Hi there, it’s time for another devlog detailing the progress made on After the Collapse, our post-apocalyptic base building game. This article is mostly going to explain the systems I’m putting in place to have varied and interesting survivors. For the newcomers, I would suggest to give the previous article a read first. I will also go through various improvements being made to the user interface and game systems. Enjoy!
Hi there !
Apologies for the lack of updates since the 1.15 release. The main reason is that what I am currently doing related to Unending Galaxy isn’t exactly great reading material for an in-depth article. With the game being released on Steam very soon, most of my time is spent proof reading and optimizing the code.
Anyway, yes, Unending Galaxy will be available on Steam very soon. The initial release won’t integrate all the bells and whistles, but I plan on gradually adding achievements and steam workshop support once the dust has settled a bit.
First of all, a big thank you to the fine folks at the Bay12 (Dwarf Fortress) forums ! Your help has been invaluable. If you want a pick at the Unending Galaxy’s topic it’s here.
Anyway, as we are slowly but surely closing in on the final release, I have been reviewing each feature one by one in order to make it whole. There’s still a lot of ground to cover but we’re getting there. I also improved how ships act in battle in quite a major way. Next beta should be available in roughly 2 weeks, barring any IRL issues.
Let’s get down to it, shall we ?
Hi guys !
My apologies for the delayed update, life got in the way and it’s likely that next week will be problematic as well. When I have to make a choice between coding and writing here, I favor the former. So don’t get alarmed by the erratic schedule, development goes on as usual.
Anyway, I made a fair bit of progress toward the release of the Beta 3 with a massive performance and stability boost, the new “free trading” AI module for your ships and multiple smaller other changes i made to the game.
Let’s get to it, shall we.
Hey there,
Sorry for the delay. As this week has been mostly about testing and balancing, it’s going to be a fairly unusual devlog format (I also apologize in advance for the mostly unrelated screenshots alongside the article). The seemingly small change of assigning sector ownership to whoever hold the most factories in the area, or to the first one to drop a military base, had extremely large repercussions in many, many parts of the game. As there’s really no accurate way to “speed up” the game to test said feature, I basically had to let the game run itself days and nights while occasionally monitoring and tuning the effects. Let’s see what happened.
Hi there !
So, the issue with the hard drive wasn’t too bad after all. The only loss is a part of my source control (git). This barbaric term describes a program that keep track of all the changes I make in the source code and which usually come with the ability to compare files with their older versions, track changelog, restore previous versions and so on. Loosing part of it isn’t really a problem except that it makes writing this article a bit more difficult. While I do keep the changelog file up to date separately, changes are written in no particular order, so I may be a bit fuzzy on the things I added between the last devlog and the last 3 days.
Anyway, there’s still plenty to discuss so let’s get to it, shall we 🙂
Hi and happy new year !
This is going to be a difficult article to write as I am watching the Awesome Games Done Quick event (a week long speed running live feed against cancer) too, and I am much worst at multitasking than the programs I write. Anyway, there’s quite a lot of ground to cover despite having taken a week off.
Let’s start with what the screenshots are showing : the new nebulae (and background). As I quickly explained in the previous quick post, I am using a procedural generation algorithm commonly known as Perlin Noise to produce the clouds. Basically, you enter a few numbers, and it produces an unique cloud and that can be tiled easily. It has other uses that I will explain further down.