Banner Hello from the second post ever on this website! Just wanted to write some stuff regarding DESOLATION’s development.

I’ve spent the last 3 months without typing a single line of code - it was mostly due to my college starting, though it was mostly my lack of motivation and excessive, very excessive amounts of doomscrolling. However, I feel ready to return to coding video games and being active on GitHub overall!

Early Plans of Update 1.6

I actually planned what to do for v1.6 on a Notion board, and it was all planned to be completed in a timespan of two weeks. But you know how that went.

Looking again at the planned updates, I don’t think I burnt myself out that much. It was mostly about the lack of material for the game’s story maps to be made. The map editor I’ve prepared in a few hours simply is not enough for me to build maps on it with ease, and not only that, I lack the knowledge for making pixel art, which makes things look ugly anyway. I’m not that against the “ugly” part for now, my first priority is having a playable story after all, but the map editor issue is very serious. If I had developed the game in a game engine like Godot this wouldn’t be a problem but since I did it without one, it also makes me responsible for making my own map system.

Maps in DESOLATION are constructed using JSON files similar to scenes. They are actually, in paper, very easy to customize and preview in real time, but the issue is that everything is prepared by pure numbers and lists. I don’t know if I could explain it but if you simply go and view a map file like c1_bedroom.json, you will see what I mean.

Anyway… I don’t plan on making huge changes to the game in the newly planned 1.6 update. In fact, I haven’t planned that much. I simply want to get warmed up again, to be more consistent in updating the game even if it’s the smallest changes.

Version 1.6 Plans

v1.6.dev1

Review of the source code of the game. Refactoring, optimizing and maybe going over the “TODO”s and completing some of them.

v1.6.dev2

Completing the power orb mechanic in Infinite Mode. Consider the old plans for Infinite Mode, and implement some of them.

v1.6.dev3

Backwards compatibility for save files. Developer console improvements(?). Bla bla bla.