Week 54: the Elder Voxels I

The weeks are getting better!

Most of this week was spent working on the voxel forest demo from last week! Also, I’m starting to plan ahead for afterwards.

I also made two Pico-8 doodles this week, one of which (the flame one) is a remake of one of the first few doodles!

Last week I said I would try and do two gamejams. I totally missed the BitsyJam because I thought it would end a few days later than it actually did. (it was already over when I realized) And I’m probably gonna pass on the Adventure Jam too because I don’t have the energy to do anything with actual narratives for now. Sorry if you got excited about it last week, but I want to stay focused and actually release stuff. :X

Anyway! I made some progress on the Pico-8 Voxel Forest thing! It still not really a game, although I did put in some kind of draft of interactivity with buttons! I also made a bunch of voxel tiles to be placed on the random map, and  I added a TES-style compass and a procgen night sky!

One of the most interesting optimization I implemented this week was that the rendering distance of the voxels is now dynamic and depends on the current CPU usage. Basically, I made the rendering distance clever, so that in case there’s more voxels to show for whatever reason or that something else is happening, this distance gets lower, fewer voxels get rendered and the CPU usage stays under 100%. Optimization that takes care of optimization for you is the best kind of optimization.

Sadly I still don’t know what the game will be. As I wrote somewhere above, I don’t have the energy to make a narrative thing, so I will probably try to make it an action game somehow. I want to figure it out and finish it this next week though! When it’s done I also want to write a special Doodle Insights all about this project and release that simultaneously with the game!

By the way, last week’s Doodle Insights was about masking and layering and I think it turned out pretty good, you should check it out!

Ok that’s it for this week but I didn’t actually write that much so let’s talk about the next projects a bit.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since I released Gar’s Den, but I’d like to make a bigger/better version of Gar’s Den with Love2D. But seeing how I ended up dropping the One Room Dungeon remake, I’ve been holding off from that idea. I still want to keep on thinking on how to implement things and how to work on it before actually starting work on it. But it will probably happen eventually and I think it has the potential to be quite glorious.

More recently though, I’ve been fondling the idea of making a game just for mobiles, or rather a toy, based on the concept of the Fidget Cube but as a video game. You’d have screens with different types of locks to unlock with simple movements and each screen unlocks the next one. And I think I would leave it at that, no score, no narrative, no difficulty, just rewarding visual effects to make you feel even better about moving things around for no reason. I need to think some more about this but I think it could be a fun project for a few days!

So it’ll be the voxel fps game, then the fidget game and then the new Gar’s Den! Or you know, maybe I’ll just change my mind about all that.

Next week I’m finishing the voxel game and writing the article about it! There should also be a few more Pico-8 Doodles!

Have a great week!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG