Hi everyone,
As promised I wanted to make some kind of preview for the upcoming updates. I thought doing this kind of dev diary format I know from Paradox would be most fitting for this. This post is about all the new changes that are coming with the new custom engine.
The old engine we are currently using is GameMaker Studio 2 which is convenient for RPG/platformer type games but has become very restrictive for My Drug Cartel. This is why we decided to start developing a new custom engine for the game in C using the raylib library. As a scripting language we chose Lua which makes creating mods for the game more convenient.
I know the initial estimate for the new engine was September but due to hiring issues with our low budget, heavy typhoon occuring in one dev's home and health issues of another dev we're now aiming to get it out by end of October. However, I'm already quite far with working on art & design for the rest of the year so I'm going to be able to already show more stuff in the coming weeks.
Better Performance
Depending on your hardware the old code base NPCs would often starting causing little lags once they got into the dozens but with the new engine the game should remain at stable 60 FPS even with a hundred NPCs walking around. In 2026 we could potentially even expand on this and add multithreading to utilize more CPU cores.
More NPC Control
Besides finally finishing the bills system in zones you'll also now be able to order NPCs to do tasks right away manually. We're also planning on adding worker policies in later updates that let you set up different equipment presets depending on the type of work the NPC is doing (i.e. armor for combat, hardhat for cutting trees or chemical protection clothing when working with dangerous chemicals).
New Inventory System
The old inventory has been replaced by a new clothing container system. Wearing clothing items now provides more slots for your inventory. This also means that if one of those clothing items breaks the items it holds will be dropped on the ground. Regular item containers like the new crates and carton boxes now also have a slot system instead of just being a list of items. Volume containers now also have their own UI which allows more easily managing your mixes of volumes. We also reduced the size of slots to 8x8 from 16x16. This means that some small items (like a syrette or libery cap mushrooms) will now use less space than before.
This was the "design sketch" for it and below it is the current state of implementation - it's still not finished as you can see.
Modding
As mentioned earlier the game uses Lua as a scripting language. For example, if you wanted to add a cigarette item to the game you would just write this into your lua mod file along with adding the item sprite to your mod folder.
You can also modify existing scripts.
Next week I'll make another post explaning the new clothing slots (they're also tetris-like now and not just 1x1 slots). I will also showcase the new Steppe biome & grapevine crop/wine that will be added in the 0.9.0 update.
- Gigicom