Jun and I frequently like to imagine that every teen in our game universe has had this conversation:
Teen: Dad, I printed the car and smashed it into a chayoha tree.
Dad: Alright, just don’t print another car between 1 and 3 this afternoon, I need the item-printer for a new set of khaki pants.
Teen: Whatever. Do we have star-paste in the fridge?
Dad: Yes. Of course.
Such a natural conversation is made possible by the ability to print items at will. That’s right. We have created an all-purpose printer meant for creating/materializing survival items of all kinds. This printer (and the resources that go into it) are crucial to getting by. Ingredients go in, items pop out. Check out the first draft of our item menu:
And here we see an iteration of what items would like once printed into existence:
Tangentially related: we tackled the development of ground-based collisions. Development, you ask? What is so hard about coding collisions? It’s like, just stopping something you nitwits. Ok listen, we’re doing our best. But basically the code has to do quite a bit: communicate that an object is not passable, remember that the desired direction was not possible, and have all this working on a curved surface (unlike most games out there — think skyrim, pubg, etc.). We couldn’t exactly use pre-made physics engines for that reason — the collision has to recognize that objects exist on a sphere, that gravity is pulled towards a center of mass as opposed to “downwards”, like on a flat surface. So the code had to be relatively original. And here’s the kicker, collisions have to appear fluid — no glitchy skipping and the like. Well, Here’s a screenplop of objects that were identified as impassible:
Until next time, mugalo folks (and space fathers, stay strong, teen angst is just a phase). Coming up later, we got some strange creatures to show off, as well as a peek into *gasp* combat!
Here are some more images from this week:
