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wircea · 8 months

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What have I been up to

For the past couple of years I have been busy with both university and work. Either separately or at the same time. But I've still been focusing on game development.

While I was away, most work went towards GRIND. I'll leave a preview here from last year:

youtube

GRIND has underwent a massive overhaul in both style and gameplay. The animations are smoother and fall in place better. The video is pretty old and some animations and visuals have been completely remade, repurposed or added. Gameplay-wise, the turn based RPG battle aspect of the game has been removed. Battles will function differently and will place more emphasis on how the main character would feel and act in a more natural setting. Here's some video footage that is a remake of an earlier video of the game from 2017:

youtube

There's not much I can say about combat other than that I plan on having it play out differently for every battle depending on your foe(s). There is not much progress on this part yet. From a technical standpoint, GRIND is finally running on a self-made engine, which I wrote in C++. I don't know how to make saying this live up to the work it took because it took me years to get it working. It was certainly an experience building both the game and the engine itself at the same time.

There have actually been 2 engines, one of which I started in 2019. It didn't really hold up due to my lack of knowledge and ended up in the trash after 2 years. I can't really put into words the pain I felt when I figured there's not much I can do further to save it. Following this, I started planning up big and I'd say the new engine is something I'm really proud about. GRIND can be altered by anyone that wants to learn to tinker with the files and new content can be made without too much trouble!

Here's a video of the engine being used to make a playable version of PONG, with AI and all!

youtube

The engine itself isn't fully finished. There's still plenty to be done that will aid me in the building of the game but I'd say that from a logical standpoint, most important features have been implemented. Biggest component left out so far is UI which I'm not particularly hasty about implementing. Game-progress wise it's still early to be hyped. I'm currently building the tutorial level and I'd love to gather about one to two hours of meaningful gameplay before I release a working demo. Because the game content I'm building is making use of engine features instead of hardcoding objects, progress can get really slow on some parts.

Doesn't mean I'm not having fun developing. Hell, I'd say I've reached the most satisfying part of it, seeing how things fall together and the game just works. It's just that things take time. And due to how ambitious the visuals of the game have gotten, making the simplest of things still take a lot of thinking and redesigning to fit well in.

I'll leave below some highlights from over the past couple of years. From the first engine attempt(2019-2020):

From the current engine (2021-Present)

It brings great joy to my heart to revisit the development process of GRIND throughout the years, especially knowing of all the impediments I had to overcome. Making your own engine is no easy task and building a game altogether can be a very demanding task, and I am grateful to have gotten this far without giving up.

Had a blast putting together this little catch-up and I can't wait to show off more!

Tune in for more GRIND updates !

#grind #game design #game development #gamedev #1bit #cinematic #game engine #video games #Youtube

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