I think the first real devlog entry (if you don't count the music entry) should tell a bit about
the story of how and why I came to develop Exotic Matter.
It all started back in 2011 when I was writing on my diploma thesis. Naturally you suddenly have time for all sorts of other thing, and so I stumbled upon a nice little game of a Swedish developer. I watched the trailer on the game's website and was instantly hooked. I think something about the blocky esthetics, the modularity, just spoke to me as a computer science student
So I bought that game and played it for quite some time. I mined minerals, fought against NPCs, built a fortress, explored the endless terrain (and got lost) - all the things you do when you play Minecraft. And while I think it was well worth the around $11 that I payed for it at that time, it suddenly stopped being fun. And that was because I realized I had no purpose in that world. And I don't wanna get too philosophical here - what I mean is that there is no mission to accomplish - at least there was none at the time. I know today you can fight the Enderdragon and basically that's your mission.
That was the moment when I decided that I wanted to built my own game. The basic world would be blocky as that was something that got me hooked in the first place. But instead of an endless terrain, I wanted to have a planet. A planet that would be huge but still, because you can go around it there would be a strong possibility to find your way back eventually - so no more getting completely lost in an endless terrain. Also it was very important to me to have a mission - as the lack of a mission was what drove me away from Minecraft. And because I am a big sucker for Sci-Fi I wanted it to play in a Sci-Fi world. Inspired by a book that I read at that time (Stanisław Lem's
Solaris) I came up with the idea for a purple planet and thinking back of the time when I played System Shock 2 I wanted to have a story line where you are alone on that planet. So I came up with the
crash landed on alien planet plot (not too original I know).
I choose Java to develop the game as I was (and still am) very fluent in that language and after all Minecraft also used Java. Honestly I thought back then that I could finish the game in half a year or something - little did I know. Mind you that the last game I developed before Exotic Matter was back on a C64. So my experience was mostly with application development. But the games I developed on that C64 back then was what got me into programming in the first place - so developing a game has always been something that I wanted to do again.
After some careful consideration I opted to built not only a game but an engine for voxel environments. So that I could live out all the blocky game ideas that I had back then. I had no name for the game at that time but the engine was called
Moebius Engine (that's also where my studio got its name from). Here is a screenshot of what the engine looked like back then:
Fast forward 6 years: After a lot of hard work, a lot of going to expos, talking to a lot of gamers and developers, founding a studio and actually even receiving some venture capital I was finally able to release the game in an alpha(!) version this year! Yay!
But it is still not finished. Some things are missing - but the engine is quite stable now and the content for the single-player mission is coming along quite nicely! Here are some more impressions of the game/engine over the years:
That was quite at the begining - I was very fond of the purple sand block at that time.
I added the first items to the game - an access card.
Always wanted to have drilling lasers in the game. This is the first version I came up with.
First test with procedurally generated dungeons.
Added precious minerals to mine and a proper (but ugly) HUD.
Added more block types (like the transparent ones that are seen in the left bottom of the screenshot) and finally gave the game a name: Xcylin. Later I realized that that's a name no one can spell or even pronounce
Also changed the item design to some 2D style.
I added non-cubic block types (like the servers and the edge blocks).
And even liquids like this acid that would eat its way through stone blocks.
Or this biomass which is basically also a liquid.
And of course there had to be some kind of vegetation.
The last HUD upgrade. Now the player has a map, health and energy and equipment slots. The drilling laser also got an upgrade and is now three dimensional again. This was basically what the game looked like before I was lucky and got some venture capital to pay someone who is better in creating 3D assets than me
As you might know, the game is now called
Exotic Matter because that is much easier to pronounce, spell and remember.
And here is basically what the game looks like today:
TL;DR it took almost 6 years to get from the first screenshot to the last three - and it was a hell of a journey but well worth it!
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