HELLO CREATORS!
As you know, The Universim has evolved dramatically since our original pitch on Kickstarter. With your support, we’re improving nearly every aspect of the game on a daily basis. We do our best to keep production quality high and not prioritize release dates over quality and fun. In today's update, we want to talk about our future plans and keep up the standard of transparency you have come to expect from us. The Universim remains 100% crowdfunded, and we’re very proud of that.
Let’s talk about our in-game engine
PROMETHEUS
The Prometheus engine takes up a huge amount of our time. It’s the primary life simulation system, so it makes sense that it will. It controls Nugget behaviour, animal AI, and even the functioning and generation of planetary environments. A few updates ago, we introduced an updated version of the Nugget Artificial Intelligence. This was our first major step towards a Smart AI System that’s been in development for some time now. Our goal is to make Nuggets feel real, like they’re organic creatures. However, in The Universim, a lot of systems are linked together and by updating one, we have to ensure that it works with its siblings and neighbors. It makes this process very challenging and time consuming. But hey, we didn’t choose to make games because it’s easy, right?
So in order to update Nugget artificial intelligence, we also have to update other features simultaneously. No amount of clever modularity or maintenance techniques could save us from this. In addition to the work on Nugget AI, improvements are being made to our planet generation mechanics.
We’re almost ready to start moving into different eras, which will allow you to try out updated buildings, build new ones, and research new technologies. We also want to introduce Road Networks, so the city formation feature can finally take form in the game. In order to make roads usefull and not just cosmetic, Nugget AI will have to recognize and utilize them as needed. In order to have roads on the planet, we have to update our planet generation algorithm to allow it to account for roadways around the planet. This is a big change that has been happening behind-the-scenes for some time now, with roughly half of our team dedicated to this feature. We’ve been working on this on a separate branch, which means it’s not really in the game build that you have access to right now.
At this moment, we have reached the milestone where we want to start implementing the first round of these features in the live project. This will probably take us a little while, as we want to play it safe by setting aside enough time for proper testing and implementation. Because of this, we might skip one of our patch releases that usually happens on the 1st of every month. We’re still going to release V12 on October 1st, though, so be ready for some new goodies. It will have the new Weather Forecast Building and a Season-Specific Engine Update. We changed how the season calculations and predictions work in order to give you a more accurate representation of what is to come and create more lifelike seasons. We are going to discuss this more at length in a future update.
These changes will also finally allow us to implement the load/save feature. While we have done a fair amount of background work on this, a lot of features are very dependent on one another (as mentioned previously), so we have more work to do before it’s ready to go. The Universim is a very complex project and we’re really excited to take it to the next stage. After all of these updates are done, we will start implementing new eras, research items, and so much more.
You can read a blog post below from one of our lead AI developers responsible for the smarter AI system and a lot of other nifty stuff.
Thanks again for helping us make the best god game ever!