This week, a wild Slow Rush Discord server appears! And I reflect a bit on writing these updates.
What's that you say? Something about a game? Oh, right, that!
Well, you can now jump into water to splash it around, push falling sand & brick atoms out of the way, get buried by them, and (usually) dig yourself out - all the good stuff.
Discord server for Super Cool Peeps!
I've created a super exclusive Slow Rush Discord server - so exclusive that only readers from this week can join!
Why Discord? Well, I want your feedback on the ideas & features I write about here, and the demos I'm publishing! A few people have reached out via email (thank you!) but I want more, and Discord is the defacto gaming community chat app.
But, the invite link is only active for the next 6 days! Why? I just don't want to be overwhelmed - I'm still very early in development.
So, be swift, my daring reader: join the Discord server!
(If you've missed out, stay calm & stay subscribed - I'll open it up again soon.)
On Weekly Updates
These weekly updates are heavily inspired by Factorio's Friday Facts (long-standing todo: think of a catchy name like that), which I've been following for 3 or 4 years now.
When I started, I was aiming for two things:
- Keeping myself accountable. When you're on your own, it can be easy to work on unimportant things. When you have to report on what you've concretely gotten done.. well, I am very motivated to avoid disappointing people, so I'll do my darndest to ship something cool each week.
- Letting you be part of the journey! You get a taste of what it's like to make a game, maybe learn some cool things as I learn them, maybe see I'm not entirely ignorant of how to make fun things (only somewhat ignorant), we eventually work out together how to trick Steam's algorithms into thinking my game is amazing, and hopefully in a year or two you (most generously) skip a takeout meal & buy the game instead ;)
But...
- Writing these updates is also a significant time investment: last week's update took most of a day - or to put it in perspective, 20% of my entire development time that week - and that hasn't been unusual.
- I usually get positive feedback on the content, but some said they've struggled to keep up to date.
- Early Factorio's Friday Facts were actually a lot shorter than recent FFFs. I shouldn't be holding myself to the bar of a 31 person team!
So, from now on I'll be aiming to keep my updates shorter & more to the point. You can ask me questions in Discord if anything isn't clear! (& tell me if I go too brief.)
Sloooow Videos
Speaking of keeping updates short, this week I realised that for a while I've been encoding my videos in these updates at half the correct framerate - so they play at 30 frames a second, which is super slow!
Sorry about that. I was messing about with my video encoding automation a while back and probably introduced the issue then. (And don't worry, the game does still run at 60 frames a second - as long as you don't go too crazy with the water.)
Making a Splash
Back to the game! You can now jump into water and splash it around:
And you can push sand around:
This is implemented using the existing moving body logic I implemented a few weeks ago - the player is treated just like a moving body.
And like with moving bodies, if a player tries to move while being buried, the atoms resting on the player no longer count as grounded - which means they don't get built into colliders. That means the player can escape being buried:
Well, okay, if you're buried in bricks you sometimes can't get out. Getting buried alive by bricks seems like a bad way to go so I'll have to fix that.
Playable web build
Here, draw yourself some water (press 5 and use the mouse), then dip your toes in:
As with last week, press F1 to see all controls.
That's all for now folks - I've got some more things brewing but didn't get 'em done in time so hopefully you'll see them next week!
Let me know what you think, over in our fancy Discord server!