#001 - First Prototype Release

Introduction / The First Prototype

In November 2021, I created what amounted to a tech demo, showcasing a truly gigantic randomly generated landscape, and letting the player fly around in it.

Demo created in November 2021 - the 'wave' effect on the landscape gives players a better idea of the scale of the game.

It was made for an idea I had at the time: a racing game where the "track" was a vast, vast landscape, and the end-goal was some impossibly distant waypoint. The game would've been multiplayer, and would've been as much a strategy-type game as a racing game, where each of the players in a match would have to assemble a vehicle capable of taking them to the endgoal with whatever they could find.

In the end, I halted development to pursue other projects after around a month. The issues piled up, and it was clear that the scope of that project was something that I wasn't willing to tackle.

Two years later, I've returned to the idea, now with a much simpler, and more concise vision. Beaconfall is a game where that original premise has been stripped down, at least for the time being.

In Beaconfall, the player must traverse a vast landscape to reach an endgoal, in this case a beacon, as before.

But now the game is singleplayer, though I would like to investigate multiplayer eventually, and the vehicle assembly portion of the game has been completely cut out in favor of upgrades and "challenges" that the player can take to aid them in reaching the goal.

Oh, and rather than having to compete with others, the player must instead compete with the endless void approaching them.

The first public release of this game, v0.1, implements this vision in a very simple and... admittedly somewhat blunt fashion. The entire landscape as of now is just bright green hills and mountains under a blue sky, which many people I've shown this demo off to have independently likened to the famous Windows XP wallpaper "Bliss."

The striped patterns were added to the landscape to emphasize scale and communicate the overall form of the landscape before the very basic and (somewhat ugly, in my opinion) directional lighting was added. By the time this game releases, the terrain will not look like crumpled construction paper, I promise.

The "thing" to get away from is a dark wall of 10 semi-translucent planes that approach the player with an increasing speed. These planes actually follow the camera on the neutral axes, so though it may seem that there's an 'edge' to them in the far distance, in reality there's no escape. To maintain the illusion of the landscape getting darker as the wall passes over you (since the planes themselves are the only source of actual darkness in the world), there's a transparent quad covering the screen that gradually gets darker as your inevitable fate closes in on you. While the 'void' is probably going to look a bit different in the future, this type of thing is definitely staying in the final game, the sense of panic I got as the screen gets darker is real good.

And, finally, to facilitate the goal of reaching the beacon, three types of upgrades have been added to the game, which currently look like small colored pillars - not too dissimilar from the beacon.

The New Progression

In the initial public build, which is being released along with this devlog, there are three types of these "upgrades" - a maximum speed increase (yellow), an acceleration increase (red), and a slowdown for the void (blue), whose speed increases exponentially. They can be collected by simply walking over and touching them.

All of these are probably temporary (the way they currently look is certainly temporary), I want the actual upgrades and power-ups in the game to be a little more interesting and involved than what's there at the moment.

Perhaps this game could use some rogue-like... uh... "like" accessory system where the player has a bunch of different collectables that provide different boons, and perhaps woes, to the player.

One goal I have for each of these upgrades, currently, is to have each of them require a specific "challenge" to acquire. Maybe the acceleration power-up isn't just a pickup, it's a pickup you have to chase and "grab" (or just touch) several times before getting it. The maximum speed increase could require you to be still for an extended period of time - which is a challenge in and of itself in a game with high acceleration and low friction (more on that in a future devlog).

Personally, I think the void wall slowdown is perfect - it cuts the speed of the wall in half. This pickup is a good thing to grab no matter where you are, whether that be far ahead or just holding out. Maybe I could have it spawn less often than the others, though.

Ideally, all of these would not just be simple pickups, but actual, decent challenges that give the player things to do other than hold W in the correct direction. But, it's early days, so I'm satisfied with this, for now.

Something you'll also notice while playing the game is that the pickups gradually get more difficult to actually pick up. With increased speed and acceleration, hitting the pillar-shaped objects becomes more and more tedious. I like this increase in difficulty, but it does get quite frustrating trying to thread that needle, and I don't want that kind of gameplay in the final game.

But what will replace it?

Beginner's Outlook

I think it should go without saying that this build is, well, a very early one.

Fun little bug I encountered a few hours before wrapping up v0.1.

Development on this project started on October 16th. Releasing this project as early as it is, even in such a low-key manner, can be a risk, I'm sure, but there are a few reasons why I'm taking this approach to development:

1. Archival reasons - I want to keep track of releases, versions, etc. I like being able to track my own progress.

2. Motivation - Having bad, broken builds of a game out and about helps motivate me to make them less bad and less broken.

3. Feedback - I want to share this idea with others and get feedback. Now is also the best time to figure out if this game will even launch on devices other than my own, so there's that too.

Over the next few weeks I'll discuss different aspects of this game's structure and framework on this devlog, such as how the world generation works, the terrain LOD system, the player movement structure (and why I might rewrite it for like the 6th time), and why the hell I made my own sound library for this game.

As for the game itself, it should be quite apparent that some of the systems within the game, particularly the world generation and especially the LOD transition systems with the terrain need work, so I'll be putting my focus on that in the immediate future, and try to get it to look as clean as I can. Beyond that, there's more that I would like to add to both the world and the player, so there's more coming there soon.

That concludes my first devlog. Thank you all for reading, and I hope you'll return for the next one. I'll also be updating this game periodically, as mentioned, so check back later for that too.

- 0de