NEP Dev Update #11: Back in action!

by Cuchaz

After a bit of a break, I'm back with another development update for my indie game, Non-Essential Personnel.

I took sometime off over the winter holidays to travel, see friends, family, etc. I also started a new part time job in January doing computer science research at a local university. Gotta pay the bills while I work on my game somehow. =P

I lost some momentum with all the recent changes, but development on the game (and the game engine) is back in full swing.

Since we last met, I've gotten the Remote Interstellar Gateway (aka the RIG) into the game. The RIG's fancy wormhole shader effects are implemented too. It's fun to walk around and watch the wormhole's event horizon deform space around it. This is a short blog post, but I'll put up a video next time.

I've also done quite a bit of tweaking to the world generation to get the RIG to spawn in a reasonable place. Hopefully not too many worlds will have a spawn point where the RIG is hanging off the edge of a cliff.

I've done some work on the sky rendering system too. The system itself is mechanically better now, and I've used it to implement a new kind of sky renderer. Here's a screenshot of a new nighttime sky renderer with pretty stars and such:

A render from the game, showing a scene with the gateway and a player against a starry night sky Click to enbiggen for more pretty.

Next up is getting the big star in the sky to move around with some kind of day/night cycle that affects the world lighting.

Then it's onto more gameplay type things like making the RIG fulfill its intended purpose.