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[EberKain]

I went to college for software engineering about 20 years ago, mainly studying C++. I worked on a bunch of different hobby projects before, but never released anything. Generally because the scope was always too big. I'm doing my best with this project to keep it manageable as a solo dev. So far it has been a lot of fun to work on and I'm really looking forward to working on the environments.

I wanted to make a non-violent game that was based on real science. My first idea was to make a space conquest game where you are building bases on other planets, but after a few months I dropped that because it was just too big a project with the direction I was going. I still wanted to do that same type of game, so I thought about doing a solar jetman clone and just take away the combat, but I was thinking about asteroids or the like. I then watched a video on how we may send a robot probe to Europa and how it would work. It just seemed like the perfect match for what I was already planning.

I know from past projects that doing 3D would just suck away all my time. I have some modeling and texturing experience, but these days I have a full time job and a family, so project time is at a premium. For those reasons I settled on a pixelart-ish look to the game. I did a quick prototype in gimp to get an idea of what I wanted the finished product to look like and quickly settled on each pixel of terrain being 9x9 pixels @1080p res, which in turn informed the technical side. I ended up implementing it as multiple tilemap layers where each tile is 9x9 and the world is a 1000x1000 grid.

Once I got serious about putting in some time on the project I started thinking about sound and music. I'm sitting here one day browsing for free music and not finding anything I like. Then I watched the movie Mandy and something about that movie soundtrack just stuck. I pulled out my guitar and amp that I have not picked up in years, I ordered an audio interface for my PC and tried to record something. I ended up with this.  A few days later I recorded this one, and that is exactly the sound I want for the game. Something that makes me feel like I'm going to space.

I would love to hear if you have seen any similar games out there that I can draw ideas from? Or look for things to avoid. You don't have to tell me the video is bad, I know its terrible, there are too many cuts and my voice all over the place. I will do better on the next one.

I have done a bunch of updates to the website which now has some real info on the game and download links. www.europaexplorergame.com

[EberKain]

Trying to address performance concerns I added a debug fader sprite that pops each time a new tile is revealed, the content of the tilemaps is calculated on the fly.  This helped my find a fix a bug that was bogging down the game in some situations.   

GIF

The way the world reveal works is I calculate the triangle area for what you can see and save it as a list of coordinates, and then just brute force the update.  The update routine runs 10x per second and cycles through every coordinate in every active list every update.  I sort them so I do the brightest colors last, so it overwrites the darker colors, but this is really inefficient when I get lots of overlapping areas that are all revealed and causes a big spike of CPU usage every time the update runs. 

I wanted to see if I could do more to make it run better.  So I created a new list that holds a list of the coordinate lists and I change the update routine to run at 60fps, but only update 1 triangle on the list each time.  So now I slowly cycle through the list and that smooths out the processor usage. 

GIF

That caused other problems with overlapping triangles.  I ended up using a dictionary to store keys for the X&"|"&Y coords of  every tile when it gets updated, so I could see if that tile had already been set this cycle if it is in more than one coordinate list.  Each cycle clears out the dictionary contents and I then sorted the list of lists to update the brightest ones first and it all works.

GIF

[nova++]

Oh, I like the look of this. I'm very weak to accurate space games, weaker still to space probe games. Not to mention slower, contemplative experiences. I definitely hope to see this go far.

I'd like to suggest looking into GPU compute for your tile processing - I don't really know what exactly is going on under the hood, but being able to run all these calculations in parallel with GPU compute could help you a lot.

[barta]

i've had a similar idea in mind for quite some time. then i got stuck with a few design decisions. what i had in mind was a more 'gamey' thing, perhaps ispired by the game 'waking mars', but more sandbox and open world. wish you the best with this project.

[EberKain]

Took a lot of fighting with my audio interface to get things working but I made a new update video that covers all the rest of the probe features.  I also replaced the video in the OP with a new version that more clearly describes everything that is going on.

[EberKain]

I have another update video and the Alpha 3 build is available for download if you want to check it out.  https://www.aggrocasual.com/download

[EberKain]

Alpha 4 update gives the first look at the home base and introduces the science lab.

[EberKain]

I have a new update video and an updated playable build. 

[RichSG]

This looks like a really neat idea! I especially love how closely you're modelling it to how the actual science works.

I tried playing the demo but I couldn't really work out what to do - maybe I missed something? I extended the grapple arms and tried to find something to grab, but couldn't find anything. Then I lost sight of the probe completely.

Are you going to put any instructions or tutorial in there? I think that would help...unless I missed it?! (in which case sorry!  )

[EberKain]

On the top left you should see a flashing yellow question mark.  Click it to open a window that explains all the controls.  I will need to make a comprehensive tutorial, but I am not to that point yet.

[EberKain]

New update video is done that covers creatures and some new probe systems.

[EberKain]

Short update on my progress, new playable Alpha build available to download.  Thanks for checking it out! 

[EberKain]

New update on my progress and new downloadable build.