Boil and Toil | Slow Rush Studios

This week, fire learned to boil water into steam, and water and acid now mix to make poison!

I also spent a lot of time on that most thrilling toil known to all small business owners: paperwork.

Wait, no, don't leave! Said paperwork might help networked multiplayer happen (maybe). That'd be cool, right?

Steam

Previously, fire meeting water would smother the water. Now, fire meeting water creates steam:

Water next to fire turns into steam.

Last week I said that I wasn't sure how to make steam turn back into water, because we don't have temperature.

I solved that by making steam condense back into water only when it's getting "compressed together"

'Compression' of steam.

Modeling compression is far harder than modeling temperature, so I totally faked it:

Steam atoms have a lifetime, and the lower their lifetime, the more transparent they become.
Their lifetime is increased if surrounded by steam.
If their lifetime is above a certain threshold and they're below some solid ("Grounded") atoms, then condense.
If their lifetime gets too low, they get killed.

This works surprisingly well: in an enclosed space, it gives the impression that the steam atoms near the top seem to be "collecting" steam from below - and when it's open space, the steam mostly doesn't condense back into water.

Poison

Previously if you mixed water and acid, then they'd each just sort of sit there, one on top of the other.

Acid and water, not mixing properly and not doing anything interesting either.

A clever cookie on our Discord suggested that acid should mingle with water to make slightly less acidic acid - which looks like water if it gets defused enough.

I had a go at that, but it didn't work great because acid atoms on the verge of turning into regular water give a bit of acidity to an atom next to them, but then they get it back next time:

You can see that acid atoms just sort of hang in place, exchanging acidity with the acid atom next to them. (Acid atoms whose acidity is sufficiently low are drawn as purple, so you can distinguish them from water).

I think the core problem is that such a diffusion model requires either:

liquid atoms to be moving around constantly (which I don't want to do for performance reasons), OR
some kind of global solver that moves acidity around between connected bodies of liquid (also bad for performance - and I'd have to do a lot of reading to figure out how to make that go).

Either option seems quite difficult to express using the cellular automata model that atoms are (mostly) built around today.

So instead I made acid and water react to create a new atom, poison:

Poison 'infects' water to make the water into poison - and doesn't react with acid anymore, so acid can corrode through it.

I'm thinking that poison will apply some kind of damage over time effect if players or enemies step into it. (But players still don't have health, and enemies don't exist, so neither is implemented yet.)

Thrilling Paperwork

One of the few perks for working in an industry which Australia is, shall we say, not-particularly-well-known-for is that the Aussie government occasionally hands out free money to us poor underdogs.

Or at least, it hands out free money to those underdogs who come out on top in a grueling paperwork fight to the death.¹

I'm applying for 2 lots of free money:

ScreenWest's Digital Games Pre-production Fund for implementing the proposed element-combining spell casting system (application submitted, yay!).
ScreenAustralia's Emerging Gamemakers Fund for implementing networked (online) multiplayer (application in progress).

Anyway, given that I am a solo developer working on my first game, I'm not sure what my chances are, but I'll find out in about 4 & 12 weeks (respectively).

Did You Say Online Multiplayer!?

I said "maybe online multiplayer". If I get funding. And if my plan works.

I plan to plan more about the plan² another time, as I've already exceeded my writing time budget this week!

Just to be doubly clear: there is no guarantee that the game will have online multiplayer over the internet.
Multiplayer with multiple players on one computer: yes, 100%.
Multiplayer involving more than one computer: to be determined.

Playable web build‎

Here, go put some fires out:

Click to focus, then play with keyboard and mouse. No mobile support! Give feedback.

Actually the paperwork isn't that bad, and I was able to reuse a good chunk of what I had already done as part of trying to crystallize the game's design. Still takes a few days though if you include the demo polishing, video recording, etc. And still a pretty good ROI - if you get the money.

Or as my Lead Investor (aka wife) put it:

Given the median platformer game on Steam makes about 3,000 USD, it's a great deal!

Planning to write the plan about the plan? Apparently you can take the man out of the corporate, but you can't take the corporate out of the man.