So wanted to share with you the histroy and future of my PES project.

The history

When I was 12, I was watching Stargate SG1 and Startrek Voyager with my parents. I loved the engineers/scientists in those shows and wanted to be one so badly but actually becoming one seemed...unappealing. I wanted to jump straight into discovering and testing without all the years of studying behind it. Later that night, I went down into my room with a notebook and started sketching my first ideas for what would later be called PES (It was called Metal Wars back then and had more to do assemblign parts into sci-fi guns than reactors). I had a ton of different gun parts where you'd literally assemble your device piece by piece and they didn't technically ahve to be a gun. I had the energy particles designed too and how they worked down to the anatomical level. I had vast dreams of players on a server experimenting with different kinds of weapons and other horrors they had made. It stayed a notebook until I was 16. 

At this time, I had stumbled across the notebook and part of me went "I really want this." Being a game dev was a pipe dream and forced you to be at the mercy of the coder. I had tried to get into it but never found a good coding course. I added to the notebook, getting rid of stuff that would be unecessary for actual players and thinking more about the actual videogame itself and less about the particles. You'd start off with basic energy and parts. As you'd win matches, you'd be able to buy more, higher quality parts but they'd ahve their limits like the muzzle has a certain heat tolerance. This is where I first devised of having buttons you cna put on the outside of your guns and rig up some kind of functionality.

When I hit my early twenties, I found the notebook again and decided to transfer my notes to a word document for safe keeping. It was a great idea as I'd end up losing my stuff in a move. I then added to the ideas again, giving players the ability to mix and match different kinds of palion energy to create unique properties they'd want and the order that you introduce different kinds of energy matters too. 

Then, two years ago, I realized I had learned enough about Unity to actually make this game. By pure luck, I found a thumb drive in the garage with my notes. I made a reactor with controls and after a ton of trial and error, it was plyable but kind of basic. It was obnoxiously organised as I was mostly testing. I sucked it up and made a second reactor that was much better organised. It took every ounce of willpower I had to delete my first reactor that was honestly a huge mess code-wise. I had a few friends play it and it took a while for them to understand wtf to do. I don't remember if it was Unity or Playmaker that updated, but suddenly when my stuff would send information to other...things, it would get stuck with old data. This was...beyond devastating. When I finally realized I'd have to use a different method of sending and recieving data between "scripts", the sheer magnitude of work that would nee dto be done, and bug hunting, knocked me on my ass. I put it aside and decided to brush it off recently to try again.

Present Day

There are two PES games I'm dabbling with alongside my main games: PES Reactor and PES Mad Scientist. PES Reactor is about operating a reactor. PES Mad Scientist is about building your own reactor. It's played by placing objects onto a 3D mat. Basically when you're ready, you release a particle from it's holding cell. That particle generates and stores power every second. The goal is to get it to bounce along walls and strike a block called a Palion Conductor. After hitting it, the particle transfers all its stored energy to the conductor. There are two factors to keep in mind: 

1. a particle needs about 5 seconds with no strikes to start generating power agian so you can't just trap it in a small room with a conductor. 

2. If a particle hits its max energy, it expldoes, destroying stuff in your testing chamber. This is bad because you start off with some cash and every wall you place costs some money as does the particle. The experiment can only end when you get the particle back into its hodling cell or it explodes and no you can't pause the game. 

You gain cash by accepting contracts that want a generator within certain parameteres.

The game gets fun as particles that generate more power, have secondary effects like heat and radiation. There's different kinds of walls and extra utility objects to use as well. Also conductors can only take in so much energy at a time. 

The future

I eventually want the game to be a first person thing where you design a reaction chamber in a 2D environment then place it somewhere in your research base. As time goes on, you buy more land and it's completley up to you where to place whatever you make, even allowing you to hook up multiple generators to eachother. Techncailly each "generator" doesn't have to generate anything. It can simply do whatever you want so if you have a "generator" that makes so much extra heat that you can't deal with it in there, you can create outlets then make a second generator that just deals with heat and hook it up.

The game series' main draw, is that you start off with 16 particles you know about that gradually get more complicated, and dangerous, to use. Then there are 16 dark particles that are just complete nightmares to figure out how to use. After that, you have 10 anti-palion particles. You the player will ahve no idea what these particles do and it will be up to you to figure it out. You then use the Darkstar generator to create a random new anti-palion particle to mess with.