12 mining machines

As the world turns – Dev Blog 98

A very busy week for me. It started on Monday (as most weeks do) – with a great Zoom conference with the Luton Creative Forum – an amazing group of local creatives. I spoke about game development and digital delivery of creative content, which was awesome. Even more awesomely our local MP was present, which I thought was a really awesome piece of community outreach.

Zoom meeting

Any regular readers of this blog (or if you have visited/read the Sigil Initiative Ltd page) knows part of my master plan is to help turn Luton into center of game development excellence. And these are the first few tentative steps to get there. Met a bunch of great people that I had heard off but hadn’t spoken too, so that was great as well. Plus, most importantly, many pets were shown off.

I’ve also been pitching a lot this week – both for funding and for freelance work. Keeping the lights on is becoming increasingly difficult in this virus struck world. I know I’m not the only person having troubles, but it is incredibly time consuming task alas – and sometimes quite disheartening. Sadly, I’m one of the limited companies that have slipped through the cracks of UK Government assistance – you can read a lot more about companies in a similar position here: ForgottenLtd.  However, I am still staying positive.

Peons waking up

Development on Fringe Planet is still on going, and will always be on going even if the work week becomes full of freelance work. I’m very, very dedicated to releasing it, especially as such an amazing community has grown up around the game – which I still find incredibly humbling. It’s the balance of keeping the lights on and knocking off Fringe Planet TODOs which is fairly challenging.

A dead peon

This week, development wise, I’ve been mostly focused on two things, optimising saving/loading the game as well as working on making peon emotions more graphical.  Save files are currently huge and have a vast amount of useless information in a very inefficient format, so I’ve been compressing it down into something more manageable, which has been interesting. Still feel there is a little bit of magic with saving and loading games. The nice thing is (as I’m not developing on SSD) loading game times have dropped dramatically – and should be incredibly quick on an SSD. There is something incredibly satisfying about working on optimisations – it’s one of my favourite game development “chores”.

Featured Image - Mounds

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the events that are shaking the world at the moment – the riots in American and BlackLivesMatter. The cowardly and needless death of a man in America has shocked the world and ignited a global wave of protest. I stand firmly with the Black Lives Matter movement, the world needs to change and racism in all it’s forms needs to end – both institutionally and non-institutionally. If there are any BAME gamedevs reading this and you think there is a way I can help, please reach out – anything from advice to signal boosting. I’m more than happy to help.

Be safe out there folks!

There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

code