SEVEN THOUSAND! – Dev Blog 76
An important and very happy day. My Twitter account has hit 7000 followers! Which is a mind blowing number. So many different folks following my game development journey: streamers, gamers, fellow game developers, fans of Fringe Planet and just generally awesome folk. It is incredible to think that so many people are both enjoying my content as well as providing feedback on the game.
It is incredibly humbling to know that I have such a huge network of support around the game. So many folks providing support, advice and encouragement. I really have to say thank you to all of you for helping me achieve this massive milestone! Every like/comment and RT counts, and I am incredibly appreciative of it all.
As a solo game developer, I tend to think of Twitter as my office – helps stave off some of the isolation that comes from working by yourself. There is always something to talk about or someone to interact with. So, I guess I should be saying thanks for making this the best office ever!
This week there has been two main chunks of work – the first is the continuing work on the look and feel of the game, more texture tweaking, shader and model experiments. This will be on going, I’m getting a lot more happy with the look of the game now, but there are still a lot of ideas I’m working on before I completely committed to an artstyle. I’ve been playing around a lot with full screen post processing effects to various different levels of success. But I am getting there slowly.
The second chunk of work was working on improving the task manager. Every order you issue in Fringe Planet (build a component, put a voxel here, cook a meal) creates a task. Everything a peon needs to do to keep itself happy/alive (have a sleep, go and warm up by a fire, eat a meal) also creates a task. Peon created tasks are a higher priority compared to player issued commands. Which can lead to a situation where the peons are busy looking after themselves eating and sleeping, while potentially ignoring player orders.
A classic example of this is peons eating raw food ingredients and making themselves depressed. Which leads to them eating more. All the while there are player orders to cook ingredients into meals (which will stop the cycle). But the peons are too busy eating and being depressed, so they never get round to creating a meal. So I’ve been working on task prioritisation to prevent this, as well as making the peons a little more intelligent about which tasks they should perform (based on location and peon skills). It’s quite an interesting puzzle!
Finally, some news about my holiday. I’ll be taking time off development over Christmas – with family and friends visiting, it will be nice to get away from the computer for a while. So my “official” holiday will be from 18th December to the 5th January. I won’t be as active on Twitter during these dates, but I’ll be writing the Friday blog posts in advance, so you’ll still get some content! Am really looking forward to some downtime. I’ll still be checking emails during this time, though may be slow in answering them. Prepare for a very re-energised Nic in 2020!
There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try: