Devlog - September 25th 2022

Covid recovery & no more infinite worlds

This week’s progress was unfortunately very minimal. On Monday my girlfriend and I tested positive for Covid so my initial assumption of it being the cold or flu turned out to be wrong after all. I did feel better everyday but motivation and internal energy level was still lower than usual. Since my girlfriend didn’t feel well at the beginning of the week, all my focus went into taking care of her. While I probably could have worked normally on the last two days of the week I decided not to and instead take care of some other personal matters instead. I did however spend a good amount of time thinking about the current state and direction of the game. I came to the conclusion that it would probably be better to not pursue an infinite world for the game but instead work with a limited area. A limited play area has a lot of benefits over an infinite world when it comes to the generation and making it fit a certain game idea. For example it allows the world generation to ensure specific points of interest are within a certain distance to the player. While this is possible in an infinite world it is much harder. It also makes the world generation a whole lot easier for me because I don’t necessarily need to have the most performant generation algorithms. The world can instead be generated during the loading time which also avoids potential stutters during gameplay. Especially the AI navigation greatly benefits from this approach as it is one of the heavier systems to do at runtime. Additionally the creator for the terrain shader I am using (or will soon use again) also announced a new asset called MicroVerse. It’s an asset that does provide a nice workflow for world building. While it’s technically built for edit time usage it looks to be capable of doing all the things I need at runtime according to the developer. Once it is available for purchase I will spend some time testing this asset and whether or not it can achieve what I would like to use it for. If possible I could also scrap the current vegetation placement asset. The vegetation asset has not received any updates in a while and the developer is also very hard to reach. Based on those factors it’s up in the air if I would be able to use that asset next year if it breaks with a new Unity version and no update is provided. To avoid this situation I am looking forward to testing out this new asset and potentially using it as a replacement instead. While this would add a good amount of extra development time it would also make certain things a lot easier in the long run and certralize more parts in the current development pipeline for which I am currently using multiple assets for. On Saturday I tested negative again and I’m also feeling almost back to normal. Therefore I will go back to work tomorrow and start the modular zombie implementation using the UMA asset I talked about in last week’s devlog. Since the asset is quite complex I will take it slow and really familiarize myself with all the functionalities before deciding on how I want to approach the code for the implementation. I can’t really estimate how long this will take but I should be able to better estimate this in next week’s devlog after reading through all the documentation.

Notable tasks this week:

• Decided to step away from an infinite world
• Looked into alternative asset called MicroVerse to help with the world generation and potentially replace current vegetation placement asset

Wishlist on Steam

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well. Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.