What's been going on?
Hello all! It's been a long while since the last update. Things have been busy. There are new
games in the works, I've moved countries, and the team has grown! Nothing here has been
dropped though, so let's catch up.
B10 got a proper wrap-up written for it and then never went out. So before anything else,
here's what actually landed in it.
The one I'm happiest with is the navigation system. Scaling the in-game world to real-world
units broke Unity's built-in navigation, so I wrote my own A* system to replace it.
The main menu finally exists too, on both flatscreen and VR. That one had been waiting a long
time.
A* path finding!
VR menus!
CVR is getting a total makeover.
Unity isn't the right fit for this game any more. So it's being replaced with a custom system,
built for this game specifically, rather than a general-purpose engine bent around it.
Drastic, but it's the honest answer to problems that weren't going to solve themselves.
Progress is good. Further along than I expected to be by now. There's no date and I'm not
going to invent one, but it's being actively worked on, and that's the part worth saying out
loud after this long a silence.
The newest project is CLINK, a game where you can drive on every surface. The floor, the walls
and the ceiling are all one continuous piece of ground, so you can drive straight up a wall,
carry on onto the ceiling, and fight upside down.
It has been a real learning experience. CLINK is where I properly worked out Steam
integration, and it is the first thing I have built without Unity. That second part matters
here: the renderer the CVR makeover is being built on came out of CLINK first.
As for the game itself, it is red versus blue vehicle combat with six classes. Your grip is what holds you to the arena, and losing it means falling. There are bots for offline play or to fat out lobbies, splitscreen and online, a map editor with Workshop sharing, and a long list of modes.
There is a demo up now if you want to try it, and the full game releases at the end of the
month.
There is a big pile of prototypes on the go at the moment. A few of the ideas:
An isometric game set in an endless city, where the buildings open up and you can go through them floor by floor, and something down there is hunting you. Run, gather, and upgrade.
A comedy sandbox built out of the real Shibuya. The whole world loads from OpenStreetMap data, so the roads, the building footprints and the heights are the actual ones.
A game about getting from one Wikipedia article to another on foot. Each page is generated into a parkour course from its own structure, and its links are the way out.
A factory game on a tiny spherical planet, drawn entirely with 2D sprites pushed through a spherical projection. There is no 3D camera anywhere in it.
A farming game on a dead planet, where you scan the ground for fossils and revive them before you have anything to plant.
Not all of them will make it. That is what prototypes are for.
Well, that's all for now! We have also started up a YouTube and an Instagram, so if you want
to see more of any of this, that is where it will turn up first.
https://www.instagram.com/wiremonkeygames/
Until next time, have a great one.