Today is a pretty great day, but it comes at a cost.
I have brought a few people onto the team, over the last few months, that have lots of promise and have convinced me that we have a decision to make.
We finish up Deficis as was greenlit - a simple tap game that really has little depth and isn’t exceptional… and then move to Deficis 2, the more indepth and interesting title, or
We make the full vision of Deficis and stretch out our time in Early Access.
The truth is, this was an argument I have had with the team a few times, and the outcome is that they have swayed me. The project was a proof of concept when released initially and is missing key elements that make the game more fulfilling. As such, we are diving in head first.
This release is another minor seeming set of internal changes and tweaks to economics system deployed to the beta branch. We have spent the better part of this last month generating a roadmap, with which our delivery date will be adjusted. Now that I can stop worrying about the business side of Gneu and can get my head back down into the guts of developing my games, life is much better. Expect more on this front in the coming weeks/months.
Deficis Alpha 1.1.3 - Release Notes
Version 1.1.3 has been released to the Beta branch!
This month was actually quite productive, including a number of bug fixes, the addition of the first piece of music, lots of internal changes that feed into the big forecasted change - Stellar Generation and Scripted levels are the focus for the next release.
Before I talk about the future though, for those interested in the past, jump down to the end of the page for the change log.
Where to from here
This month, testing uncovered some important issues that the original implementation of the universe generation algorithm failed to address and ultimately the whole concept was broken. As such it had to go.
This change though, means that the core functionality that was driving the game has to be fixed and its a pretty major amount of code that needed to be refactored, not to mention removed. The core set of gameplay that made Deficis interesting is currently disassembled and sitting in my IDE like a bunch of legos from my mindstorm kit when I realized that it wasn't exactly working the way I wanted.
But it also gave me an opportunity to address the question of where this game is going. I have received a number of inquisitive emails and probing Q&A sessions on IRC on the topic of where Deficis is going. The current game is interesting but it isn't exactly as fun as anyone would like, the generation was neat but not exactly creating the environment that I want and the gameplay is exceptionally simple. This is because it is currently a tech demo - so let's get into the meat and potatoes and share some of the design vision...
The generation algorithm is changing to be focused on star systems. You inhabit a solar system with 5-12 planetary bodies each providing goods that you will need to transport; each providing environments you need to terraform; each providing environments that need to be farmed; and each possibly inhabited.
Your people have a decade to leave your planet and move to your new home to resume the process of consuming resources.
Instead of having a lump sum of resources, consumed in abstract lumps, there are a handful of types of resources:
These feed into the consumption algorithms and influence each other
This feeds into the need for a player to be given more control over their populations, since leaving all of this to some set of internal black boxed algorithms is not exceptionally kind. Players now have a tech tree to manage, researching advancements in terraforming allows for switching to sustainable energy sources and opens the game up further with different ship types, increased control over the planet's systems and ultimately addresses end game concerns that people have expressed.
This release is the first step down this road, showing the scale of the solar system for a currently scripted level highlighting a Sol like system that you can move around in. You can also check out some of the tweaks that have been implemented to improve the menu system and settings configurations.
As always, you can follow the broad brush strokes of development on the blog, post questions and share comments on the Steam Community, and/or purchase the game on Steam. For those of you running into issues please consult the issue tracker before letting me know, as the issue you run into may already have a quick fix.
Here are the publicly relevant changes to the game:
1.1.3
Added
Changed
Fixed
Known Issues
Review Copies…
There have been a number of inquiries about review copies of the game, from basically everywhere under the sun. First and foremost, thank you for your interest in the game. It is great to have your attention!
I anticipated the need and for those of you interested in review copies of the game, please hop over to Steam and download the demo. There are only a select few options disabled entirely revolving around the maturity of those features and how much I expect them to change. As the game grows these features will likely changed, but as of this date – this is the best option for now.
In January 2011, the Global Game Jam allowed three friends and me to build a pretty neat game about the end of life... Farewell was born. It was simplistic, built on top of UDK and provided little direction to the user. Although we considered it a learning experience and did our best to deliver on the theme of the Jam, something was missing... it didn't quite gel.
In March 2014 Epic decided to drop a bomb on the game development community, opening up the UE4 source code, documentation, support and centuries worth of developer experience to hobbyist game developers. This has changed the industry in ways that we likely haven't even realized yet.
This move inspired a friend and me to try and build something small, and after vetting a number of our ideas Exodus was born. Building on the ideas & concepts from Farewell, we delivered three heavily travelled builds - To date there have been 13084 downloads.
In May 2014, I added it to Steam Greenlight did some very simple marketing, letting the game speak for itself; the concepts, vision and some organic discussions have lead people to the game.
There was a final name change completed two months ago - the game is called Deficis.
That said, let's get into this release and what you are going to see & do.
Deficis is a bleak game about the end of humanity. You are the sole person left to manage the remaining days of humanity, commanding them to delve out into space in search of more resources. As your population grows, their resource requirements do as well, to their own detriment.
Technically speaking, this game has been quite fun to make. It features procedurally built levels using seeds, faux n-body physics used for motion and a load of brand new code written to help manage data driven development; if there is interest in the details I can share some of the internals with you. Not that the algorithms are too complicated, but it might be fun to discuss.
The game is currently in a pretty raw state. *With the move to Early Access and to Steam I have removed a lot of the things people complained about most (sound effects mainly) and I have rebuilt the UI from scratch to try to get some of the clutter down.* There are still a good number of features to be added, and a good number of minor issues needing to be addressed.
Here is the plan for the next few months:
The default branch will be updated when a significant number of changes are stable.
The beta branch will be updated every tuesday with any relevant builds that have passed through the automated and manual testing team.
Internally, there is a testing branch that our testing team is granted access to. This branch is updated as builds are available, likely every couple
days as tasks progress and issues are closed.
Early Access will be coming to a close the first week of November, this year.
There are a number of opportunities for assistance with the project, though mainly with testing and QA. If you have any issues to share please hop over to the Trello Board for Deficis.
I am looking for a foley and 3D artist to help with sanding down the rough edges and getting the music/audio up to snuff prior to leaving Early Access in November. If you are interested in helping out please don't hesitate to reach out.
So here we are.
I have to thank you all for sharing your money and time to play this game. I have now worked on it with four different co-developers, had them all go their separate ways and resulting in me being solo, building something neat to share with you all. I hope you enjoy it, or at least let me know why you don't.
