Things have been a bit quiet. Well... for anyone following this blog it has at least, behind the scenes things are still very busy.
I'm currently in the process of a massive code rewrite.
To AI, or Not To AI
When I started this project it was as a kind of experiment to see what AI was capable of. A very large chunk of the code was generated using various AI models... in fact, at first everything was AI generated... graphics, music, the whole shebang.
AI has become a bit of a dirty word. People immediately called me out on the AI graphics, so I set to removing them. Then the AI generated music was replaced with human generated music. That just left AI generated code.
It seems that AI generated code is considered more acceptable than AI generated art. I can see why, because code is generally unique, even if other developers code has been used to train the models. Even so, AI has it's weaknesses and drawback, and I wasn't comfortable having a project with my name on it where I wasn't familiar enough with the code to make changes where needed... so I started slowly dumping the AI content.
That turned into a much bigger task than I expected. I actually started from scratch, recoding by hand the features and mechanics that I had previously AI generated, using AI only for complex calculations, or to save me time on repetitive tasks, and hunting down bugs.
Where Is It At Now?
The rewrite has been going well, but, as you can imagine, rewriting a game from scratch takes a long time.
I had hoped to have a build that was a close approximation to the last build that was made available on the Playtest branch in time for Next Fest, but it's now evident that that isn't going to happen. The game will still be going to Next Fest, but it will be the pre-rewrite version, which I am now considering a "Prototype".
The NEW version, the non-AI version, is coming along slowly, and as its coming together I have been able to refine some features, add some extra things that were missing from the Prototype.
For Example...
New Menu Layout
BEFORE
AFTER
New Intro Slides
BEFORE
AFTER
New Planet Scene
BEFORE
AFTER
Where Is It Going Next?
The rewrite continues. The Demo for next fest will be the Prototype version, but shortly after I will be opening up the Early Access stage, which will feature the new rewritten version, which will, by then, have all the features of the demo version, and hopefully a few more.
From there we will continue to work together to add the rest of the planned features and push toward a release date.
So, yes, "progress" is slow at the moment because I took a big step backwards, but the end result will be far better for it. I'm looking forward to showing it to you.
See you on the horizon!