Pass the tissues…
I’ve not had the best of weeks myself, whatever I had last week carried over into this week and got worse so it’s monopolised most of my time. I did get a few things done though.
I had a skim though the Design and tweaked some language and updated a few concepts to make them a bit more believable.
I still have quite a few things I need to do though. Updated ship concepts, refining how weapons and utilities work, etc.
I don’t want to create too much feature creep though and generate a concept that is just way out of scope for what we want to do.
The Design is very much a living document, and will continue to be tweaked as development continues.
One of the things that I have going for me is a large(ish) group of colleagues that have unique talents and a love for space games. So I’ve been having a chat to designers of all kinds to see if what ideas and concepts they may bring to the table with them, or if they are interested in providing assets as development continues.
Like we mentioned last week we managed to get “Steamworks” integration working, this has also allowed us to distribute testing keys to people close to the development team. So far, all our tests have proved successful, or at least informative!
⚡ Shockk has largely been kept busy by building in a “developer console” in the engine so we can change parameters for testing without having to recompile the whole codebase every single time we make even a minor change.
Some of these changes will later be used for dynamic world generation anyway, so may as well get them in now.
However, this has proven quite tricky to implement.
So, building a live debug console into an engine isn’t easy.
The main roadblock has been the fact that to type into a console that is overlaid on gameplay involves unbinding keys that are used in the game and rebinding them to a text input on the fly.
Fortunately, once this is figure out, in-game chat should be a breeze… we hope.
We also need this function to render a pause/options menu, who knew?
Collision now works! Kind of.
A simple “axis-aligned bounding box” is drawn around all objects, and is thus much larger than the actual objects at this time.
The calculations for collision zones are also sub-optimal at this time, so performance has taken a bit of a hit.
These issues will hopefully be fully resolved before the public release of the tech demo.
Right now ⚡ Shockk is also working on a technical overview on how they’ve implemented “uniform randomness” in our world generator. You’ll be able to read that here once it’s up!
By next week we also hope to have the developer/debug console completed and improved collision detection.
Improvements will be made to our Steam page for when it gets launched, and I hope to have some cool concept art for the corporations in the game from one of my colleagues.
See you all next week!
-🦊 The Fox, Project Manager