I'm so sorry to everybody here that it's been a while since I've posted an update. It's been a slightly rough block of months for me. Without getting into too much detail, I've been working really hard at my day job since this COVID thing started. My girlfriend, who's lived with me for the last few years, moved out. A lot of stuff has just been falling apart. It really hasn't been such a great such a great time for me, but the project's still moving forward, and I've tried my best to keep up the pace with work on Outer Colony during evenings and weekends.
In a weird way, it's been one of the only constants for me as everything else changes. You work on this thing, and you celebrate these quiet, technical milestones: esoteric accomplishments about class hierarchies and efficient packet sizes, abstract stuff that nobody would really care about. You smile at repository commits, in a room by yourself, year in and year out. It's weird to work on a project like this. I like it, though. I keep doing it. It makes me feel better. I hope other people can enjoy it, someday.
Apologies in advance for the haphazard nature of this update, as I'm just typing out some Faulkner-style stream of consciousness before I go to bed.
The isometric graphics overhaul is getting to a rather good place, and the game is reaching a state where it's decidedly playable again. Here's a tiny colony I'm just starting to build, got a concrete hut, the lads are planting some crops. Not a ton going on yet, but here's what things are generally looking like:
Creature sprites, good God, creature sprites. We're down to less than 10 species that need animations, out of 54 total. It might seem stupid to have 54 creature species and the gajillions of frames of animations in the game right off the bat, but the ecosystems really need them to work right. Every biome / biome-group has a food chain, and a bunch of work has gone into getting the environments themselves to work semi-correctly, and I just hated the thought of cutting any creature species out. Besides, a bunch of species have interesting lifecycle quirks and behavioral nuances, and I just couldn't bring myself to scrap any of them, given all the coding work that's already been done.
In the end, I'm glad I kept them all in. It stretched the cost and timeline needed for sprite production, but it's been worth it, at least to me. And I kinda' hope players can appreciate that level of nuance, and that it ultimately adds to the feeling of depth and quality of the worlds. I'm a little tired tonight, so I didn't quite have it in me to put together a proper demo video, but here's a couple minute clip just showing a few creature sprites in a test window in the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeVsMOmvGQo&feature=youtu.beNote: It's super hard to see the creature sprites in the initial upload. The sprites are small, but they look alright when I watch the video locally on my hard drive. Maybe YouTube is doing something with compression? I'm not 100% sure, but I'll try to post a better video or screen shots soon.
I think the procedural human sprite system has turned out rather well, too. This is where things get really cool, and I'll make a separate post that's dedicated entirely to this. As humans equip and take off pieces of clothing, weapons, and other items, it'll change their appearance / animations to reflect the underlying data model. All sorts of physical features also contribute to the generated sprite, like skin tone, hair style, hair color, and even eye color, if you look very carefully.
The way it ultimately works with this sort of pixel art is just that there are a huge number of little images that all fit together just right. It's been painstaking and tedious to put this system together, but seeing all the little people running around, looking different, wearing different things – I like it a lot. We need two more baseline animations for the system to be 100% green: a death animation and a swimming animation, but I think that should put everything in good shape. If you look at the screenshot of the colony above, everybody's wearing baseline spacer attire, but if you look carefully, you can see various skin tones, hair styles, hair colors, and more.
Here are a couple more screenshots. This is a guy wearing a full set of kevlar armor:
Here's a guy wearing a more advanced set, shape memory alloy armor:
(Note: You can mix and match sets / clothing items. It's possible to put on a kevlar helmet and SMA armor pants, for example.)
There have been a ton of other little updates over the last several months, just addressing minor issues to improve playability and add small features I've felt like coding. There's now a “nano” size for worlds, allowing players with highly limited hardware to generate single-region planets. I've been replacing all the illustrations and concept art in various interfaces with proper pixel art, in order to maintain a consistent aesthetic and to improve the game's look-and-feel. I really want players to be able to feel the worlds, to lose themselves in the experience of playing, and I think the pixel art in the actual in-game dialogs really helps create the right sort of environment for that.
Here are a couple really quick screenshots showing what I mean, with new biome artwork in the tile inspection tool. These show warm sea and xeric shrublands, but there's new artwork going in everywhere.
Warm Sea:
Xeric Shrublands:
Here's the world generator, showing some new art as a world is built in the background:
There's a lot more to write about, but I've got to get some sleep for now, and I want to post this before I do. I'm thinking about rebranding the project again. Does anybody remember when this was called The Far Reaches? I've got to re-do all the in game tutorials. There are still some minor features that the renderer needs, like showing pending construction / mining / logging orders. Like the stuff Blood_Librarian suggested above, there's a bunch of little work happening to try to improve UX, try to convey information better to players. The focus is going to shift over to that, once we release again and can start gathering more feedback.
I've got to rebuild the website wholesale, and I've got to find time for that. There's a bug right now that's preventing multiplayer servers from saving worlds correctly, obviously that's got to be addressed. There's a ton more work to do, but we'll just keep moving forward, and when it's in a state that's ready for re-release, hopefully we can start having a bunch of fun with it.
Thanks as always for everybody's patience, and I appreciate everyone's kind words and support from the last few comments. I'll try to post the next update in less time than it's taken me to post this one.
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Topic: Outer Colony (Read 66304 times)