Development Update
Hello Everyone!
I hope you have all been doing well these past few months. It's been quite sometime since I've done Steam post and so this one is definitely long overdue.
I just wanted to take sometime to go over the state of development, and share some of the recent progress that's been made through in-game screenshots and videos. My hope is to get everyone caught up and excited about some of the new features that will be present in the game at launch!
Just note that this post does not nearly cover everything that's present or will be coming in the game. This is just a quick and dirty overview of some things I thought you all might find interesting!
[h2]What's new to Vectorio?[/h2]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
As shown in the video above, there's quite a few new things to go over even just on the defense side of things. You may have noticed some new defenses such as the Shield Generator, a building that deploys a bubble shield that can reflect bullets and slow down enemies.
Or the Ravager, a long-range defense that fires shattering bullets capable of ripping outposts and groups of enemies apart in a beautiful display of explosive destruction.
You may have also noticed something different about the tiles inside the outpost. This is a new building type called a "Tile Beacon", that can alter nearby tiles providing a bonus to any buildings on them.
Above is the "Safeguard Beacon", which creates reinforced tiles around it providing huge defensive bonuses to any buildings placed on top of them. These are extremely useful when preparing for larger attacks or boss fights, and on the flip side also create weakpoints in outposts that you can target.
[h3]Region Sectors[/h3]
Another goal with the new game was to spice up the world of Vectorio. Originally the idea was to do biomes, but through testing I found that biomes did not fit the theme of Vectorio, and gave worlds a strange look when combined with the actual minimalistic aesthetic of the game. However, I wanted to still bring the same concept of biomes to the game as they did fit the gameplay loop quite well, and I've managed to achieve this through what is now called "Sectors".
Each region will be divided up into sectors, with each one having different outposts, resources, and overall design to them. From a game design perspective, the idea is to have sectors get continuously more difficult as you progress through a region, letting you utilize the buildings and defenses you've unlocked in new challenging ways to capture a sector.
Above is a look at how a region is divided up into sectors. You can see as you progress through a region, more spawn points will become active throughout the map, with sectors further in spawning more challenging enemies and bigger groups. This was a recent change to the game and is still being worked on and tested, so it may change as development continues!
[h3]Resource Physicalization[/h3]
Also new to the game is physicalized resources. What this means is resources no longer "teleport" around the map to where you need them, like with research boosters in the classic. Now, you need to move resources around the map to where they need to be, which is done mostly now by drones.
This process starts by setting up an input zone for the cargo drone to draw resources from. You can see this process visualized above, with an input zone being setup on a cargo grid.
You then need to setup a place for the drones to dropoff resources to. In this example, you can see an output zone being set over a grid of research labs, which are now tied directly into the new research system which requires resources to unlock new buildings and defenses. Once finished, the cargo drone will automatically draw from the input building with the most resources, and then drop off the resource to the output building with the least resources, enabling easy automation!
This is just a simple example as well. Some buildings will combine resources together to make new resources, which can then be transported to other buildings that may required them for any number of things, be it research, unit production, power production, etc.
[h3]Enemy Awareness[/h3]
More work has been done on enemies recently, improving their awareness and being able to counter attack buildings that are firing at them. My hope is to make enemies a bit more challenging without just jacking up their stats, and so this is one of many changes that will be made to their logic.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
I am currently also looking into flagship enemies, which will be able to call other nearby enemies over to them to create much larger organic groups that can attack specific sections of your base.
[h3]Improved Interface[/h3]
In addition to some of these new features, there is a fully redesigned interface that has been built from the ground up. The new interface provides higher clarity and more information then the previous game through new panels and data lists that all work through the new library utility.
Many interface components now also have custom animations to make them feel smoother and more modern. This can be seen in the inventory panel below, which now also contains sub-categories!
Additionally, I've moved away from the classic linear interface design, and instead have tried to go for a more dynamic and unique design to give Vectorio more character just in it's interface layout. You can see this as part of the new main menu screen, which is completely different from the classic.
[h3]Technical Enhacements[/h3]
And of course, one of if not the biggest focuses of the remake, which was on the technical side of the game. As many are aware, the classic did not perform well on larger bases, especially on lower end hardware that could not keep up with everything going on in the scene.
The first 3 to 4 months of development were mainly focused just on this aspect of the game, with an entire customized Entity Manager system being designed from the ground up to help support 10's of 1000's of enemies on screen at once. This is achieved through a dynamic priority system, which automatically adjusts the simulation speed of specific entities based on if the entity is on-screen or not, and what the entity actually does. This enables entities to avoid unnecessary calculations, and reduce the amount of required ones by allowing them to instead interpolate what would've happened during the time they weren't simulating, which from testing works near flawlessly!
Another big concern with the classic was drones, as they had a huge impact on performance when in large numbers. In addition to allowing them to simulate at slower speeds when off-screen, they also now use a time-based approach where they calculate the amount of time it takes to go from one target to the next. This avoids all the disgusting distance checks they used to do, and means they instead just need to check the time left on their journey to the next target!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Additionally, the entity manager system uses full object pooling, which the classic did not do. This means objects are never destroyed and instead are reused when they're no longer active, avoiding excessive instantiations and garbage collecting when many things are happening on-screen at once.
Although there is still additional improvements and refinements I'm going to be making to this system, from testing the new system is extremely promising and will continue to get better with time.
[h2]Looks great! When will it be available?[/h2]
As some of you know, the game was originally set to release back in Q1 of this year, and as it's quite clear I've missed that date by a long shot. There's a number of reasons for this, but it's mainly due to the fact I did not correctly estimate how long it was going to take for certain aspects of the games development to take, mainly testing the technical side of the game and running balance cycles. The remake is a LOT more complex then it's predecessor, and so many new systems took a long time for me and my private testing group to fully stress test and patch up.
Some of you on the Discord server may have also noticed the post I did about some of the design issues me and my private testing team uncovered, which are now being worked on to bring the games "fun factor" up to a much higher standard. (for those interested, you can see the post below)
While the game is coming along exceptionally well with many new exciting features and things to talk about, the simple truth is the game is just not ready to go live yet, even in early access. I believe Vectorio has the ability to be a genre-defining title, but in order for it to reach that point a lot of work is still yet to get done, and so I don't want to rush it out too early just to try and make a quick pay-day. I care deeply about this project and the community behind it, and so I will not release it until it's to the standard and quality level I want it at, even if that means a few more months in development.
So. as for any dates surrounding the release of the game, I don't have any. All I can say is the game is definitely close to being ready to go live, but it's just not quite at the quality I'd like it to be yet. I also do plan on doing a demo soon to let everyone get a hands-on experience with the game, which I'm aiming to hopefully get out in the next couple weeks here during this month (ideally mid-late May)
[H2]That's all for now![/h2]
I hope this gives everyone a bit more insight into how the new game is shaping up, and what you can expect to see from the game once it's released.
I know many of you probably have questions regarding Multiplayer and Modding, but as it stands right now I am not yet ready to share progress on these yet. I am doing my best to try and get Multiplayer in for launch, but it may need to wait until the first major update as my main focus lately has been on the actual game side of things. As always though, I will keep everyone updated on both of these features!
Discord: https://discord.gg/auDgRJqtT9
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2082350/Vectorio/
Remember that if you're interested in the new game, wishlisting it helps a TON!
Thanks for reading,
~ Ben