Start of a New Year
Hey there, it’s been a while.
I’ve hit a bit of a roadblock when it comes to blog posts. For the past few months, I’ve just written about what I did that week on my project Maintenance Crew, since the things I was doing were interesting enough to talk about each week. Problem is I’ve hit a part of development that, at the very least, I don’t find fun to write about — it’s a lot of fixing bugs and preparing systems for the next phase of development, when I think it’ll be interesting to talk about the game again. Rest assured, the project is still ongoing; I haven’t abandoned it despite the silence. This leaves me in a strange place for my blog posts, however. I don’t want to force a blog post every week even if I have nothing interesting to say — that sounds like a very easy way to get people to stop reading as well as to kill my enjoyment of writing them. My plan going forward is to write a blog post whenever I have something interesting to say, weekly or otherwise. With that out of the way, lets chat about Maintenance Crew and my other work lately.
Some of you may remember I set myself a sort of soft deadline of the end of the year for a playable build of Maintenance Crew. Given that it’s January 1st at the time I’m writing this, clearly I haven’t quite met the mark there, but I could foresee I wasn’t going to. The point of the deadline was never to be a hard goal, but a motivator. I’d like to think it was fairly effective, given the progress I’ve made. Like I said before, I still have a handful of things that need polished and implemented into the game before I reach the point I intended to by the end of the year, but after that hopefully I should have some more fun things to talk about regarding the game and, more importantly, a fully playable version. For those curious about my current plans, here’s a little sneak peak at my todo list:
A sneak peak of my todo list, showing the remainder of my plans for “Phase 1” and a small glimpse into my plans for “Phase 2”
To quickly explain the delineation here, everything in phase 1 is something I see as essential to the core gameplay loop and is minimum requirements for the game loop to be “complete” — not necessarily fun, but functional. Phase 2, on the other hand, is the beginnings of starting to make the game more interesting, using the foundations I’ve set up for myself in phase 1. As you can see, most of the remaining things in phase 1 are not particularly interesting to talk about, at least for me. The one exception to this would be the advanced interaction system, but that system has already kicked my butt once, so as you can see, I might be looking for external solutions to that problem just to move on from it and get to the elements I’m more interested in working on. Once phase 1 is complete, I might run a handful of quick impromptu playtests with friends and family, so reach out to me if that’s something you’d be interested in. Bear in mind that the game will probably not be super fun at this point and will still need a lot of work to get to a point that I’m happy with, but the point of these tests will be to get people’s opinions about the kinds of things they would want to see in the game and to give me suggestions as I enter a fairly open ended phase of development. Additionally, I’ve been informed by one of my friends that the name “Maintenance Crew” is actually already taken on Steam, so I’ll need to come up with a different name for the project. The project name itself (the Unreal Engine project) will remain Maintenance Crew as a sort of working title, but if you have suggestions for the actual game name, feel free to send those my way as well. Now that that’s out of the way, lets talk about another project I’ve started recently.
Since Maintenance Crew is sort of on blog-hiatus until I finish phase 1, I figured a good way to have things to talk about would be to start another small project in parallel with Maintenance Crew. This does mean that phase 1 of Maintenance Crew will probably take a bit longer to finish, but I think it’s worth it in order to have more to talk about. The project in question is a mod for a game called Factorio. The eagle-eyed among you may remember me talking about this game in October as the game that kept me from writing a blog post for a couple days due to a DLC release. Factorio is easily one of if not my favorite game of all time. On top of that, it may have one of the friendliest modding platforms of any game ever — the whole game was essentially coded as a mod to the engine it was written in so mod makers have access to most of the same tools that the actual developers have. The engine itself is written in C++, which is the part that mod developers don’t have access to, but the modding API is in Lua, which is a very easy to use programming language that I’m also learning through this process, so it’s sort of killing two birds with one stone for me.
The mod I’m making is currently running with the working title of “Arcana”. Basically the idea is to introduce magic into the game that combines with the engineering to create magical technologies. This project is still in very early stages of development and I’m still learning both how Lua works and how programming mods for Factorio itself works, but it’s coming along nicely I think. Here’s a little sneak peak of the brainstorming document I made today for the mod:
Arcana’s brainstorming document
This mod is going to fall under a category of mods known as “overhaul” mods. The basic idea of that is these are mods that completely overhaul the progression of the game into, essentially, a whole new game, running on Factorio’s engine. While some mods go to extremes with this functionality (see: the suite of Pyanodon’s mods, Ultracube, and Sea Block for examples of that), I intend for this to be a sort of “light” overhaul. The mod will have a new win condition for the game, probably some custom achievements, new logistics problems to solve, and of course plenty of new things to make and automate, but at least at this early phase of development, I’m not intending to change much about the vanilla game. As you can see in that brainstorming document, I’m intending to keep the very early parts of the game mostly untouched by my mod before introducing the first new resource in the second part. Beyond this, I’m not totally sure what I’m going to do yet (mostly because I haven’t actually looked into how to change prerequisites for base game technologies yet), but I’m having fun learning about Factorio modding and just sort of winging this project without much of a plan. Hopefully I’ll have some fun stuff to talk about regarding this project soon!
Lastly, I’d like to thank anyone reading. Whether you’ve been reading every post or this is your first one, I really enjoy sharing what I’m doing with you and I hope you stick around to see what I do next. Happy new year!
