It has been well over two months so I think it’s about time for another update.
I have been struggling with a lack of motivation lately, not just for this project, but anything in general.
So what I have been doing is mostly just trying to relax and refresh my mind a little.
Thankfully I found some great animes to fill the time. And I have also taken a liking to Genshin Impact.
Now, with the procastination aside… Let’s talk about what’s new.
I have been working on improving the feeling of traveling to “the same cave” on a different save file.
I specify which resources you can find in each cave. This is to control how the progression will pan out.
But the rest of the content is randomly generated through material variations to give a new and exciting look.
The images below illustrates a rough working example:
And this effect will be applied on top of a random seed for generating the different sections as well.
So you can expect each save file to look a lot different from someone elses.
I will probably keep working more on this in the future. But I’m going to call it good for now.
I would like to focus on getting a demo of the game playable by the end of the year. And I feel like I’m very close to realizing that.
The current plan for the progression in the game is that you will iterate through the metals ascending to harder and harder metals.
Each metal will provide an expanded market and allow you to earn more money. But will also be gradually more difficult to collect.
You will be able to unlock upgrades to collect materials faster in time. And in general, make your choirs more satisfying.
Each type of metal will be contained within a separate permit location. Each permit may or may not contain several cave partitions.
Each cave partition could contain a different variety of items for you to unlock. But for the first playtest, I will keep it to a single cave per metal.
Some information for each permit is already known from the previous owner. But there could be more for you to discover.
I can decide if a certain resource is know or not. If I set it to unknown, it will display as an undiscovered resource in the permit panel.
(This is purely to give you something interesting to look forward to finding)
New permits can be unlocked with money. And will be increasingly expensive to fit with the desired progression pacing.
I think that about wraps up what I can show and tell for this time.
A lot of the work also went into improving communications between different parts of the code. Which is always a difficult task.
But it’s very satisfying when you can see that it all works together in the end.
Hopefully in my next post, I will have a demo available for download.
