Skylimit Tycoon Windows, Mac, Linux game

We have other day jobs as you might have read before, and the development has more or less been paused for a couple of months to get some insperation back. We have played some other games in the meantime.

Kendanware and Skylimit Tycoon

It's more than 2 years ago since we started Kendanware and trying to find the right type of game for us to develop. The idea of Skylimit Tycoon come quite early, but we started to design a game that we after some months decided to redesign, since it should be possible to custom build all rooms in the building, but it would be very hard to build a complex with 1000+ unique rooms and you would never be able to complete your skyskraper or even 10 floors. Even though we've simplified a lot; the game is probably more complex than you think, only the source code is around 3MB, which equals about 5-6 books (250 pages each).

We have learned a lot over the passed two years, even though both of us are Java developers since many years back, but game development is different. We have written some minor games since 1999. We had to learn how to use the game engine, which in our case is JMonkeyEngine and also learn to do some 3d modelling, writing basic shaders, etc.

First refactor of Graphics Engine - complete

The first refactor of the graphics engine has been completed and merged to the main development branch. The new version is using an event system to retreive updates and we have managed to remove some multithread issues by doing the rewrite. We hope that we haven't introduced too many new bugs during the rewrite.

The sad thing is that it looks exactly the same as before the rewrite, so it's nothing new to show you.

Next task

Our next task is to do some refactor of the definition structure. There are more than 30 different kinds of definitions that describe items such as elevators, stairs, furniture, rooms, etc. We hope to be able to reduce the amount of definitions and also reduce duplicate code for rendering, validate placement, path finding and other tasks. We expect that it will take a couple of weeks to get it done, since it's a major rewrite. This means that we need to update all room definitions so it is possible to place rooms. We will also need to reimport all models in to the new structure.

It's a quite massive job, but it will be easier for us to maintain and quicker to develop a good editor, less code to optimize and less code write tests for, which hopefully will lead to a better game in the end with less bugs,

UI

We've tried some different graphics styles for the user interface, but we've yet not found what we're looking for, so we will need to experiment some more before we are satisfied. We have tried more colorful generated 3d icons instead of just flat icons, but it is hard to get a UI that works from 1280x1024 to scale up to 4K and still have it to look good.

The challange continue, and we hope to get your support, since that inspire us even more!