Devblog #5 - Complete Rewrite and Story News! - Beyond Technology

Hello again!

Welcome to the fifth devblog. It has been quite a while since the last one (9 months) and I must admit that I took a bit of a break from developing and focused more on school and other hobbies of mine. The reason I stopped in the first place was that my codebase was rather messy and a lot of the engine foundations was designed very poorly and was not very efficient. So I decided to rewrite the whole game, this time the game should read a lot of its content from files. This has a lot of benefits, firstly the code is a lot more structured and cleaner, secondly, it's easier for me to add content and lastly is very easy to add mod support later on.

Other game decisions:
During the break, I thought about a story for the game and what features it should have and so on. I decided, that the basic idea should be that an exploration robot crashlanded on a planet, after being sent out by a team of space scientists to explore a planet. The robot has lost a lot of its memory and is also unable to communicate back to the space station. Now its goal should be to build up a robot colony on the planet and return to the space station.

What is the current state?
The current state of the game is a (very) early technical demo, not much content is in the game yet. I only worked on the core engine features and not much else. Pretty much every tile, item and entity in the game is loaded from files and is "described" in a component-based system. Here is an example of what a tile might look like:

"2;LOCALIZABLE;grass;RENDERABLE;grass;PHYSICS;0;0;32;32;LIGHT;0;.5;MATERIAL;dirt;30;1"

I also looked at the (now) old codebase and pretty much improved every part of the game's code both performance-wise and readability-wise.

Here is a video of what the game currently looks like to play:

In the last part of the video for instance, you can see the optimized physics mesh generation!

Merry Christmas,
ProRed