sterile moth
Hey everyone! Making a game engine here. It's for a specific game that will probably be called something like Spectre, but I'm not sure yet. The name of the engine sounds fancy and cringy, I know, but it's a reference to the ship you pilot in the game, which is called Spectre. So it's a fun combination of words. The Spectre also has an engine.
Anyway, the game is a flight simulator in a scifi setting. Humanity tried to terraform an alien planet, settled down a bunch of colonies on the surface, then everything went wrong! the planet's terraforming regressed and it became a hostile environment. But it's too late for the humans there now. Takes generations to settle in, so that's life now.
You will pilot a plane and move cargo all across the planet. I plan on it being a mostly zen gameplay, but with mysteries and intrigue to explore as well. The flight dynamics will be as realistic as I can make without compromising a fun gameplay or my sanity. So probably accurate enough to fool an amateur, but not a real pilot.
The main gimmick is raymarching. I've never seen a game with only raymarching as its only rendering technique. So this might be a very stupid idea. But it should be fun to try and make this work. At the very least a good learning experience. Why? Because I want to experiment with fractals as a way of generating complex futuristic cities to fly through. And nothing better than SDFs to achieve that.
The work done already: I did what I like to call an exploratory implementation. Zero regards to organization and design, with the bare minimum of what it would take. This version of the engine had a crude ECS-like system (just the concept of entity and component, not the actual data structures), scenes, renderer and other bells and whistles. At the end I could define a scene in code, with entities having complex models defined by SDF primitives. A terrain system that is large enough to convince as a tiny planet.
sacred vine
split pagoda
dawn helm
rapid orchid
undone compass