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Heathencall, potentially the last bastion of human life in the galaxy, has been changing the last few years. The animals are going insane and swarming in killing masses. You are a scout tasked with finding and moving your village to a new home safe from the largest swarm ever encountered. Will you save your village, or fail them and see your entire village eaten alive.

Post news Report RSS The Weekly Wastelander: Issue 2

More news on the development front of Heathencall and a special treat.

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The Weekly Wastelander


Issue #2


Welcome Wastelanders to another issue of The Weekly Wastelander. This week has been a bit more productive then last week though mostly on the back door side of things than the front.

Optimization is chugging along at a decent pace. So far I have cut out around two hundred and fifty lines of codes that have become redundant due to this optimizing. With only ten events currently cutting out this many redundant lines is quite a lot since I don't even remember writing that much. Once I have all of the events I want to write (about three hundred) this optimization will mean somewhere in the range of 2400 to 3600 lines no longer needed for the game which means a smaller and faster game. There is a bit more to work out in the coding to be fully optimized that could cut out even more useless space taking code but there is a few hiccups in my actual programming knowledge to work out and the nature of the specific bits make it difficult to find a catch all code that will work for me.

This week I have a special treat for everyone: The very first trailer! Understand I'm not very good at making trailers as anyone who has seen my Youtube channel can tell you. Eventually I will be releasing a better one once I get some better artwork done for the game but for something quick and dirty this one works well for me. NOTE: I didn't notice that the Fatigue, Hunger, and Thirst tracking bars weren't displaying for some reason in the trailer, they will be in the big orange-yellow box on the top of the screen dead center.

I did a lot of trouble shooting over the last week trying to nail down bugs in the screen resolution changer. It's been one of my biggest troubles over the course of development and it's finally looking like something that I have gotten to work, somewhat. There are still a few glitches with it but I think I've gotten a good workaround that should work to allow players to change between 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, and 1920x1080. Currently the 1920x1080 resolution is a bit stretched but in my own opinion it still looks really nice. Also it always loads up in 1024x768 as that is the only way I can get all of the text and objects to line up correctly. Hopefully I will get this fixed completely before the alpha release.

Another great thing this week is a FULLY FUNCTIONAL saving and loading system. This is something that I have been struggling with since I began developing the game. The engine hasn't been used for something this expansive before as far as I could tell so finding examples on how to get the save system working how I need it was almost impossible.

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