Image credit: Image credit - ProbablyNot
21.03: March 2021 Devblog
Thursday, April 1, 2021
Written by: CosmicCoincidence
SS3D Build: v0.3.95b
Big plans require big action.
March Recap
Thanks again to all our lovely supporters, it's because of you guys we have put forth the effort to make a new plan of action to make a working prototype of a game loop as our new milestone.
New Milestone
We saw that now that money is a factor, we could no longer continue developing randomly. We don't want to throw bounty money at tasks they may end up completely broken if the underlying systems need future rework. To completely avoid future rework, it would be ideal to develop the game linearly, starting with the most core pieces and working up. This, however, is a very slow process and it's no secret our development has already been quite slow.
We had a team meeting in discord this week (with the added presence from Jack Trachea from UnityStation) discussing these topics. With the added insight from Jack on UnityStation's development, we concluded it would be highly beneficial to create a 'game slice' or a basic playable round to release as a sort of alpha or demo (we decided to focus on the traitor gamemode first). This would hopefully attract some new players, testers, or even developers. And to help achieve this goal in as short of time period as possible, it would be advisable to not include some systems, or in some cases include incomplete systems. But this will likely cause them to need rework later.
So we broke up the milestone into a 5-step process that we believe balances releasing a playable game loop ASAP and reducing future rework. Each part of this process also has its own milestone page on our github.
- First and foremost, we need to design our major systems to all be future-proof even if we aren't implementing them fully yet. The core systems we do need to be fully robust initially are at least interactions, containers, & tilemap. Currently, the tilemap system needs an overhaul due to trouble scaling. Interactions may need some upgrades too.
- Secondly, we need a few new systems like animation, clothing, & basic health. Health is one of those that we will have a complex design for but our first implementation will be basic. We need some form of health in our demo for playability, but we will plan for its future replacement.
- Third we need some complementary systems like basic construction, crafting, & combat.
- Fourth, we need to dump in some content for jobs so the player has things to do.
- Finally, a server hub and a traitor gamemode makes it a fairly complete loop.
From here we have begun creating tasks for this process and will be adding bounties values to many of them soon. So although we do not have any bounties made just yet, if you have been wondering where your donation money will be going, it will first be distributed to tasks in step-1 of our milestone process once we conclude their bounty worth.
Details
Goao (John)
- Added some basic graphic quality settings to the lobby menu, this may help those with slower PCs test our current game.
- Went through and commented on lots of our undocumented code.
Models
Cornelius still on a roll, contributing some apples, bbq sauce, and a very badass and very large xeno alien queen!
Onebi is back after several moons and brings us these modular cyberdecks. Not sure what a cyberdeck is? Think of it as a sci-fi hacking tool that connects with the user's brain.
Art
Probably Not can be credited again with this month's awesome blog art.
Conclusion
We will be having another dev meeting in the Discord if you want to follow along close with our next moves. It will be on April 3rd (today) at 8pm UST. A great man once said, "be there, or be square".