Hello Logicians! It's been a year and a half since the last installment of Logic World Wednesdays, our weekly devblog. Well, we're back, and you can expect regular (hopefully weekly!) blogs until at least the end of this year.
I (Jimmy) made a little video where I talk about what happened and what's coming next. The short version is that we didn't make enough money with LW to sustain full-time work on it, and I had to get another job. But I've realized that making Logic World is the thing I want to do most, so I left my other job and I'll be focused on LW full-time for as long as my savings last.
If I can grow Logic World revenue enough to pay for my rent and groceries, I'll continue full-time Logic World work for as long as it takes to finish the game. If we make money beyond that, I'll be able to bring the other team members on full-time as well. I'm going to try very hard to grow our revenue, because I want to deliver the best possible game for you, and all I need to do that is financial security. So, wish me luck.
But if you want the long version -- sit with me by the shore for a bit?
Subassemblies - Jimmy, Ecconia, GHXX
We've been working on the all-time most requested feature: the ability to save a group of components and place them elsewhere, including in a different world or a different multiplayer server.
It's been a real collaboration between team members to get this feature right, especially around the UX. We're quite happy with how it's turned out!
You can try out Subassemblies right now in the Preview version of Logic World (see below!). We'd love your feedback on how they are to use right now, so we can make sure Subassemblies are fully polished before the next update.
Fixed Perspective - Jimmy
I've added a feature that allows you to freeze the perspective of the camera and interact with the world via point-and-click, instead of a first-person perspective. This was suggested by a friend of mine who gets motion sick from 3D camera movement, so the feature helps her play Logic World without throwing up. But we've found that it's really nice to use even if you don't get motion sick easily -- it just makes it way easier to click on things in all those situations where there's a lot of items to click on that all fit on screen at once.
You can try out Fixed Perspective right now in the Preview version of Logic World (see below). Let us know what you think :)
The Logic World Wiki
There's a lot of information about Logic World, but historically most of that information has been sparsely documented and hard to find. Recently, some Logic World players asked us about setting up a wiki to solve this issue. We felt that was a good idea, and so we're pleased to present the Logic World Wiki!
You can check it out for yourself at https://wiki.logic.world.
A wiki is a collaboratively-edited repository of information on the internet. Wikipedia is the biggest and most well-known wiki, but there are thousands of wikis, including many great video game wikis like the Minecraft Wiki and the Factorio Wiki.
On Saturday we asked in the Logic World Discord if anybody wanted to be an early contributor to the wiki. A few people volunteered, and in the four days since, the wiki has grown from nothing to more than 50 articles! We'd like to give a special shout-out to the people who have already edited the wiki:
- BobisBilly
- DjSapsan
- FoxFireFive
- HuntaBadday
- Lawrziepan
- N00basaurus
The wiki is still very young, but we hope in time it will grow to be the definitive resource for all things Logic World. Anybody can edit the wiki, so if you'd like to join the heroes listed above, check out the Logic World Wiki:Contributing page.
Logic World on Rails - Felipe
Hi, I'm Felipe aka pipe01, the main web guy for Logic World. As you may remember from previous LWWs, our main logicworld.net website and associated APIs currently runs on a bunch of services written in Go. This has been working relatively smoothly for the past few years, however it's become harder and harder to maintain because of how complex it is, especially for our other team members that aren't as versed as I am on Go development. Additionally, given how logicworld.net consists of a bunch of programs that must work together, it's quite difficult to spin up a local instance for development.
For these reasons and a few more, I've decided to rewrite the whole web stack and, given I've had a very positive experience with Ruby on Rails in a past job, the new website will be a monolithic Rails app dubbed "The Rubening". This has many advantages, such as a much smoother development and deployment experience as well as reduced resource usage when running, but it also comes with some disadvantages such as slower performance and less obvious scalability. Although it's not without its drawbacks, I believe this choice will make it much easier to introduce new features in the future while also making the existing ones more reliable, and the codebase will be easier to maintain and work on.
I've been working on this rewrite for exactly 2 months and we are very very close to deploying it, the main features are all implemented and working nicely and all that's left is a few minor tweaks and polishing, so you should hopefully see this new evolution of the website running very soon. Although, if all goes well you should barely notice any changes!
When the migration is wrapped up, the new platform will serve as a solid foundation on top of which we will carry out our future plans. We are very excited to work on new stuff to connect all Logic World players together in many cool ways, and with all this new and improved scaffolding we will be able to do it in a flash!
Steam Cloud
Since the last Logic World Wednesday, we added Steam Cloud support. So if you have the Steam version of the game, your saved sandboxes, subassemblies, servers, and screenshots will be automatically backed up to the cloud and synchronized between devices.
You can read more in this post:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1054340/announcements/detail/506199076171155241
Showcase on social media - Jimmy
Recently I started sharing cool Logic World creations to our Bluesky and X pages. This is really fun to do and I like having these social media pages as galleries of awesome builds.
I'd love to share your work (with credit of course!) on Logic World's social media. If you've built something cool and you'd like to be featured, you can reply to this post, ping or DM me on Discord (@jimmy8080), or email me ([email protected]). It's easiest for me if you take high-quality screenshots or video for me to use.
Previews available now!
We're getting ready to release the next game update, v0.92. We're releasing preview versions of v0.92 before the update is fully done, to collect feedback on features and help find bugs. You can play with all the features shown in today's blog (and more!) if you want to try them early!
To opt-in to the preview versions:
- Right click on Logic World (or the Logic World Dedicated Server) in your Steam library and select 'Properties'
- In the properties window, select the 'Betas' tab
- Under 'Beta Participation', select 'public-previews'
That's all for this week! It's good to be back. See you next Wednesday :)