The first week back – Dev Blog 78
This week has been all about getting back into the swing of things – continuing full time development on Fringe Planet. A holiday is always a wonderful thing (and great for recharging the batteries) – but the work still needs to be done. Doubly so, when you are a solo developer.
The big push this week has been a large chunk of planning – working out the milestones to get Fringe Planet released this year. I’m incredibly excited about this and I’m almost ready to give an actual release date. Still a few more things to work out first, but I do have a date in mind. Which will probably coincide with the surprise release of Rimworld2 or the Steam launch of Dwarf Fortress knowing my luck!
There has also been some very interesting discussions this week about bringing Fringe Planet to VR. I feel the game itself would lend itself very well to VR – it would be the quite literal God sim (I do miss God sims…). Sitting at a table zooming a floating island around you and issuing your orders to peons. Watching buildings get built as you zoom about in an omnipresent way. Zooming all the way in and watching the peons perform a ritual from a first person view. There is an amazing amount that could be done.
This is, at the moment, all very tentative. There are a few hurdles that need to be overcome first – but this is very much a direction I would love to go. Before non-VR folks get worried – I’d never just publish Fringe Planet as VR only – it’s incredibly important to me that the game is as accessible as possible – so a non-VR version will always be the priority. This would be something I’d look into fully after the initial EA launch of Fringe Planet – need to keep the lights on in reality, even if I am in a virtual Void!
I’ve also spent some time optimising both this blog and the main website for mobile. I noticed quite the increase in mobile traffic, but much to my chagrin I noticed that the main site wasn’t playing that nicely with actual phones. Be this a lesson to everyone who does web development – it’s worth testing your site on actual devices, rather than relying on emulators! If you are using a mobile device and notice any issues – please feel free to reach out, always happy to get bug reports.
Finally, I’ve been working on an MVP related to the voxel terrain, adding some cool new features. More details to follow about this next week!
There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try: