Hi, so if any of you follow the developer forums, you might have seen that I recently became a developer myself. I recently saw that there were some questions (maybe frustrations?) about the current state of affairs, no doubt because there hasn’t been any real release and pretty much all coding work done in the past few months has been on the engine. So I asked and the team agreed that the idea that I give a rundown of what has changed in the few weeks since I and several other developers joined the team. Note that many of us are still in college and as such have other duties such as homework and exams/tests. Not to mention actual jobs or other things. Still, things have changed quite a bit in the week that I’ve been on the team.
So for starters here was the state of affairs when I joined, the engine was built you could run the game. That was pretty much all going for it. The world spawned with two identical microbes, one if which you could control. No animations, the background would move sideways as you moved towards the top of the screen, no AI, no health, no compounds, and a literal border to where the background stopped rendering. Now just one month later, animations have started to be added back in, the AI has begun to be re-implemented, other microbes are spawned in, the compound bars work correctly and the ATP is correctly used, while the compound clouds are finally starting work after much difficulty. Plus despite being busy with school I was able to spend a few hours creating an alternative control scheme that’d I’d like to let the community test. In other words in the last week things have gone from having an engine supporting a movement simulator to something that is starting to look like a prototype for a game. Obviously part of this speedup is due to the fact that code is for the most part already written, just in the wrong language. Still things are progressing, and we’re planning on adding several features into the next release so it isn’t just a re-release of the same version just in a different engine.
Frankly I find it amazing that hhyyrylainen (if I misspelled your name sorry , - no worries I fixed it -hhyyrylainen) has been able to build a custom engine practically by himself from what I hear. So there’s a short-rundown of the current state of affairs from the development side. I’ll try to answer any questions anyone might have.