Hey everyone!
It's been just over a week now since Allumeria launched and hit early access. Thank you all, so, so much for the positive response. It's been incredible to see people playing and having fun. It feels vindicating, feeling like my choice to make this project has been validated.
I have been very active in the Discord and the discussion forums, trying to figure out what things need work, finding bugs to fix etc, and there's some repeat questions I find myself answering, so wanted to make a post to catch everyone up to the same page about why I made the game the way I did, and what I plan to do in the future now that the game is out.
As of writing the game has sold just under 13k copies. This is awesome! My goal was to hit 10k copies sold in the first week and the game hit that figure just in time.
While 13k copies is a lot, as an indie dev I need to be exceptionally careful about budgeting. I spent 20 months on this game so far and I want to make sure I am able to recover the "cost" of that work, on top of making sure I can afford to continue working on the game full time.
So far I will say I think I will be perfectly fine continuing to work on the game on my own, but I wont be able to hire additional programming support any time soon. So that keeps the scope limited over the next year or so to things I can do on my own. I do want to investigate hiring a composer at some point within the next year though, as I've heard many people asking for music. I can technically create music myself, but I am not very talented and cant produce as many tracks as I would like to.
I think this system still needs a lot of work. I've managed to clean up and fix all the low hanging fruit (bugs & room detection issues), but I think many gameplay and UX issues remain. One of the big problems is the system is not communicated very well. I've seen people get very frustrated at it and I think that's on me for having the dialogue be a little vague. I would like to improve this over time. I made a post on the Discord asking for feedback on this system and plan to read through it all and write up a plan for how to improve it.
I've seen many people having issues finding the snow dungeon, and this is on me. It generates underground in the snow biome with no surface indicator of where it is, so you just have to find it in the caves. It can be a little frustrating and I would like to find a way to make it easier for people to find.
Good question, and I plan to go into detail on this one.
I actually personally like limited open worlds in games. I prefer the tightly controlled game design.
Keeps scope low. I am a solo developer and needed to find ways to keep scope very small, making sure I can develop the game as fast as I can and get it out on time.
In game design I have a preference for smaller but more densely packed open worlds. I think a good comparison to make for my point would be the world design of Skyrim vs Starfield. Skyrim has a single limited map with an immense level of content density. The game is designed around drawing your attention to points of interest, and making the journey fun by placing activities along the way.
By comparison, Starfield has a practically unlimited play space. You can travel to hundreds of planets and land anywhere on them. However, I feel as if the content you will find is often not particularly meaningful, and the journey between these destinations is more of a straight line, there is no content density. (Not that it's "bad" game design, just that its something I prefer less)
With Allumeria I wanted to take the former approach of a densely packed world that doesn't spread content thin across a large area for the sake of making it seem big on paper. That philosophy permeates the entire game. I want everything to have depth, and that usually comes at the sacrifice of breadth.
As an example, there are only 3 major surface biomes. I think people who are used to games like Vintage Story and Minecraft might scoff at that and think it is pitifully low. But the reason why it is so low, is because I spend a lot of time trying to fill up each biome with a huge amount of content. The goal is that from top to bottom almost everything is new. New monsters, new blocks, new weapons, new items, new bosses, new dungeons, new structures etc. I want each one to feel like its own self contained area.
I grew up playing Terraria and MCPE, and both of these games had limited worlds. For me, there is something so cozy and fun about exploring inwards if that makes sense. Becoming intimately familiar with the world you have and exploring every nook and cranny, rather than traveling outwards 1000's of blocks. I also find it helps immensely with decision paralysis. If you have a limited area to work with it can help cut down on the stress of choosing the "perfect" area for your build. It's very rewarding to play in a small area for a long period of time.
So anyway, that was a bit of a ramble, but I hope it can help you get a sense of how I feel very passionately about smaller worlds, and find them comforting as a player.
When I first started working on Allumeria in Jan 2025, I originally wanted it to be out by the end of 2025. That is a pretty lofty goal. To make that happen I wanted to try and keep the scope as low as I could. As discussed, I am already a fan of small worlds, so not having to create infinite terrain generation and chunk streaming was an easy win to reduce the amount of work needed to push Allumeria to the finish line.
When you create a new world, it actually stores and generates the ENTIRE world at once, and that's why it takes a while. The whole thing is stored in ram and is generated in discrete passes. Unfortunately this does also mean the seemingly simple request of making the world a bit bigger, is still essentially the same as asking for an infinite world. I have pushed the world size to be as big as it can and still fit in ram. I'll talk more about this in the next section.
I would be lying if I said there were no problems whatsoever with limited worlds. Most other games will do infinite for a reason. The biggest ones are, imo:
Limited worlds cannot support long term servers with multiple people coming and going
Limited worlds mean there is no upgrade path for a world. Once it has been generated, there will never be any new content in that world.
The way it's currently implemented in Allumeria just looks kinda ugly
I don't mind the first point so much, as Allumeria isn't designed to be a "long term" game. It has a fairly linear progression, so once you reach the end it relies purely on the sandbox and horizontal progression content, and there isn't enough of that at the moment to sustain a long term world.
A big problem that I have partially sidestepped is upgrading the world. If you created a world in the demo version of Allumeria, that world will never have the snow or desert content. You can still generate a new one, explore that and bring your character back to the original world you created, but I know that is kind of a lame solution. I think the biggest benefit of infinite worlds is that you can always travel out to find new content. I still don't think its ideal (see me complaining about long travel times in a previous section), but it is still more immersive than clicking through a world selection UI.
And finally right now the cutoff is just kind of ugly in Allumeria. The world just abruptly ends and hits a void. It'd look nicer if I was able to set up a fake ocean to look at, at least. But will discuss my future plans in a bit.
Early on my answer was just a hard no. I needed to finish the game and get everything working and infinite worlds would easily add months to the development timeline. Now that the game is out, I also feel like there are more pressing issues I want to work on in the meantime. That being said, I do have a long term plan that I would like to try and execute. I can't promise it will 100% happen but I want to at least try.
So the plan is, I think I will be able to slowly upgrade the engine piece-meal over time while working on smaller updates. The two biggest blockers are:
World Generation - The world generator will need to be entirely re-done to work with infinite generation.
Chunk streaming - The game will need to save and stream chunks from the disk instead of storing the entire world in ram.
Once these two issues are addressed, the game should theoretically start working with any world size. Then the remaining issue would be game design. Here's what I've been thinking about that:
I was thinking, what I could do is keep the best of both worlds. The main game takes place on an island surrounded by a large amount of water. This encourages you to stick to the main area and explore everything there first. Then if you really need to, you can go and travel to the more random/procgen continents that have the same biomes and content as the original island.
But again, please consider this as a hypothetical. I want you to buy and review Allumeria for what it is right now, not what you think it will become. I am still a solo developer and what I can do is constrained by that. Early Access is a very precarious position to be in, as it creates an expectation. I want the expectation to be that I will continue working on the game, but please, if you are 100% ride or die on infinite worlds, do not get your hopes up. I would like to try, but this is VERY complex and I don't think I am ready to tackle this any time soon. (think maybe a 1.0 thing, like Necesse making the jump at that time) I just wanted to fill everyone in on my thoughts on the topic.
My goals for the next few months are to do smaller updates that expand and improve existing features in the game. There's a lot of stuff that needs work and I want to flesh things out more, like farming, fishing, npcs etc. Basically, I spent 6 months working on progression content and now I need a break to have fun working on the sandbox systems again. I'm still not sure specifically what 0.16 will entail yet, as I am still working through more bugfixes for 0.15, but I'll start posting teasers again in Discord for the new content when I start working on it :) Anyway, that's a lot of words and only one picture. Thanks so much if you read all of this, and I hope it clears up any questions you may have about the infinite/finite world debate, and also how the game is doing and what my plans are. Thanks so much <3