Hey there, I certainly have to make things clear. Time is passing by quickly and I actually cant believe it is already 4 months after my last post, I had some posts planned but postponed them all the time. I did a lot of fundamental work so far and it wasn't worth an update. Next year you can expect regular updates.

Its a rework, not an update

The game on Steam is going to be updated. But the game I am working on is getting done from scratch, it is not an update on the existing code base. As I have explained it is too messed up both conceptually and on the technical side. This required a lot of fundamental things to be done first. That is dozens of classes and thousand lines of code. And maybe you will think holly cow he is insane, working on it for so long and then starting all over again, it will take another 10 years to get a demo or so. I understand that and that is also the reason why I didnt show anything yet, I may also thought that it was self explanatory. It is the right thing to do and it is coming along fine. I may underestimated the AI part a bit but overall the pace of development is much better than on the last version. I do reuse all the things that I can. For a system I was working on for weeks with headaches on the old game I was able to implement it completely in just a few hours as I already did all the troubleshooting.

What is done

The good news is that you see there 540 People walking consecutively at 44FPS and there is room to optimize the system, 300 run at 80+FPS. With the old system 40 people already challenged the CPU that was not intended at all. Also a number of 100-200 is already a very big amount of people for this game, but I dont limit that number, its up to the player and mechanics how much is possible.
Currently people walk in the scene, they choose a home to live and do simple AI decisions on whether they walk around or go home. I have a big part of the resource and item system in place (basically the same as before) so the next step is to harvest, produce and consume goods. Some AI and mechanics for that already is in place. The point is that once it is working there already is much more game than there ever was. That is certainly far away from what you call a finished game but the essential gameplay is actually there pretty early. Endciv now has really little in that sense. It has weather, it has doggies walking around and such but that is all not the essence of what a game should be about. That was my mistake, focusing on the wrong parts first and my attempt to correct that is to go for the basics first. I hope you believe in that once we actually got the game running those decorative things like graphics, audio and feeling can be added then, you have seen what the idea is. And of course that content still exists. But now the first game version might even use dummy people without animations but it will be something you can enjoy for way more than just a few minutes. It takes time but before I make a useless Christmas themed main menu next time I better give you some gameplay first.

An overview and open questions

Some of the overall features will remain such as finding goods in the wasteland, recycle trash, make a sad place a nice place, trade goods with others. The mechanics do change and instead of micromanagement and looking at each individual thing the focus is on the bigger picture. Also I want to make clear that is is all about to develop further, if you and me find that certain features that have been scraped are worth it then it can happen. One of those things is the Day/Night cycle. I will not implement it in the first version as I am not sure if it makes any sense. Games like this usually dont implement it for good reason. I will implement it later as an optional feature and then we can find out if it makes sense or not. I can go back to Endciv in the mid of January and I will focus on the features described. I can not tell you how long it will take that is the only honest estimate I can give. Have a good new year and I will get back to you in a month.

[ 2017-12-31 14:58:56 CET ] [ Original post ]