Devlog #001

Hello capitalists!

It is time for the first devlog, a lot of progress has happened since the last blog post. So let's get right to it!

The signaling implementation mentioned in the previous blog post is done! It took me some time to figure it all out but it is finally in a state where it is usable. How well the current implementation works will be revealed in the first prototype testing phase.

Here's an example video of the signaling logic in action:

And of course, in case your signal placement is off or you are missing signals the trains will explode and loose all their precious cargo in the process!

I'm not entirely done with trains for now, but the current implementation should be good enough for play testing the game prototype.

The user interface has been completely reimplemented using a 3rd party ui library.

While my first try was implementing my own solution for user interfaces it quickly turned out to be much more complicated than I anticipated. So, I changed plans to use the wonderful Dear ImGui instead for now and this worked out great.

Creating new user interfaces aswell as using the user interface feels much better now. Overall this is a huge improvement and I have prepared a before / after comparison. The videos below show the old and the new UI (I've actually used this as reference when reimplementing the UI with the new library).

Also I have implemented a loading screen which is now shown whenever you transition from the main menu to the game.

The loading screen has been implemented by making game worlds run their initialization code in IEnumerable's, which makes it quite easy to track progress and only execute a small operation at a time and then redraw the screen:

Not sure if it's just me but in other engines such as Unity implementing a loading screen later on always has been a big hassle. This implementation was quite pleasant actually 😄

Almost all 3d models in the game have been replaced with better ones. The initial models were created by me and just meant to be a placeholder while in development. The new models I have bought from asset stores and they will be used in the meanwhile until I have gathered enough funds to replace them with custom models.

While they are certainly not perfect, they are still quite an improvement over the placeholder ones (Models rendered in blender, not in the game):

The next things to implement will be some larger changes to the energy network mechanics, a scenario system and a tutorial. After that it's time for playtesting the prototype thoroughly and work out potential game design issues. Apart from that I don't have anything else planned in the next few months. But I'll make sure to write a new devlog once there is shareable progress!

Have a nice day!