Devlog

2024-01-20

From the this point onwards things escalated pretty quickly. You can find the details in the video description, but here are some highlights: Entity Component System, command queue with visualization, info panel, ship upgrades

2024-01-09

After some time passed, it was the start of the year again and I was watching some videos about spacial hashing and some other algorithms in a quest to understand how large game worlds would work. Very interesting stuff!

I started to implement a simple cell based lookup and rendered the result out into a png file. It was painfully slow and cumbersome.

I can do better! So I decided to visualize it in the browser using my trusty old friend PixiJS!

Initially it was only plotting dots on the world, and drawing a circle around the point highlighting the points inside a radius. But of course there needed to be interaction! So I added some mouse events and made the circle move around the canvas.

2022

"Ah the start of the year. Time to build this space game that's stuck in my head!" - That was probably what I was thinking in 2022. I started checking out the Rust programming language and was happy coding in a low level language again. I did use C++ a long time ago, but Rust was just so much better and safer to use. So I began looking for a game engine and found Bevy! And let me tell you: Bevy is such a joy to develop with! The entity component system is just phenomenal! I implemented some of the ideas from Bevy into my current implementation as well. Though I must say it's nowhere near as performant of course.

I made some devlog videos showcasing my progress as well

2014/2015

Over christmas I started animating a small dot on a canvas, because I wanted to see how games actually move things around. This initial implementation started with a simple HTML page and a setInterval timer and evolved into my first attempt to build a game. I eventually started streaming the development on Twitch for a few days and it was a lot of fun!

I found an old video that shows the progress that I made. Unfortunately it was written in CoffeeScript and some other old technologies, so I could not get it working again.

The game was using PixiJS as well (canvas rendering back then) and used the same assets that I found on OpenGameArt.

It had an entity component system, storage indicators, a command queue and acceleration / deceleration for the ship movement, pretty cool!