8/24/2019
Tons of Progress
The tasks for Chemaria that were ahead of me the past almost two months were going to take me out of my comfort zone and I knew this. As I have been adjusting to my new work and schedule, I have fallen into a groove of finding time to work on projects such as Chemaria and pushing myself to learn new things.
Since last update, I have done a lot of tweaks to the general text rendering in the game.
Going from this
to this
On top of that, the settings menu truly affects the game now, allowing options to modify the camera zoom, whether or not the game will be in fullscreen, and turning vsync on and off.
The load menu has gotten a makeover, allowing the user to even delete their save files.
The game has a proper pause menu also providing a save option.
Someone paying attention will also notice a few new things in the last screenshot, and that is that the game chunks are not a single block type anymore! I added in a SimpleX noise Lua implementation. Using 2D noise, I am able to generate these more natural shapes in the world.
I am going to modify it a bit as I move forward, adjusting the numbers which determine what block is generated, based upon the Y position, but that is for the future.
One more small thing as well, holding a pickaxe actually affects the mining speed, mining and crafting have limited distances which you can perform them from, and an item selected in the toolbar will show up in your player’s hand.
That last picture also demonstrates thge various different elements in the game now, such as the various ores and ingots.
Next Steps
There is not much left that I want to do before release! I am having my wife work on better looking and higher resolution assets to replace the current ones. I also plan to add in more items to modify materials (like the furnace does, but for mixing various metals into new ones.) and more materials in general to work with.
I obviously want to finetune the world generation as mentioned before, because at this point it will be a very simple process to modify the generation methods.
There is also the big beast of adding the logic simulator into the game, but that is going to come after those things mentioned before, and maybe even after officially releasing the game and moving continued development to a closed source repository (the original repository will always exist as open source).
Thanks!!
It has been great keeping track of the community as more of a lurker and simply focusing on getting something finished on Chemaria. I love to see the Defold community growing and I hope to continue to be a helpful member as best I can while also pulling from the wealth of knowledge that comes from the various forum posts day to day.