Development Log Week 90

Michi is back in the office and Martin in uncharted waters.

Martin

Being a part of very small development team usually means that you have to take care of many things beyond just developing the game. And more often than not, these are tasks that in a larger company would be taken care of by specialists. Just as there would be programmers do do the programming and artists to generate the art assets, there would be a team of PR staff that would take care of everything from sending out press releases to overseeing the production of a trailer.

The latter is exactly what I had to deal with this week. In fact, I didn't only have to take care of the "overseeing" part, I actually had to put on the screenwriter's hat and come up with a script (if you want to call it that) for the teaser trailer we would like to have for the first official release. Doing this I realized, once again, that there are very good reasons why anywhere outside of small-budget productions like ours, a trailer would be made by a team of experts ranging from screenwriters over directors to possibly cinematographers. It's something that lies firmly outside of my skillset and I can only hope that the animator, the composer and whoever else might be involved in this project at some point can translate my sub-standard input and convert it into something great anyway. Because they are definitely experts in their fields!

Michi

Hey everyone, I am back from paternal leave and ready to dive into Prosperous Universe development again!

Right before I left a few weeks ago Martin and I met at the simulogics HQ to discuss (among other things) the material editor. Quick recap: the material editor is an internal tool that we build to simplify the creation and management of all materials and their dependencies in the game (that is resources, items, production thereof and so on). While Martin developed the foundation of the material editor itself I started to integrate the world editor into the tool as well. We use the world editor to procedurally create all sectors, stars, planets and their resources. So integrating the two editors makes sense because now we can create a material in the material editor and use it as a planetary resource in the world editor without changing to another tool.

Integrating the two tools means that the world editor (the older tool) has to undergo some changes. There are technical reasons for that, but more importantly we wanted to change how the world editor works while we are at rewriting it anyways.

In the old version the creation of a game world was divided into multiple phases, like sector generation, star generation, generation of connections between the stars and so on. All these phases would run once the start button was pressed and it used a few parameters (like amount of stars per sector etc.) to influence the outcome. While that worked well the results where a bit too random and to create a world that we liked would take many tries. So we decided to split up the generation into multiple steps in which every creation phase could be controlled individually. More details on that will follow next week :)