Gaia Patch Notes — July 9, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hey everyone, so I've started work on multiple projects and wanted to keep you guys updated it on it.
First off, I started working on Gaia 2.0. This new version will be a massive improvement on the first game. I'll be taking into account all of your feedback. You can expect new building mechanics, new environments, improved combat mechanics and lots of general polishing and design restructuring. Many thanks to all the reviews that provided deep feedback. I have no date on the release, it might be by the end of this year or next year, we'll see.
I've also started work on some side projects and testing out some waters. I'm branching out into different types of games. I have some links, gifs and pics for you guys and I was hoping you'd provide some feedback and maybe even suggestions if you like what you're seeing.
The first on the list is Intra Corpus. I just put up a new store page, it has a trailer, some screenshots and a description, but basically this will be a 3D game that explores the human body with the help of a drone. The main theme is exploration, so it's light on the number of mechanics, but the existing ones are quite deep. Check it out and let me know what you think or if you have any questions, post them on the community hub!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1359950/Intra_Corpus/
The second one on the list is a 2D game that doesn't have a name yet even though I've spent a few months working on it on and off. This one is basically a sort of RTS like They Are Billions, where you start off with a few workers and warriors, build up your base and units, all while searching for resources and fighting off literally 20'000 bad guys at the same time. The game is made with Unity, so if you're wondering how it can handle so many units at a time, it's because I'm using ECS, which is a very powerful and kind of complicated approach to programming. In the gifs below you can see some of that in action, as well as some of the rough UI, map design and resources. Note that the art for the units, buildings and UI is nowhere near final, but the environment will remain like that if this game ever sees the light of day. I tried adopting the art style of Rimworld and I think it looks pretty nice.
I apologize for the gif quality. Sadly Steam allows only a max of 3MB sized files on steam announcements and I tried to cram in as much as I could.
First GIF has the fog of war turned on and showcases a 'worker' constructing a foundry, which is basically a gathering point for all sorts of minerals such as diamonds, graystone, soapstone, diamonds and ramite.
Next 2 gifs have the fog of war turned off to showcase the thousands of units attacking the foundry. All these units have their own brain, pathfinding, etc etc, whatever it is you expect from a normal RTS bad guy. The only shortcut taken to help with computing power is that the bad guys are divided into groups. Each group has an invisible leader, in this case the orange square shown for debugging purposes, and the units inside that group won't be computing pathfinding as much if they're far away from any potential target. This way, your FPS will never have any spikes and will always be smooth.
And here are a bunch of resources, such as water and oil, with a whole bunch of bad guys roaming around. These pictures have a much higher quality than the gifs so you can see how the game actually looks like. For best results, you should open them in a new tab in your browser.
I started this project back in 2019 to learn ECS but it came farther than I expected. There's turrets, barracks, ranged and melee units and other typical RTS stuff in it now. What do you guys think about this one? Would you play something like this? I don't have any story or setting for this game yet, but I was thinking something along the lines where you're a commander who's in charge of establishing new colonies on planets to extract water and bring it back to Earth safely.
If you want to start a discussion on Intra Corpus, please use the community hub on its own store page. For anything else, we can use this announcement.