So, uhhh… it has been.. 4 months… since the last devlog. Quite a lot of things have happened.
First of all, I haven’t given up on the project, but this should be obvious from the fact that this devlog exists.
The reason for the pause is simple: I have been unfortunate enough to have found a job!
Yes, I was job-free during the development so far.
This change resulted in way less time and energy for gamedev,
but over time I started getting back into the groove and now I’m fairly steadily working on the game.
During the past months I have mostly focused on a new region – “Acid Pools” (potentially not the final name).
Here’s a showcase video:
It is heavily inspired by the Dallol system in Ethiopia.
By A.Savin - Own work, FAL, link
I find it wild that such alien-looking environments exist on our planet.
All of the assets were created from the ground-up in Blender by me (well, I used one CC0 texture).
Not gonna lie, it was a bit of a pain, as I’m not good at 3D modelling and I’m also not good at accepting that. So I was making bad stuff and feeling bad about it.
But, I managed to power through and I think it looks quite good.
I could go more in-depth on the process, but, honestly, I don’t have the energy for that right now.
I’m planning to go through the art-pass again sometime in the future, improving the assets and adding new ones, but for now it’s good enough.
Other than that I’ve been working on various different things: buying drones, scanning materials, updating Godot to 4.2 (it wasn’t super smooth, but not too bad).
Also, I’ve been working on a way for the player to create a map of the region:
Basically, the Helicopter Drone will be equipped with a LIDAR,
which will allow it to scan the terrain to create this point-cloud visualization.
That’s probably not all, but I don’t want to get too into details. I hope that I’ll manage to keep up the pace and that the next devlog will be this year.
