩

GB studio by Chris Maltby. (2019, March 18). itch.io. Retrieved July 28, 2025, from https://chrismaltby.itch.io/gb-studio ↩

McGrath, M. (2025). C++ programming in easy steps (7th ed.). In Easy Steps Limited. ↩

Tonsky, N. (n.d.). Pride Versioning - Pride Versioning 🏳️‍🌈 0.3.0. https://pridever.org/ ↩

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