Devlog #21 - What have we been up to?

Since the last big demo update (which got a small update so you can save progress), you might be wondering if we spent our time sleeping. Well, you wouldn't be too wrong about that, as we both took some well deserved time off! About two-three weeks for each of us. So you can guess that, the rest of the time, we worked a lot! There has been a lot of bugfixing, but also new features. Let me show you some of them.

New district

Tom has been banging on triangles and blasting textures to create a new style of building that you will see in an upcoming district of the city. Like all of our districts so far, it doesn't really have a name yet so we just call it Future. Neons all over you think? This is not Sci-Fi Singapore! Welcome to Le Mascaret, where trees are very heavily guarded by firepeople, well taken care of and sometimes used to build buildings without the high pollution of classical concrete.

This new design continues to draw inspiration from the amazing works of Luc Schuiten. Classical materials like wood and glass are used in a much more novel way. Drawing in the power of millennias of evolution, the windows are designed much like the beautiful wings of butterflies. Air is pumped naturally at the bottom of buildings and expelled through their roofs, animating the buildings with light breezes to cool them.

He also tuned and added new shapes to the rest of the city to help distinguish the various neigborhoods. How cool are these honeycomb solar panels?!

Live City Editing

Le Mascaret is getting bigger and bigger. We developed a powerful technology that enables us to edit a simple high level representation of the city and generate from it the visuals, the collision areas, the data needed to drive the vehicles and even the minimap! That's one damn powerful Build button.

But as you can see in this awful tiny 5MB limited gif, this technology had a minor flow: everytime we changed anything, we had to fully rebuild the city. This takes about a minute so it's not really a problem when we are creating big new sections. But when we start tweaking all the details, the wait becomes annoying really fast... What you see on the right of this gif is a new"live" city editing mode that automatically refreshes only the affected part of the city, making the flow of creation much faster and enjoyable!

It's not perfect and will always need a final full rebuild of the city to avoid any bugs. This is the kind of thing that is done behind the scenes and rarely get a chance to see. It's one of those things that don't show up in the final game but is still very important in the development.

BTW, if you're interested in our city generation technology, drop us an e-mail!

Struggles

On a more personal note, I discovered yet another unexpected indie developer struggle: to be afraid, even ashamed, of working on my own creation. Not that I don't like what we do, that there is too much work or that the work is too hard, nothing like that. You see, developing video games is expensive and we are running out of money. Again. Yup, this is not surprising to us. We survived the previous times and I think we will continue surviving.

I spent most of last year working on Flight Simulator and that put money on the table so that we can safely work on Highway to Heal for most of this year. But it's far from being enough money to finish the game. And since working on our game doesn't yield any money until it's released, working on it is simultaneously kind of a waste of time for our company. A bit of an Ouroboros situation...

Even writing this is hard. First because I'm no writer! Secondly, because this feels even worse than working on the game, since it doesn't help us get closer to the release of the game and doesn't yield any money to help that either! Still, I feel it's necessary to keep people in the loop, to be honest with our players, our backers, anyone who supports us.

Nonetheless, we discussed the situation with Tom and we're ready to see this through, even if it means we don't have a salary at all for some months... We have been chasing wild options to finance the rest of the development. You might see a few surprises in the coming months, if we see some of these through. But like we often do, we also help other developers with their projects.

Helping others helps us too

Recently, we helped a few games and I'd like to take some time to show them to you, as they are pretty cool.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2148970/Skygard_Arena/ Recently out of early access, I had the pleasure to spend a week with the lovely developers of this tactical MOBA. I helped them fix some of performance issues so that players could have a much better experience playing the version 1.0 of the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1681060/Exogate_Initiative/ Local to our city of Bordeaux, I had completely forgotten that Maxime asked my help some months back to tackle a very strange bug: the performance of their game was degrading immensely after a couple of hours. Kind of annoying when you spent hours improving your space expedition base. Fortunately, Maxime got back to me and I could take a look at it and it seems I fixed it! A patch containing this fix amongst many improvements they did is coming.

Weewoo!

As often, I have no idea how to finish these posts. I can say that we will continue to make our best efforts for virtual sirens to scream loud! We will happily read your feedback, your comments. Come chat on our discord!

• Daniel