Sorry for vanishing there: had some christmas holidays and decided to put the blog aside for a while, to rest and recuperate after the IndieGoGo project.
The extra time allowed me to make some pretty good headway on Species 0.5.0, exposing a load of variables and fixing a variety of stability, performance and game-balance problems. The ecosystem engine is looking much more complete now, though it still only runs at 20fps, which I’d like to improve on: I’m not sure some older machines will be able to handle it in it’s current state.
Oddly enough, it’s the smallest tweaks that are having the biggest effect on the game. A slight change to how the terrain is generated allowed for far more emphatic mountains and ridges. Applying a negative effect to thin legs (specifically, thin legs reduce stamina) drastically changed the long term appearance of the creatures.
I still haven’t re-worked the save/load function, and I’ll need to talk with Jade about how the graphical assets are coming along before I can announce a release date, but we’re definately getting there.
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Also, congratulations to everyone on surviving the 2012 apocalypse. The skeletal Mayan warriors didn’t come this far south, but between the sentient flesh-eating supervolcano ash and the marsupial hivemind rising from under Ularu, consuming everything in it’s path to the ocean and leaving a track of blighted, dead land upon which nothing can ever live again, it was still pretty bad.
Happy new year!
#1 by White parrot on January 2, 2013 - 6:48 am
Welcome back, and happy new year !
#2 by MarcoDBAA on January 2, 2013 - 8:40 am
Happy new year and good to hear that we are approaching the 0.5.0 release now.