Posted February 28, 2023 by Wauzmons / Seven Ducks Studios
Welcome to another Elysian Log, where we look at what was implemented this month and what you can expect from the next month of development.
Let's get started!
Milestone: Multiplayer Test
The biggest milestone we achieved this month is a multiplayer prototype for cell stage. All movements, stats and abilities get synchronized over the network to make it possible for two or more players to share a map. The server is built into the game itself, so you are automatically hosting a server every time you play and can allow others to join in.
Just like everything else in cell stage, this feature is still pretty raw. For example the seed of the map doesn't get synced, resulting in different terrain generation, as seen in the video. Multiplayer will be further enhanced with every following update, until it is stable enough to be included in the demo.
Milestone: AI Microbes (Micro)
You are no longer alone in this universe! Two types of AI-controlled microbes can now spawn in cell stage. The ones in the demo just roam around aimlessly, but we started working on a configurable behaviour system to allow them to attack, flee or call for other microbes, when certain conditions are met. Thanks to object pooling, we can spawn new microbes without performance impact, by "recycling" ones that are no longer visible on screen.
Another imrovement that we are working on is procedural colliders. Right now the hitboxes for all creations are the same, no matter the size. This makes the ranges of attacks seem far too big for small microbes. With colliders that are automatically fit to their size, this will no longer be the case and combat is going to feel much more believable.
Milestone: Galaxy Generation (Macro)
Not only cell stage did get a lot of improvements. Tons of planning and experimenting was done on space stage. While only visual improvements made it into the actual demo this time, we made some major progress on designing the gameplay for EE's biggest stage.
You can read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElysianEclipse/comments/10mmkif/plans_for_galaxy_genera...
Some smaller things...
In addition to the big stuff, we also made smaller improvements in version 0.2.3:
What's coming next for Elysian Eclipse
For the next month of development we want to focus on the following:
Thank you for your Support
Meme of the month by YoruShika
Thank you to all the patrons! Without you this wouldn't be possible!
You can support the project here: https://www.patreon.com/wauzmons