Hello! My name is Bobi, and I’m a software engineer working 10 years in the field, working primarily as a backend and devops engineer for most of this time. About a year and a half ago I lost my full time job(womp womp), and having some time on my hands I started working on this game that I really wanted to play. In fact, it started as a “Game Design Document” over three years ago, but I have to be honest that the scope has, uhh, evolved since then.
The Game
The game will have two primary “phases”, the roguelike 3D fps extraction phase(could be argued to be the secondary phase, in terms of chronological arrangement, but it will be the main part of the player experience), which will be a quake/half-life-like mix of “puzzle” filled rooms, hord-mode arenas and shooting galleries assembled randomly into stages, where upon completion you will be able to “extract” and return to your space-faring space ship with the goods. The space ship phase will be a ‘colony’ manager type experience, where you as the leader have to go through a few Crusader Kings ‘random event’ style dialogues, decide on where to focus your colony resources (human and physical) and, naturally, cook your soup, which will serve as the analogue for the meta-progression of your 3D fps descents.
The soup
Oh, did I even mention the soup? Yeah, well, it’s just the single most important thing and the sole reason you and your colonists thrive, but whatever. This world is a grimdark inspired post-apocalypse, and as far as you are aware, your ~5000 strong colony is the last remnant of human civilization. The rest of the galaxy has long since become completely overrun by a xenomorph alien hivemind, leaving only a couple of cultist collaborant worlds habitable by humans.
Being in charge of your colony, which is hurling through space on an inter-galactic spaceship, required you to make yourself a super-human, immortal cyborg. This extensive augmentation left you unable to digest most regular foods, and instead, having to substitute all your daily required caloric intake with The Soup.
The beautiful
I have been really struggling with 3D modelling, and doing even the basics with blender got me feeling really useless and sad, so I use the TrenchBroom → funcGodot flow for mapping, and for stuff that really couldn’t be just matte textureless pills and boxes I settled on a hodgepodge of free 3D models with animations(or not) found on sketchfab.. Truthfully, I just sunk too much time into trying to learn how to do stuff that I’m not even excited about, instead of doing stuff I’m extremely excited about making.
After deciding that I’ll put all the 3D sh*t on the backburner, things really started taking off! Today marks the day that I’m finally proud to make my first devlog.
The Log
I’m the type of programmer that really values systems, objects and front-loaded development / technical capital. Working alone on this game for so long really made me look in the mirror and reconsider my approach. Weeks building the weapons system turned into months, and I was still not even squeezing out enough “game” to rival Duck Hunt - Something had to change. Don’t get me wrong, I am proud that I have a rigid weapons system with reliable hitscan, flashy decals and emitters, enemy interactions, modifier support; but I only ended up adding 2 weapons in the end, leaving half of the endpoints unused. Stepping back a few paces and looking at it as a whole, I just had to concede - details did NOT form the big picture. Even worse, they didn’t even begin to outline it. So a couple of weeks back, I decided to orient myself towards results – not at the cost of technical debt, just, only working on parts of the system I intend to employ in the feature I’d like to add.
Over the weekend, I decided on finally focusing on the inventory system. In-world items, picked up by looking at them and interacting, or dragged into your bag from the dayz inspired “Nearby” space in the inventory UI, rearranging by drag-drop, rotating, dropping by dragging out, splitting stacks. It has ALL the bells and whistles, and it doesn’t (greatly) impact performance to boot. And this was only FRIDAY AND HALF OF SATURDAY (I went to see the new spiderman on Saturday..). Sunday I spent extending the perk system to make it possible for special items (called modules) to be able to give you perks and special abilities. I initially scoped it out as a week’s work and I had it under the hood in under half that time. I am still working out some kinks to make some items function properly, but that’s mostly functional coding with high turnover, but I digress; It works, and I didn’t get bogged down on making it too open-ended. It still has some boilerplate, like export functions that will allow me easily plugging it into extraction and eventually the co-op netcode, but it’s already functional and presentable-ish.
What’s next?
Next dev log will be focused on the mapping and procedural generation / assembling – it’ll be a little more technical, but I’ll try to make it a decent read.
No, I mean, like, roadmap.
I’ll be honest, there will probably not be any talk of a roadmap for some time.. I’m aware I’m talking about a game here, and people would prefer to try it rather than read about me making it.. but just stay tuned.
Looking for help!
I would love to connect with a 3D artists – do reach out if interested.
Where can I re-read this? (It was so good)
Interesting you should ask; I have a devlog on itchio too, if you’d like to re-read or maybe give it a like: Souperb weekend - Soup Extract by Bobi's Games