A slow month
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Sometime after the Verdant update, I was getting a little tired from working on the game after a period of creative highs focusing on one biome for a week. By the start of the month, I started to feel some burn out from game development after working on it almost every day for so long, so I took a roughly 2 week long break early this month, only checking the community for any bug reports every few days during that time, which is why I was mostly quiet for that time period with no updates except for bug and crash fixes, and why there were no videos on my channel being made.
This one will be shorter than previous months.
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Right after my break, I focused on replacing the current way the game stores data with the new data structure, where I named it as an "object dictionary tree". Instead of carefully saving all the data in the form of byte arrays each time, the game will instead store all data in this data structure, and read from it when loading. I replaced all the saving code with this new way of saving. All the loading code only still remains for existing saves.
This is the month where the refactor was done, and it works for both new and existing saves at this point!
The save at the top uses the new data structure, and the save at the bottom stores data in the older less organized way. The new file size relative to the old will vary for different saves, but it's still be small enough to easily be uploaded to the cloud!
This conversion is also the reason for the v 0.1.2 spaceship deletion bug, as the game now either deletes or overrides files that use the old format, one of which was spaceship data. The data was deleted, but wasn't replaced by the file that was supposed to override it when saved.
Taiga cave update
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Once that refactor was done, I decided to do an update similar to the Verdant update, but overhauls an existing biome that lacks content on Tierra, and the taiga caves were the perfect fit!
Before the update, all it had to offer was a higher concentration of glow ferns, and harvestable frost flora, and the rewards didn't quite justify the risks of freezing temperatures. This is what it used to look like before the update.
After the update, it now has treasure containing a new toolset called permafrost tools that can only be found here, and it's also crafted by some resources that can only be found here as well, a lot more decorative plant life, and slippery ice patches in the freezing parts of the cave! Here's what it looks like now!
Most of that change was made after the refactor in roughly a week similarly to the Verdant update!
Experimenting with Generative AI
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In this case, I don't plan on using AI generated assets for use in the game. I do however use ChatGPT or other LLMs to generate a few ideas here and there, such as what some of the cave plants look like, refine those ideas to better suit the game, and implement them myself, and have been doing that on and off since early 2024.
The YouTube channel
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The YouTube channel is likely going to contain many videos where at least one part of it is AI generated, with credits in the description as to which AI model was used. This is the primary area where I'll experiment with AI.
What I'm working on
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Beyond the technical things, I'm currently attempting to add a map into the game.
Current navigational design
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The game is already designed around the lack of navigational options in the early game, where the lack of a map and the navigational cooldowns heavily incentivizes the player to obtain an item that can show players their way home more conveniently. Once players obtain a Bronze Compass, it also shows the way to the broken spaceship, which is how the game nudges new players into finding the spaceship without directly telling them apart from the "Lost? Press C" message.
Where maps could belong
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At the moment, I'm considering making the map accessible right after the player repairs the spaceship, where it appears on the top-right corner of the screen, and will finally make the bronze compass less incentivized once repaired.
Main technical challenges of maps
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The game technically already has a map in the form of landing sites for all worlds, but the map that I envision is one that also shows tiles the player has placed, such as houses, as well as each chunk having a different brightness level depending on the brightness of the explored chunk, which the landing site map doesn't do.
One challenge I have at the moment is how to make it run smoothly. These maps usually have to show 10s of thousands of tiles as single colors when zoomed out far enough, and iterating each of them to draw onto the screen every frame will lower the frame rate significantly when opened. That will be an optimization challenge to overcome at the moment.
As with many things in programming that involve large projects like this one, spaghetti code will be written at some point, which can often make it harder to implement new features, but there are other parts of the game's code organized enough to make adding new features fairly easy. For maps, it'll involve displaying world chunks, and the code responsible for dealing with world chunks is on the spaghetti end of the spectrum. Adding a map means mingling with world chunk code, which is likely to break or bug out other parts of the game that use world chunks.
More biome-based updates
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Adding maps that I envision will be more difficult, but adding content to existing biomes is much easier to do in the current codebase, so it's likely for more biome-based updates to be rolled out in the future as I figure out how to add maps.
Creations / Media
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Since I was inactive for most of the month, there isn't anything new to show here as far as I'm aware, but if you did make something this month relating to the game, it can be displayed here :)
That's roughly the state of the game for this month. Mostly a slow month at the start of it, but ending with another focused update that overhauls an existing biome!