Addiekin Studios

If you like survival crafting games I made a shortish 5-10 hour playthrough Survival game in PICO-8 wishlist it on Steam Today

I have been in the process of trying to finish up COLDNIGHTS for release after a long time of trying to figure out a way to add more code to the pico-8 version I decided to migrate it to love2d. I was a little afraid the attempt would end up taking a long time. And to my surprise it only took about a week.

After that I began to fix a lot of the game systems. It was nice to finally be able to fix them. I have added a few things like a recipe hint system. Fixed recipes for a fur-coat and for building walls and doors. Now it finally time to move on to bigger and better things for the game. There are still plenty of systems to fix up as well. The weather system needs a bit of work and the thermal simulation needs a little work.

For The Emergence Protocol, I was finally able to fix a crash that was holding things up for a while. So things are unblocked there and I can continue working on exploring the scope of the protocol.

I'll share more steps to get to this point, but I have the cryobeds checking the oxygen levels around them to determine if it is safe for the occupants to be awoken from stasis.

There are many exciting things to be done and I cannot wait to get to them.

Last things is that they is a summer sale going on over on itch.io so if you'd like to support me and my work pick up a bundle. Follow along for more updates things should get exciting.

Here is a video I took of a full system test today. These are extremely useful captures. You can easily reproduce any bugs you find and help narrow things down to specific changes. I can also get a sense of how the game plays in video form. What may be missing or not readable, etc.

Here is the test script I used for this

View all the layers of the ship test four directional movement

Check grid for asteroids (generated ones as well)

Take a couple of steps to test the asteroids are moving

Test selection of units and all stats

Pickup items from fridge, see stats update

when asteroid hits check log panel

Put one item back in fridge, verify stats update

Walk over to cryo-bed wake up hiru

Test single selection stats

Test double selection stats, highlighting names

Test walking to doors, closing, release gas, verify log

Test opening, gas movement

Pickup mageseal

go to hole

fix and select magseal

walk to navigation panel

bring up navigation

generate bring up star chart

close panel it

open nav again, close

There are going to be a lot more test scripts and test videos for sure. And every time I add something it adds a ton of test scripts. So far there is not any actual gameplay. I am just building the foundations and trying to fill out the vision to see if it comes together how I hope it will.

Its a little hard to see the video, there are doors and I was testing out the control panels. Making sure you could lock off sections of the ship to keep oxygen from escaping. That precious O2 and eventually N2, C02, Hydrogen mixture and hopefully not noxious gases or bad chemicals. Hey what you burn inside your ship is your business.

Also added a crew details panel to show the crew stats, inventory, current tasks etc. That should be coming along soon. At this point a lot of things are opening up to be done and added, that there will likely be many updates trying to document them all which is the best sign for an early project.

Check out my previous posts for a little bit of the progress. Also Do you think its getting a bit cluttered? I definitely do, I'll need to be cleaning that up. Right now I'm focus on some of the over all systems like equipment, combat, ship parts like air pumps and conduits and other things. Got a long way to go so I hope I can speed things up a bit.

And we have the ability to select from items we want to pickup now as well as items we want to put away. As you can see there are some slight bugs in there that have to do with some kind of duping it doesn't actually duplicate the items it just appears duplicated in the list for some reason. So that is going on the bug squash list.

These are always fun little things to look forward to squashing, though during testing and gameplay recording they do become annoying little buggers. Its good to have the recording of them to analyze when the time comes to do bug squashing, but focus on more important features at this point is the priority.

So after I got the asteroid to crash through the hull, I tested whether or not I had done a good job implementing the way the hull is identified to be fixed. It still needed some code to get it to work as the chunks of the asteroid crashed on through the ship.

There was still a little bit of an issue with the implementation of the moving of the asteroid, it ends up splitting apart as it moves which is not intended. So the movement code is not exactly where it needs to be to implement many other ideas. so it will need some more work in the future. Perhaps pretty soon as it will also enable many other mechanics and visuals so its a very important part of the game.

If you look back at the previous development logs, there are a lot of systems being worked on a little bit at a time. Things seem to be incremental here and there and I am intentionally doing this to try and get to a core loop while also being conscious of some of the future needs. I have found that in programming a lot of times I want to have the structure in place and well defined before expanding on features. So the goal is to get the major parts and structure defined and then content could be easily added.

This is a first simple attempt at adding an asteroid hazard to the game. And first trick was to just make something move. Just the basics get something moving and then go from there. Pretty simple pretty messy the bigger feat will be making it move as one and figuring out some center of mass things etc. Easy stuff for tomorrows me to figure out.

At first I actually had it tear through the ship right through the / angled parts just an accidental positioning. Then moving it down like in the first half of the clip it just kind of rammed into the ship and stuck on the hull. That type of material will have a valid use later on in this dev.

However I quickly made it so that it would go throw thin ship hull. And it also has the added bonus here of ripping through the ship floor too. I cannot wait to also add the thermal and lighting effects to this. Its going to be a pretty cool looking effect. I hope it will anyway we'll see if I can pull it off.

Universe gen placeholder there

This obviously still needs some work, though it is a screen of the highest zoomed out level of the universe. I think it will rarely be used aside from the initial universe generation. Unless you have a particular skill at wiping out all life in huge sections of the universe. Who knows you might be that "destroyer of worlds".

The lighting might be a lot better than what it is however all that is needed functionally is being able to select a region within the world seed. The goal right now is to get all the things in that are needed to get a core loop going and be able to do some simple scenario loops. Move between planetary systems, land on asteroids, just kind of fly through space. Dock at stations etc. Land/Takeoff from planets.

Starting to work on the visualization of the universe and the star maps. I am not sure if this is enough to continue further, I will probably use this with some kind of additional effect. As it stands its likely too difficult to actual visualize here.

There is a point where a project starts to explode with the amount of things that become possible, after initial hurtles of course. And we have reached that fulcrum. Selectable units can be moved around, objects can be picked up, added to scenarios, there is a grid format for multi-layered objects, objects can be contained in other ones (still needs testing). Player has an inventory (unconstrained) and can select and see that inventory when performing tasks. Tasks can be defined, there are few other base systems that need to be defined for the ship.

Although I think its time to work on the main event. I also subtlety added a random name generator and a universe seed into the simulation. So we have the basis for the massive generation I want to make. You need stuff to explore and do after all.

I still cannot wait to explore this game myself. The amount of anticipation for this game to exist is um... Ridiculous hopefully people can get a glimmer of the vision as I add more dimensions to this game.

Excited about this one, I added cryo-beds. Right now it just gives you the option to "eject" someone from a cryo-bed. Though I am going to make it so that I can create control panels for any device in the ship. I think once I have that then I'll need to seriously enhance the UI options and things for panels. So look forward to that. Also getting to the point where I think I need an editor for making ships and other "models", also possibly putting together scenarios as well.

There is also going to be some more boring work soon to get sounds fxs and a sim log in the game.

i am also excited about doing something I've been wanting to do for a while in a game. And you can tell me if this is something that you might like to see in a game. I have been wanting to make a game where there are two windows. One for vast controls, I've also wanted to make it so that perhaps you could link up a touchscreen tablet or another device. I have seen what some flight sim enthusiasts go through and have always been intrigued but never really had the time, money, and passion to invest in the types of rigs that I have heard about. I can understand the desire for that sort of immersive experience of having physical cockpit mechanical switches.

So I've decided to intersperse the sort of boring things in between some of the more gameplay and game mechanics related things on the project. And its time to get all this nasty code started for saving and loading. And this took a couple of days to get working because it requires things to be precise and complete in order to work. I'll need to update this code periodically too to add some more information that is currently not supported in the saving but also not yet used in the game like the world seeds and other types of information that are not in generally serializable structures.

And we are moving campers, so finally got the movement around the ship working. so you can move a crew around this opens up a bunch of other things that I can do now.

The last issues I was having before were mostly to do with the heuristic being used to calculate the best next part in the path. Also I need to get back to the pathing at some point and optimize it for best Euclidian distance, since theres a lot of non-optimal pathing going on here. Whats good is that it does work to start being able to build the gameplay and find out which ways to best build the content and the required logic for it.

Ok now that there is at least decompression, the next step is both selection of objects in the world and unit movement and actions. For that I needed to implement a pathfinding algorithm. This was a first very poor attempt. I have implemented pathfinding in the past but I guess I never really needed to understand the impact of the heuristic on the path.

There's a lot of work to be done but you need to start somewhere. Once this is working I'll be able to start on allowing the crew to have more actions they can perform and work a bit on how tasking and sequencing of orders will work.

Some progress here, so happy to have something that should work to prove out other systems. It may need some tweaking in the future, the propogation may prove to be a little slow in terms of ticks although the time scale is something that can just simply be adjust for other actions. It might be to fast. It really depends on what will suddenly not be possible or hard to depict or simulate. Its a starting point though.

I modelled this very simple not so ship like single floor ship. I gave it a roof only. I'll need to make other ships soon to explore multiple level things as well as experiment with the size of the simulated space which right now is 128x64x128 which is a bit small so some things are difficult and the tick speed is a bit slow. I have some approaches I have used in the past to optimize this process, full traversals even at this scale are SLOW btw.

I am also hoping to improve performance a lot in the future by integrating code written in my experimental language into the code for this game there have already been some places where C++ is choosing to be cumbersome. I'm enjoying really digging in again with writing my language compiler in C++ and this game again. Still lots of things that are frustrating and I hope to eventually switch the code over into my new language so that I can avoid a lot of the frustrations. Mainly all the typing and fragile memory manipulation of C++. So many times where you run into, I need to put this on the heap AND I DONT WANT TO, because now I need to delete it. I'd rather can a smarter way to manage the memory. And C++ forces you to create SO MANY new objects such a waste both of code, typing, and most importantly MEMORY. /End RANT

Still enjoying it C/C++ feel so much more powerful and performant than even lua in love2d and definitely Java and C# and especially JavaScript. But so so so so much more code. I have considered switching over to zig for a bit more safety. And not have to deal with the STL template crap. Oh sorry I was supposed to have ended my RANT. Teehee

I think I am a little crazy with this game btw, I have a lot of work ahead of me. To me its like a sirens song though I cannot wait to play this game. I have love for my crew and all their flaws before they are even entities within the game. Hopefully I can make the code do them justice. I also have a love for the universes to be explored.

So the first post was my first attempts at simulating gas movement. I had quiet a few different approaches to the simulation that as you can see produced some interesting results. This time it was definitely a surprise to find new mass being created when I am pretty sure it was definitely not possible. I had checked more than a few times that all mass movement was strictly conserved adding and subtracting only reciprocal amounts. As best I could tell before scraping the approach altogether was that there was a couple overflow errors in the code and a few conditions left where things were not capped appropriately causing a cascade effect. Thought that does not exactly sound right.

Anyways that approach proved to be incorrect. Thats what you get for trying to use AI. I continually find AI has some of the worst approaches to game mechanics logic and simulations. Its so confused between the low quality of code available to it and the plethora of physics and institutional knowledge that was used to train it.

What I am trying to test here is two small cubes with a specific amount of gas initially suspended BY GODS hand in the center of each hollow cube. The gas should escape the hole and the internal pressure should force it out.

My initial test scenario for building and refining systems is sort of a mini-game where you are in charge of a crew and have to repair the ship after asteroid or small debris collisions.