Hello everyone, let me give you a short update what happened in this year and what's you can expect for next year.
January - Interior Items
The Year started with a improvement of the Graphic performance. The main part was using LOD levels for some of the models and adding support for this to my systems. I improved the highlighting, selection and other systems, to improve the performance. I also converted all buildings to the new Interior System and finished Templates, so players can create their owns now.
February - Person Metrics
In the second month was planned to add more person features but it was needed to refactor the simulation. Moving the activities out of the building and doing the person metrics and activity updates more async helped to add these new features. It was a big effort, but it also leads to very high performance improvements what was planned for later, so it was switched.
March - Performance
The March was planned to do the Person Skills more needs and Environment, but end up in another big performance update, now back to 100fps at the starting ship and several optimisations and fixes, due to some really good testers building very large ships. I could finish the Residence feature and moved the activities to the Interior, to get an easier workflow and ui for the players.
April - Skills
In April the rooms has been restructured and all activities have been moved to the interior items. This should make it more clear and easier to use. The rooms were restructured, so more things can be added to a room. The Persons got Skills and the interior items can require some minimum skill.
May - Vacation
The May started with a 3 week vacation after the 2.5 years working close to every day :) The rest was smaller polishing bugfixes and post processing improvements. I also changed the font and make more languages possible. At another good Playtest i fixed a lot and got good feedback to polish everything more.
June - Better Graphics
In June i tried to hired the first employee for the game. But it didn't went as expected, cause i needed a lot of effort for communication ending up in stopping that experiment and continue alone. I played around with substance painter and it got way better and faster results than i had before. I also added storage options and refactored a lot to make this work.
July - New Models
The July went pretty fast without much time for large features. I worked a bit more on my sideprojekt for money to have more time for further development. I painted a lot of models and did a new room type. I also bring the animations to the next level to make e.g. the toilet work well and fix some blending issues between them.
August - Room Configurator
In August i created the room configurator, where the player can setup their own room designs. I added more features to support interior overlapping to the outside like solar panels, and their animation towards the sun. The rest of the month i was very busy, due to we moved from Germany to china for some years.
September - Migrating Engines
In September i moved to china with my family for some years, after a long quarantine i was just able to finalize the latest release and more models. I also started to migrate to a new Version of Unity, what was a big mess, due to they add breaking changes that completely ruins my current architecture, so it took a long time to adapt to it. I was able to bring the spinning engines to the new architecture.
Oktober - New Rooms
In Oktober i worked most of the time on the new design of the rooms. I removed the underground layer and let the boxes drive on the floor and created a complete new room design and a room-building. The framework of unity I'm using is also getting closer to the final release. I tried to update, but there are still too many problem with it. But in general it seems i can update end of the year to it.
November - Crafting
In November the main purpose was to change to a new gameplay. The Persons become way more important and are now moving resources around, constructing rooms at the room location and maintain things by themself. The Interior Items got their own resource box, that can be crafted at the old construction workbench.
December - Room Update
In December i did the last change of the gameplay, to make the rooms updatable. Also Pi menus have been added, so you have a Sims like Interaction with the crew. It affects close to all parts of the game and took a bit time to polish all of this. I invested some time to prepare for a large Unity update and got everything stable.
Plan for next Year
Release
Following the original plan we would get now close to the release, but the game changed so much, that it will not be possible. The original gamedesign plan was to build just the buildings but changed to manage the interior items and persons. Due to i am still alone developing on this game, i have to move the release one year further, to get you a good game.
Roadmap
At the start of next year, i will be busy to readd all features that were in the game before and outdated due to the last updates. One example is to migrate the Dock and supply ship to the new Interior Item approach. The starting ship will also be updated including most of the tutorials.
When this is done, i will work on the storyline and more content. In paralell a new Playtest-Phase will start. If you are interested, you are welcome in our discord :)
When all of this is done and the game is stable enough, i plan to launch a Demo while adding more content like Temperature Systems, more Resources and Interior items, till the final 1.0 release.
Wishlist
If you haven't it done yet, please wishlist and follow to keep up to date :)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1638030/Generation_Ship/