Blog 1 - Rise Of The Overseer - A Change Of Name

So... I put my demo of The Overseer up on Itch.io a couple of weeks back during my summer vacation. That felt more like "start of the journey", rather than an end point. Particularly because developing something is only the initial challenge - making it visible and marketing it is the other half of the equation. More info for the uninitiated here. The trailer gives the best idea of the sort of style and humour behind the game;

https://megadib.itch.io/the-overseer

Otherwise, this week has been my 1st week back working full time on my project and it's been a busy week! I am working to have the game available on both Itch and Steam, initially in demo form. This week I have been focusing on the Steam release so far. The store is set up and now has a 2 week lead time before the demo is also available there. Though, it will be a while before the full game is available, as I have to finish it.

One thing I really wanted to do on the Steam release was to have a competitive element to it. This is done through uploading of scores and download of the leaderboard so that it is possible to see how your batch of Participants has performed against the world population! This is the main thing I have focused on, so for sure the Steam version will have a different feel than the Itch version.

The main challenges at the moment are;

• I am the only player of the game at the moment, so I am in 1st and last place on the leaderboard! I am getting round this by downloading sample data from a sample project from my game engine, GameMaker, so that there is a bigger pool of data to work with. I will make my own data server to simulate larger batches of real scores.
• Another challenge is knowing how scaleable it is to download the leaderboard data from Steam? It's fine with the small pool of data I have now, but it might not be as the number of players grow. I have implemented it from the beginning to download the lowest and highest score, then the player score, then randomise scheduling of download of the rest of the leaderboard so it progressively fills up.
• How scaleable it is to display all of the scores on a graph? Again fine with the small pool of data I have, but as the pool grows it becomes necessary to do the graph as a GPU operation, rather than CPU, which means writing shaders and dealing with vertex buffers, which is time consuming.
• The game engine's API didn't include all of the features I needed, so I had to extend the C++ based code to include more functions.
• The Steamworks API is always compiled into the code and activated with the extension I am using. Hopefully it is still well behaved enough for the  Itch version. Otherwise I may need to rewrite more of the API.

It is so satisfying to see it come together, see the leaderboard start to be displayed and be able to show a graphical representation of how well people have done! Many games such as Spacechem or Infinifactory where statistics are shown use Histograms. The way they doing it, I am pretty sure they they need their own data service to pre-process data, rather than downloading the scores from Steam. As I was trying to avoid this, and the scores are already ranked, I am trying to show the results as a cumulative percentile graph instead.

One noticeable change is also that I have changed the name of the game slightly; from now on the game will be  Rise Of The Overseer. The reason is that for a while I have realised there were other games called The Overseer, so I decided to choose something more unique that still fits with the overall story arc. It is deliberate that "Rise Of" is in grey lettering in the new game image. Why? That's for me to know and others to interpret :-)

I will be aiming to be a bit more obvious going forwards with progress on this blog and trying to post an update on Thursdays. Or at least that's the plan! I aim to write this during periods when I am waiting for compilation, or other waiting type activities.