DevLog #11 - The Dust Storm

It's been a while since the last post. The reason for taking so long is simply that we've been busy working on the game. Based on feedback we made some changes to the early content which have been proven to work well, we've overhauled some of the menus, we've added an ingame roadmap and most of the time has been spent working on the next big feature: the Dust Storm.

Concrete production pipeline

Before, colonists would just mine the terrain and rocks and use the resulting regolith blocks along with some water to create concrete at the crafting table. This was good enough initially but it didn't have a good feeling. All the production was inside the base and these are processes that are big and messy. As a result, we've moved the production completely outside, saving up some of that precious indoor space

New menus

As we've worked on the game adding new features and changing existing ones, the menus have changed a lot and as a result, there was little consistency. While this wasn't a technical issue, it was something that was still bothering us. Cristina took some time to redesign everything, while still keeping things functionally the same. Now, we're really happy with the results and we have some extra designs ready for when things evolve further

Roadmap

On our Discord server we often get questions about various features that people want to see in the game and in most cases, these are features that we also want to add to the game but haven't gotten around to. We've figured that once the demo is public, others might have questions too so Cristina came once again to the rescue and designed a nice screen with various features and their states. This is in no way an exhaustive list but it should cover the big features.

The Dust Storm

In most Mars themed games I've seen, the dust storms feel a bit underwhelming and I wanted to make something different. "Dust" is in the game's name after all. Looking around for inspiration, I came across the smoke grenade effect from CS2:

If this looks like a step up from traditional effects, it's because it is. It's a volumetric effect and what this means, is that the smoke is not just made out of some neatly placed textures that face the camera. Instead, smoke is something that exists in 3d space, reacting to light and geometry around it.

Fortunately, in my day job I work as a graphics engineer so I have a decent amount of experience with shaders and doing things on the GPU. After a whole bunch of prototyping, I ended up with something promising:

The "material" was looking pretty good but it also needed to interact with the world in a way that looks at least semi plausible. This means that it needed to flow through the world, warping around the base and the player built structures.

I knew of one game that did something somewhat similar: Timberborn. Their water physics feels really good and give the game so much gameplay richness. Luckily, I found one article from GameDeveloper that mentions a paper called "Fast Hydraulic Erosion Simulation and Visualization on GPU by Xing Mei, Philippe Decaudin, and Bao-Gang Hu.".

That algorithm doesn't really fit so well in this scenario, since water and dust storms, while both behaving like fluids, are different. Still, the paper was a great starting point for some experimentation. Using the GPU for the simulation heavy lifting, I managed to get a simulation going where flow is modeled in a physically plausible way.

Of course, there's more to it, than just visuals. Colonists now struggle with navigation when caught outside needing to get their bearings. Dust also gets everywhere and needs to be cleaned. Wind Turbines produce more power but are also in greater danger when operating during dust storms.

We're still working on this feature but we're getting closer and closer to a next release for our Discord users. Once it's proven to be stable and polished enough, we'll be ready to make the demo public.

Until next time!