Shine Fall has a Discord now

Hi! Solo dev here working during free time in a quite ambitious project, it's a 3D survival, with lots of open topics yet to be decided.

I've been making everything on this game from the stratch, including its game engine (I call it Biomancer) to the music, going through art and gameplay mechanics. 

The 3 Main Features of the Game 

1 - Infinite Procedural Worlds 

Worlds will be procedurally generated from ground up, props, textures every "static" object will be made 100% by code. Note: Procedural generation is NOT AI, it just means that all you see is generated by code - a code written by a human - me I'm coding the world through random seeds based on the character name, so in a sense, a game you start will be exclusively dedicated to you. Also thanks to procedural generation, some worlds (I say worlds, because the game will have several of them) will be infinite. It will be dystopian like Backrooms, but you will have your safe home to always return to.

2 - Destructible & Buildable Scenarios 

If you seen some videos and gifs of my game engine (Biomancer) you may have noticed that I can easily create/destroy/carve/attach/glue/dig any 3D surface (see the gif below). I plan to give that power to the player and to NPCs, meaning you will be able to destroy + build anything in the game. I plan to extend this feature as much as possible, so you can expect a quite interesting battle system where you can break your way through walls to get to your hiding enemy. That also means you will be able to create your own home, and possibly settlements for your companions in the game, details are based on the last pillar I'll reveal later.

3 - Human-like NPCs

Shine Fall will be powered by the integration of human-like large language model (LLM) powered AI for all NPCs. This means that every character in the game, whether they are a companion, a rival, or a stranger, will have their own unique personality, daily routines, and even their own goals and ambitions. They will not just follow pre-set scripts, but will think, feel, and respond in a way that is almost indistinguishable from a real person. It's like having a whole new world of living, breathing characters that are always there, waiting for you to interact with them.

Yes this is happening, and as a sneak peek, here is a screenshot of a discord bot (Matriel) I made using the AI of the game, she explains this very feature in her post:

You can talk to her in our discord!

This is the biggest indie game I've ever created, my objective is to create something that will resemble a AAA game. The game has lots of inspirations in titles like: Skyrim, Prototype, No Man's Sky and Minecraft.

Join me on Discord to never miss a thing.

The Team

Me.

I love making game engines (and I do that for a living) so I'm creating the game using my own humble game engine.

• Game Design: Me
• All Programming (Gameplay/Engine/Graphics/Physics/AI): Me
• Music: Me
• Art:
  • Me procedurally generating it for static art like props and nature.
  • Me rigging, skinning and animating models created by merging (and procedurally modifying) multiple pieces from assets created by online artists, (The full credits will be available once alpha is released,  because right now I'm still deciding which ones to pick)
• Sound effects: not yet decided.

The Game Engine - Biomancer

My own indie 3D Procedural Game engine: Biomancer

I'm first developing the Game Engine, but parts of the game may come in parallel as well.

Image Samples

Here are some screenshots:

The very first Screenshot:

There is the very first screenshot of the base model that will be the base for all models (female at least) rendered by my engine.

As you can see, the model is plain and not animated, loading it internally from blender was the first step of many, things may evolve slowly since I'm making the engine.

Sorry for the blurs in the image, those parts are fully modeled, and I'm not sure if the game will be 18+ or not, that's a possibility not yet discarded.

Another detail you can see is the background which simulates the sky procedurally. The black ground is just nothing, since the sky right now is just a dome that covers everything but the ground.

Development Progress/Release Dates:

Current development is at 34.6% complete.

The Game Engine is 59.8% complete.

The Game development is yet to start.

Did I mention Shine Fall has a Discord?

Colors!

I updated the shader to render with colors (it was a plain boring white so far). The model has no texture yet, its all vertex based colors.

Again sorry for the blur, I fully modeled those areas as said before because I'm not sure if the game will have any NSFW content in it (as a side feature).

Just as a refresher, I did this by making my way from a "notepad" to what you see, using my own engine, that's why the graphics won't be fancy like unreal or unity.

I'll get her some proper skin appearance, right now it looks like a doll...

Side note: These post are not time accurate, meaning it does not represent the actual stage or pace of development but rather the pace in which I have time to update this log.

Skin! 

In previous update you saw her skin was not resembling skin at all, but not anymore:

This was achieved with a proper skin shader I did, this means the game will render the model based on the color I have set for her skin and the current lighting environment to make it look like actual human skin. The procedure is called sub-surface scattering which is just a "fancy" way to describe how light bounces on and in your skin (also happens in plant leaves and certain types of rock like salt)

Here is the off/on comparison:

much better, right?

The engine also calculates direct scattering from sunlight, here is closer look on her hand making V:

I just kept short about the technical details on how the effect works, but if anyone is interested I can go deeper in a special post.

Thanks for reading my update, and until next update :)

Animations!

No T-pose anymore, I had animations in blender but my engine was not able to load them.

Not anymore, it supports skeletal animations, next step is to load 2 set of animations independently:

One for facial expressions and another for body animation, this will be a very important aspect of the game in future as you will see.

Side Log  - Language Barrier

Funny side log not exactly a full update but still sort of an update with a funny story.

If you haven't realised yet, English is not my first language, and one of the problems that us second-language english speakers have to face frequently is detecting names that may have some unnitentional possible meanings...

A name of a NPC in my game I was considering was Packer, then I took the stupid decision of searching for images in case it was a commonly known brand or something similar (to avoid conflicts)... And I had to see lots of plastic dicks, safe search was on, and for some reason these were all still popping onto my face...

A lesson was learned: Packer means penis prosthesis.

Another word for my english vocabulary never to be forgotten.... That's it, have a nice day...

Put some clothes on!

Finally doing it for the poor girl. Look how happy she is now:

Lots of issues like z-fighting, weird bone wrapping, lack of double faces, some abnormal vertices weights.... And well, just plain white clothes!

But on the other hand, you can put any clothes you want (as long as you have the clothes in question, ofc), this will be a feature in the game.

Here are her in some other clothes.

The technique used for this is skin remapping. 

Now that she's properly dressed, what about... hair?

Lets get her some hair over this pretty bald spot next!

Hair has grown!

Finally the female model is presentable:

You see, our hair does not reflect light in the same way as other parts of our body.

Hair belongs to special type of reflectance materials called Anisotropics, which is just a fancy name for saying that it reflects light diferently according to each direction and location, observe how its specularity shifts across each strand.

Of course, I gave it a cartoonish touch not to make it look very realistic, all to avoid falling in the uncanny valley and also because my humble engine can't handle it XD

I'm not a professional artist, I'm a graphics programmer, so I'd love to hear any feedback on the art side :)

And here is a sneak peak of what's coming next...

Game is around 6% complete and 14% ready for alpha release.

Making the Maker

The game needed an visual editor and now I have this:

It's getting good enough be a character editor, will ease the process of creating all possible combinations for each race in the game.

I hope soon to  start posting videos, because things will be better presented if animated

Game is around 7% complete and 16% ready for alpha release.

Expression from face and body

So far she could only animate her face and/or body as one, meaning if she laughs her body needs to have a "laughing" animation. But not anymore, now she can laugh and dance, jump or even punch someone at the same time. In other words, now we can have different sets of animations playing simultaneously.

Here is an example:

3 independent animations at the same time: winking, smiling and posing :) 

Game is around 8% complete and 18% ready for alpha release.

Everything is procedural!

One of the main points of the game is that everything will be procedurally generated.

Organic models will be partially, but static objects like nature and buildings I'm planning to make them 100% generated procedurally.

Here is the first iteration of the trees, dry without leaves for now:

I added it to my game editor so I can create procedural profiles which are like "themes" for each procedurally generated element in the game.

If you are curious about how the tree generation works, it is simple:

1. Generate a cylinder for the main trunk
2. Generate a cone in the top of the cylinder
3. For a few random positions in the surface of the cylinder:
   • Generate another (Branch) cylinder with a fraction of the parent cylinder.
   • Generate its cone on top 
   • Repeat step 3 recursively for each sub-branch.

What I described above is what we call fractal generation. Lots of things are still missing, but the main idea is done :)

Game is around 8.5% complete and 19% ready for alpha release.

We can't leave the leaves out

Sorry about the stupid title, but hey! Trees can have leaves now:

The editor can control how many leaves, their sizes and their properties like shape and color:

Well, to be more precise the editor controls how the generator randomizes the trees.

How are the leaves generated in the code:

• Make a bezier Spline along the Y axis
• Tesselate vertices in it and in the Y axis itself
• Triangulate the vertices.
•  Mirror-copy it to the other side of the axis
• UVs: goes bottom-top and center-side direction.

Game is around 10% complete and 22% ready for alpha release.

We just hit the 10% mark!!! Yay! ᕕ(⌐■_■)ᕗ ♪♬

Make some noise

You see, a good procedural generated game needs noise to make it look more convincing. So I pumped up the engine to support a full noise generation system:

Here is a screenshot

You may be wondering: "What is this crap used for?"

• It's the soul of a procedurally generated terrain (spoiler: this is what is coming next).
• Can be used to add realism to physical textures
• Can describe small flunctations in water waves
• Can be used as a base for Smoke simulation
• Can be used in Cloud generation
• Much more...

That's why I had to add a special module in the engine just for it.

Game is 11.5% complete and 24% ready for alpha release.

Side Note: we have a Alpha release date: November 15th of 2024! 

This date may change in future, If all goes well it could be sooner? hm... I wish I could dedicate 100% of my time to it :(

Make it terrain

I got a noise texture generated by my noise editor (from the last post) and created a Terrain from it:

This is a fully procedurally generated terrain, just the first plain version. I have it coliding with the FPS camera correctly.

One may think this doesn't seem much but there's a lot going on behind the curtains, the LOD calculation is done through the GPU using a tesselation shader:

The game is 12% complete and 25% ready for alpha release.

Physics in game is... different

Hey, did you two bodies can occupy the same space and time? In games, they can, and if you don't account for that you will get this:

So, what happened in there was that I mistakenly inverted the collision response normal vector, which pushed the camera into that box center, forcing the camera and the box to have the same position, once that happened the distance between both became zero, and in physics, dividing by distance is a common and frequent operation, so what happens when you divide by zero? So far in my engine that meant infinity, so yeah... in a split second the camera had a force of infinity applied to it, resulting in it getting tossed like a meteor outside of existence... quite a poetic bug :') 

Here is a zoom at the camera's position, observe how its Y position starts around 13, and then gets crazy really fast.

I changed the behaviour of my engine to take division by zero as nan (not a  number) so I can easily debug this scenario (it's more complicated that than, but that's the general idea).

So yeah, as you can guess I've been busy with the game's physics system:

The game won't explore physics system like the new Zelda or anything like that, its physics will be rather simple, that's why I'm just doing basic collision detection/response myself :)

The game is 12.5% complete and 26% ready for alpha release.

Infinite land, no boundaries.

Pick a direction and go, in the game you will be able to walk forever and never face any invisible walls.

This is possible because as you may already know, the game is virtually 100% procedurally generated.

This is me walking in a straight line for 5 minutes:

This is one key aspect of the game I'll make sure to put extra effort: I want to give the player the freedom to run, jump, fly anywhere for as long as they please, this feature will be bound to a storyline, so there will more to explore about it, as of right now, this is rough and need lots of polishement.

The game is 13% complete and 27% ready for alpha release.

Infinite procedural forest

Here is what's like to be surrounded by an infinite forest entirely generated by code:

Being infinite is important for the game, because I want the game map size to be infinite, there will "bases", towns, entities, along the way. 

Performance is a key factor in here, so there are lots of optimization to keep the frame count around 60 FPS (You can see on the top-left corner of the video).

This is the fast motion version of me running in the forest (The GIF quality is terrible due to upload size limitation, I recommend you see the video above instead):

Another cool stuff about this, is that everytime I re-shuffle I get different trees.

Now I'm going back to character design, I hope to have to a character editor to show you guys in the next updates :)

The game is 14% complete and 28% ready for alpha release.

Character Customization is coming...

This is going to be a sneak peek for a feature that makes procedurally generated characters possible as well as the character customization.

Yes, you will be able to customize your character in game, this is the very first prototype:

Here is a low resolution gif of the video above:

I will list all the possibilities, but I can tell in advance that: height, body parts, skin color, eyes shape, nose, cheek, eyes colors, hair color and hair style will be fully customizable.

In future, I expect to have a more detailed explanation on how it works and all its capabilities, maybe in a video?

The game is 15% complete and 29% ready for alpha release.

Shifting gears to Artist mode

These last days I had to go back to Blender to adventure myself again as an 3D animator. 

The game was in need of lots of basic character animations, such as: running, jumping, getting hit, falling to the ground, combat stance, basic attacks and more...

I'm working on the basics for me to be able to have a first gameplay iteration ready as soon as possible.

I also need basic facial animation, but I'm not done completely rigging her face yet. So that will come in a later update.

The game is 16% complete and 31% ready for alpha release.

Starting the gameplay

Back into coding! Now I set a priority of something to play with.

This last days I've been working with the basic camera controls and animation tweens.

You can see it on this video (sorry for the low res. the game was one pixel less than 720p and youtube downsampled it to 480p 🤦

I've been busy but not with super shiny stuff as you can see, I'm still building brick by brick, it will be shiny in the end :)

Oh, yeah and she blinks, I did the animation myself. I'm so proud I finally learned something from 3D design :D

The game is 16.5% complete and 32% ready for alpha release.

Planning & Estimation Review

These last days I've been working on basic gameplay basic features, like player logic and camera controls.

However the big update this time is that I have gone through every single future game feature extensively to review all tasks I have done and plan the ones I have schedule to be completed, this is to better estimate when and how the game will be released.

I will repeat this process again in future to make sure planning is realistic and estimations are accurate.

Here is the result breakdown of my plans:

• The game has 758 Tasks in total.
• 330 Code Tasks
• 428 Art Tasks
• In general, Code tasks weight ~60% more than Art Tasks, making code 56% of the total game work and art 44%

The Game will have 7 Major Releases:

1. Sandbox Alpha - Released when the project is at 35% Total completion
2. Closed Alpha - Released when the project is at 63% Total completion
3. Open Alpha - Released when the project is at 83% Total completion
4. Closed Beta - Released when the project is at 95% Total completion
5. Open Beta - Released when the game is feature complete
6. Release Candidate - Release when the game has all major and most minor bugs are fixed
7. Official Release - Release when all bugs are fixed

One big change is that I decided to split the first Alpha release in 2, making the first release a Sandbox version of the game. 

Unfortunately this estimation review process revealed 10% more tasks tasks than what I had previously planned.

However, that's not a set back because thanks to the fact that I split the alpha in 2 we are a lot closer to a playable build than before.

This means the first Alpha will be released 6 months sooner: around May of 2024!

Now with the new estimations: The game is 14.9% complete and 38.5% ready for alpha release.

And here a footage of the basic run ability I was working these last days, so you have something to see as expected :)

(ง •̀_•́)ง Fight System - Part I

Sorry for the delay, I had to travel to visit my parents, didn't have much time for anything else during the last week. 

But now we're back! ᕙ(`▽´)ᕗ

This is one of the three main features of the game. Because of that, this log will be the first part of a lot of upcoming updates (maybe 20 or more, they won't be posted in sequence as I will bounce among different features of the game).

The first important feature of the Fight system is the Camera and enemy targeting, like other 3D games, you will be able to focus on a target when pressing a focus button (Z or R button in a controller for instance).

This is how it looks as of today:

Notice that I start in a free-camera, and once I press the "focus button" the camera locks to the target.

To be honest, I actually press 2 buttons, the focus button as discussed and another "engage button" to make her go to fight mode (like drawing your sword), this is because it will be possible for you to target both foes and friends in case of dialogs for instance. 

I know, baby steps, but brick by brick we will build a great game, you will see :)

The game is 15.3% complete and 39.6% ready for alpha release.

(ง •̀_•́)ง Fight System - Part II: Jumps

Jumping animation and physics first round is now complete.

Now the character is able to do:

•  a regular free jump
• fight side jump (dodge)
• fight backflip (also as a dodge move).

Here are all jumps:

In the next phase, I might pause the fight system development to switch back to the Editor to work on some low level UI for the menus in the game.

See you in ~10 days with more updates :)

The game is 15.7% complete and 41.0% ready for alpha release.

Don't take anything for granted - pt. 2

Another very basic feature present in any game engine is GUI (Graphical user interface), every menu you see in a game is powered by a GUI system in the engine.

So my engine has it, but it looks like this:

As you can see, it's an user interface for Game Editors, not for an actual Game.

So these last days I got busy making very basic features for a simple GUI for a game, right now I have a very simple ui:

First version, no actual game design in there, just getting the UI system to work :D

And yes, keep it low, but... we may have a name for the game... (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧ Shine Fall! Not official yet, so just between us for now :)

The game is 16.3% complete and 42.5% ready for alpha release.

(ง •̀_•́)ง One Punch Girl (Fight System Pt. 3)

Back to the Fight System once more, making attack physics, animation and camera framing.

Here are the current results:

Will an attack be strong like this? If you level up enough, it maybe even stronger :)

Sparks, sounds, damage and particles are missing... Right now we have the bare minimum for me to advance to the next step.

There's a new Planning & Review cycle coming up next, estimatives will be updated. 

So far, I presented some very vague concepts about the game, I will return with a few more solid information in the next update, expect to see 4 of 5 main features of the game. The last one I'll review a bit further down the line because it's so bold I'm not sure how I will deliver it, so please stay tuned :)

The game is 17.4% complete and 45.5% ready for alpha release.

Editor Data files

After last planning section, the objective is to make the Editor as powerful as possible before diving into the game itself, even the first releases will be only about it.

For this and the next few updates I may present more technical topics of procedures that usually are taken for granted on existing engines out there, with the only exception being me switching back to Art mode to produce content for the editor itself. 

One of the first challenges I'm facing right now is this:

That is one of the 3D model files I have and it's already over 180 MB of space, it takes almost half a minute just to load it to the game.

Well it was before I fixed the problem, it turned out that I could remove lots of redundant information, optimize the mesh geometry and reduce animation key count based on linear distribution. Also in order to improve the loading time, I had to create the engine's own data format:

The file size was reduced by 89% and the loading time now takes less than 2 seconds.

I made a whole data file editor in the editor, I called it pak maker:

Now every non-procedural art component of the game is packed compressed and optimize for fast loading during the game.

The game is 17.5% complete and 50.2% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Texture Editor

A few posts ago I presented the engine's noise editor.

Now I will show you a more techinical version of it I just finalized:

Sorry for the choppy animations and low resolution, the maximum upload size for these gifs in here is quite small.

What you see is the texture shader editor that is capable of creating procedural textures with random inputs that may create different results each time it's executed,  I may do a video explaining this deeper in future if you are insterested).

With this I conclude the first iteration of the engine's texture making system.

In the next update I might reveal the engine's name :)

The game is 17.6% complete and 52.3% ready for editor alpha release.

Welcome to Biomancer

The Game Engine now has a name:

Props to Kory (https://www.artstation.com/kory), the amazing artist who created the image from the engine's Splash screen/About window.

The proposal of Biomancer is to create procedural generated "organic" game content (as of "create organic from machine" ), thus its name and Kory's amazing art, this will be essential in the development of Shine Fall.

This will be the last update of 2023, I'd like to thank you for accompanying my project through this year and we will continue in 2024 at full speed, cheers!

The game is 17.75% complete and 54.5% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Geometry Making (pt 1 of 3)

I've been working on Biomancer's Procedural Geometry Making tool. This allows you to create procedural 3D surfaces visually.

The objective here is to author 3D content that can be customized and randomized by the gameplay, it's like a simplified version of blender but for programmers and what you create can be changed during the game, like making a table with different amount of legs or different shapes or amount of edges, you can do it for the player to make his own table or for it to be randomized to make variations of it.

This is the first of 3 iterations, in the next one I will show how to make parametric surface via code. See you soon :)

The game is 18.0% complete and 57.0% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Geometry Making (pt 2 of 3)

Biomancer (the procedural game engine I'm creating with and for this game) now can create 100% procedural surfaces via its own scripting language, I called it Biocl

The language resembles a mixture of C#, C++ and GLSL, it runs on top the Lua interpreter in the editor and gets converted to C++ automatically when exported to the game.

The purpose of this is to add static 3D procedural assets a props to the game,  keeping my promise of bringing 100% procedural environment to the game.

On the next and last stage I hope to add Marching Cubes to the table to add way more possibilities of procedural surfaces.

The game is 18.8% complete and 60.0% ready for editor alpha release.

Going Through a very long Tunnel

Our development train is now going through a vastly long tunnel: Refactoring the physics system.

The current physics system is old and rudimentary, it does not even support relatively basic stuff like rotational mechanics, custom mesh collision and ragdoll physics.

So we are remaking the physics module, I may use PhysX or some full physics sdk otherwise I'd take forever to remake it.

This was part of the roadmap as my current physics engine is over 10 years old, so the time has come to replace it. 

I'm basically working on transplanting this module, so nothing is building correctly right now, hopefully next update we are out of the tunnel so I'll have some cool screen captures to share.

The game is 20.3% complete and 67.7% ready for editor alpha release.

New Physics System & Estimations/Dates

Wow, this was quite a big refactor in the game engine, we now have a brand new physics system. Faster, better and all kinds of shapes are now supported.

Gameplay mechanics are not fully upgraded yet, I'll leave this part for after Biomancer (game engine/editor) release.

I'll be back to Biomancer itself to start the level editor next!

Now...

ESTIMATIONS!

To be a bit different this time, I'll disclose some information about the release dates according to my planning calculations.

There are 10 releases planned for our roadmap.

• 2 first releases are the Game Engine release.
• 2 next releases are a sandbox version of the game, with almost all gameplay mechanics available
• 6 last releases are all related to the game itself.

I'm still considering if I'll release as 3 different projects or not.

Here is the estimation breakdown:

This are quite artificial estimations, they were generated by spreadsheet calculations based on how much of my free time I can dedicate to this project. Later down the line, after the first release, I plan to open it for collective funding and if all goes well, I may be able to dedicate more time to it, as I always wanted and expedite.

The game is 20.6% complete and 70.0% ready for editor alpha release.

Material Editor

I'm back developing the game engine, this time I completed the first iteration of the Material Editor:

Sorry for the choppy animations, all due to the size limitation in here.

Right now you can customize color, roughness, metalness and sub-surface translucency, I'll add more options in the next iterations.

Now for the next weeks I'll be back on the 3rd and hopefully last iteration of the engine's 3D procedural geometry generation.

The game is 21.0% complete and 72.6% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Art Maker

As I promised, the art of the game will be 100% procedural (with the only exception being part of the characters only).

On these 3 part update I did a procedural geometry editor via coding, which is nice but not very useful as an Art tool.

So, I'm solving that by upgrading that scripting tool to work directly via 3D editing:

Now it's real time, unlike before, you can see how you can combine in lots of ways several 3D shapes into one.

In that GIF, I combine that ellipsoid with the rest of the surface smoothly creating a pleasant curvy look. There's also a"stairs-combiner" that literally create stairs in between the Ellipsoid and the other shapes.

For that I used a math concept called Signed Distance Fields. I can dive more in details about it in the next updates if you want :)

Keep in mind that this maker is not ready yet, there's more features to come. Now imagine the possibilities! And just you wait once I get into domain repetition.

(I said domain repetition, not domain expansion, but it's going to be as cool as domain expansion, I promise)

The game is 21.4% complete and 74.5% ready for editor alpha release.

Infinity

A very important aspect of the game is the infinity. Some levels will be infinite, and for that I will need a math concept called Domain repetition:

With that I can repeat any procedural geometry in any way I want.

We are getting close to release the first alpha version of the Editor.

The game is 21.7% complete and 78.9% ready for editor alpha release.

More Design Possibilities

Sorry for taking too long to post this update, I had a lot going on in these last few weeks.

However, I haven't stopped working in this project during my free time.

So I've been adding a lot of functionalities for the 3D Editor.

I'm planning to port all these to the game itself so the player can create anything in game via this procedural editor, this will make content creation much easier and way more fun!

Here is me playing a bit with it in the editor:

The game is 22.1% complete and 84.5% ready for next editor release.

Planning & Estimation Review 4

It's time for another round of estimations review.

This time decided to change one big thing: Instead of presenting the game engine as a release, I will present the Sandbox (Demo) version of the game. This is because if I take your precious time, I'd like to make the most of it and show how the game will look like instead of how the tech behind the curtains works. The issue was that from my engineering side, 75% of all work is going to the game engine rather than the game itself, that's why I felt like releasing the game engine/editor first. However from a marketing perspective, it doesn't make any sense for me to show deep technical features for gamers prior to presenting the game itself. That doesn't mean I'm not going to publish the game engine, I surely will, that is the main mod tool for the game itself, I'll make sure to make it available for modders.

The estimations are becoming more solid each review, now here are the new estimation dates:

As always, it's important to remember that, these are quite artificial estimations, they were generated by spreadsheet calculations based on how much of my free time I can dedicate to this project. Later down the line, I plan to open it for collective funding and if all goes well, I may be able to dedicate more time to it, as I always wanted and expedite.

As a progress update, I've been working on a Class System Editor, even though very important it's unfortunately nothing visual, so no fun screen capture this time :(

After this Estimation review, the game is 22.1% complete and 82.1% ready for Sandbox Pre-alpha release.

Scripting

I've been busy with a module of the engine called "Class Maker" that allows me to create any entity in the game (like, enemies, camera, NPCs...). I'm creating my own scripting language to help me fully create the game in the engine itself. The reason why I'm creating mu own scripting language is to be flexible and efficient at the same time, as this language will be converted to other languages behind the curtains depending on what is the purpose of its execution call.

Now, not to kill you of boredom here is me creating a 3D House in 3 minutes using my game engine:

I said it before, but I really want this content creation to be part of the game itself :)

The game is 23.6% complete and 88.0% ready for Sandbox Pre-alpha release.

Bioscript: The Engine's scripting language.

I'm finishing up the basics of the engine's own scripting language. I believe that it may be complete by the next update. Here is how the syntax looks like

With this language I hope to code the game live within the engine. For that the language is converted to Lua at run-time and to C++ when exporting the game, so it's fair to say that this language is a "scripting" language as fast as C++.

If you are here just to see some cool gifs, I've got you covered. Here is me punching a hole into a solid surface.

Now, this is the same thing but in the middle of it, I make the surface is now hollow inside in a flick of a second:

The game is 24.6% complete and 91.6% ready for Pre-alpha release.

Destructible Scenario & Physics 

Setting up the scenario in the engine I'm now able to do this:

That blue square "explodes" the ground every time it touches it, making a crater, the other brown ball just collides with the scenario normally.

I will also make the opposite: creating object and making them interact with the scene at play time.

We are getting close to the first alpha version of the game engine release, I will tell details in the next posts.

The game is 25.1% complete and 95.0% ready for alpha engine release.

ALPHA RELEASED

We hit Alpha!

Right now it's Closed Alpha, but you are free to join our discord and test it yourself!

We also finally have a page for the Game Engine

The game engine is 43.0% complete.

The whole project is 26.3% complete.

Biomancer (Engine) 0.1.3.0 Alpha Released

♥(ง☉‿☉)ง ♫♩ 乁(☉‿☉乁) ♥

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 44.3% complete.

The whole project is 27.0% complete.

UI Editor - 0.1.4 Alpha

ヽ(⌐■_■)ノ♪♬

Minor trypophobia warning!

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 45.5% complete. 

 The whole project is 27.8% complete.

Bioscripts: 0.1.5 - Alpha

I completed the engine's script editor, the scripting language is called Bioscript.

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/876634/bioscripts-015-alpha

You can load the test project by clicking in Open Existing Projects and choosing "./samples/TestProject/TestProject.bioproj"

I owe you a tutorial, I'm aware, it will come once the engine is feature complete :)

Meanwhile here is me fooling around with the engine's 3D Editor.

That's like a bulding done 1 minute, and Here is me navigating through the building:

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 46.7% complete. 

 The whole project is 28.5% complete.

2 Years of Shine (And Biomancer)

A few days ago we hit the 2 years mark of me posting about the game and my game engine online.

I want to thank everyone who has followed the the project over the past two years! It means a lot!

Here is a full dev log:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/890417/two-years-of-biomancer-a-major-...

And here is a discord invite in case you want to download the game engine and try it yourself!

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 47.9% complete. 

The whole project is 29.3% complete.

We hit the 30% Mark!

The project is 30% complete and that's a hell of an accomplishment!

Here is a new Devlog for you!

And here is a cool preview of what's in the Dev log! I'd be glad if you checked it out!

And here is a discord invite in case you want to download the game engine and try it yourself!

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 50% complete. 

The whole project is 30% complete.

Today Biomancer is in Open Alpha!

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/960820/open-alpha

You can now download the Game Engine on Itch:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer

You can join our Discord to get more regular releases:

https://discord.gg/nrZeYy3UM2

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 57.1% complete. 

The whole project is 33.5% complete.

Human-like AI

I just finished the first version of the Game's AI. It's based on LLM (the same tech as ChatGPT, it's llama actually), so you will be able to fully talk to it in the game! 

It's all offline, no connection to any AI server.

To test this new AI made for the game I create a discord bot and powered her with it!

She is called Matriel and you can talk to her in our discord!

Here is me asking her to explain the 3rd and last big feature of the game:

Here is the full dev log: https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/987475/human-like-ai

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 59.8% complete. 

The whole project is 34.6% complete.