The Future

Hi.

I haven’t been very active with game development this year, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything at all. I’ve been primarily working on creating a new engine for myself, again! This time it’s an update to rapid, primarily learning from my past mistakes, and in general just trying to make the engine much better for full blown game development. Although I haven’t released a stable version yet, I feel like it’s getting really close.

My biggest slowdown so far is waiting for Nim’s compilation times to get better. That isn’t to say they’re terribly bad – they’re not C++ or Rust levels of slow, but 8 seconds to start the game up is still quite annoying for rapid prototyping, and I don’t want to open the can of worms that hot core reloading is. The fact that my engine pushes the compiler to its limits at places, mostly by using some experimental, not very well-tested features (such as concepts) doesn’t really help, but according to the language’s lead developer, Araq, incremental compilation should be ready for testing very soon, so I’m quite excited to finally do some game development for once.

Project pmem.recall()

This is the reason I’m writing this post. During my two weeks of winter break, I’d like to do some improvements on _MEM.RECALL(), generally making the game better, more polished, and more fun to play. The planned improvements include porting the game to the new engine, which should fix some bugs related to screens with high refresh rates, finishing the story, better level design, improved controls, and most importantly of all – finalizing the game and calling it done.

During the three or four days of Open Jam 2019 I wasn’t able to create much of a complete game. While I’m quite happy with what I was able to pull off, with lots of juice and the game generally looking very good, I still think the game can play much better. It doesn’t have to be hours long, but expanding the story would be a good thing for the game overall. “This future is war. Go back in time to fix it all.” just isn’t very satisfying, and the game’s ending is too simplistic and unceremonious.

I will have to make some substantial changes to the core of the game, such as increasing the screen size to make level design easier. The current levels feel very crammed and it’s not really fun to jump, flip, and dash around them. On another note, I’m also planning on adding more levels before the current game’s beginning, to explain how the protagonist got where they are, what they did, and what they’re about to do, without having to resort to explaining the plot in the game’s description on itch.

This would also be a good moment to mention level editing. I’m not sure whether I’ll use an in-game editor or some external solution like Tiled, but I’ll definitely have to make editing and playtesting levels much easier than it is right now. I mean, come on… using yaml for levels? :)

So, yeah. The game will be rebuilt essentially from the ground up, but I’ll try to keep the general aesthetics similar. I don’t really want to spoil too much details too early, as… well, I don’t have anything cool to show off yet, so you’ll just have to wait patiently until I have anything to share. I’ll be posting my progress to Open Jam and Nim’s Discord servers fairly regularly as I slowly but surely make pmem.recall() a reality.

But anyways, Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s hope 2021 will be less hectic than this one, and I wish the best for y’all.

Cheers.