So, Quanta didn’t make the cut in the IGF (congrats to the finalists and everyone who entered!). I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed, but looking through the first page of entries was enough to tell that I didn’t stand much of a chance, at least the feedback from the judges should be helpful. Now, knowing that the IGF is out of the way, I’m going to be reimagining/reworking things a bit.
In the version I submitted to the IGF, I really focused way too much on technical junk, and I sort of over extended myself on the art side of things, the realistic industrial look is rather hard on the assets and shader end of things (and it still wound up looking rather dated) as well as not being very distinctive/interesting. This also forced the system requirements way higher that I’d have liked. So for this new ‘version’ or ‘iteration’ or whatever you’d call it, I’m going to go for a simpler, more distinctive art style; something that will look nice, but be simpler and actually reasonable on the asset creation end of things. I have some ideas as to how it’ll look, and I’ll post some screen for some feedback when i get something working.
Gameplay-wise, I’m waiting to hear feedback from the IGF judges and from whoever downloads it when I publicly release the build (I’m debating just uploading it tonight… I’ve gotta add some legal disclaimer stuff though… but soon anyways). But I definitely want to focus a bit more on the learning/difficulty curve and such, and actually do some playtesting, etc.
As far as technology goes, as I mentioned before I am rewriting the engine from scratch (but using the old for reference so, having done most everything once before, it should be fairly rapid development), I’m likely (not 100% positive, but pretty darn close) going to make it open source, if mainly to force me to write cleaner code. I was originally looking to do a lot of multithreading stuff, but after a month of stumbling around with that, it’s not worth the effort, I will use threading (for instance, I might run the audio system in it’s own thread, or divide up some of the internal stuff into threads) but not in the original way I was looking to. I will try to leave the new engine open for networking stuff, but that’s a bit less of a priority right now. I am going to be using a scripting language, at the moment I’ve got some very limited lua stuff functional, but I’ve had python suggested to me by a few people and might give that a shot, as boost.python looks a bit nicer to work with than luabind. Also, I am making every effort to make it work on Linux, since I’ve recently been using Linux a lot (tried ubuntu first, and now I’m running Arch Linux).
Overall, I’m hoping to make fairly regular releases (once I get the new engine far enough along to have something resembling a game, so a few months off yet..) and to be more open and out there a bit more. I’ve been sort of protective/quiet with Quanta up to now (think I’ve posted about it on two forums… and that’s about the extent of my PR work, to all 2 of the people reading this thanks for the interest!).
Sorry for the long post, but I had a lot on my mind…
