Firstly, I would like to thank everyone for staying with us during the past couple of years. It's almost Christmas and PalmRide has been on Steam for mor than two years now (Now you got the chance to get that Christmas achivement).
For me personally, 2023 has been quite an interesting year in terms of game development. No update was made to PalmRide and no new game was released, BUT I can't underestimate the journey I went though this year as a game developer.
This 1-minute video summarizes the gamedev projects that I have worked on in 2023 (mostly stuff for college, remember that I'm a masters student):
Besides gamedev/ programing, I also changed a lot as a person in 2023, from adopting a more "grinder" mindset to discovering more philosophical concepts and learning more about Christianity. Anyway, this is not what the post is about, these things can be discussed on the Discord server.
You may remember The Galaxy Rider, the Crazy Taxi-like synthwave space game which I officially announced back in 2022 and created a Steam page for in 2023. Since the page was created, both my interest in the game but also community's interest started to fade away, so, during October I announced on Discord that I will stop working on that game for a while and instead focus on creating an experience that resembles PalmRide more.
The choice to postpone The Galaxy Rider was amplified by the fact that I struggled a lot with the spaceship movement, world generation and overall, I couldn't make the game fun. Until these problems are solved as I get better at game development, the game will remain postponed.
I then started prototyping with a retro Synthwave Star Fox-like game and I found myself quite enjoying it. I ditched Unity in favour of Raylib + EnTT and so far I'm enjoying this minimalistic way of making games. That drive I had when making PalmRide pretty much disappeared after the game had been released, and although I tried making games in the meantime, it kinda felt soulless in a way. This is how the things have been until I started this new game that I'm talking about.
Let's call this new game "StarRide" for a moment, as it currently don't have an official name. This is how the game looks like at the time of writing this post:
It's not much (but it's honest work hahahahaha using antique memes), but this features movement, world and biomes generation, path generation, path following, enemy systems, shooting systems, health systems and a few custom shaders for making the game look retro. This prototype was started in October, and now in December it's in a pretty decent state considering that I didn't work full time on this.
If things work out good, I might release the Steam page for this game during January or February 2024. Again, the name of the game was not set, so if you want, you might give me a name suggestion on the Discord server.
When I switched from Unity to Raylib + EnTT, I realized something: I'm bad at making games using game engines lol. The thing is, I'm much better at implementing my own functionalities into a game rather than modifying existing ones to suit my needs. I don't want to say that engines are bad, they aren't, it's just that I am more comfortable with implementing functionalities from scratch.
That being said, I may pick up again The Galaxy Rider in the future, but implement it without a high-level game engine, and instead use frameworks such as Raylib or MonoGame instead.
I now realize that I turned this Merry Christmas message intro an announcement/ devlog/ story post, but whatever... the more content, the better, right?
I want to again wish you Merry Christmas along with family and friends, and let's enjoy some games & synths in 2024!