11.2024
Clear Dragonvoid blights, pick weeds, and utilise your jade bot technologies to decorate a house and garden in this tiny, cozy Guild Wars 2 fan game, set in the vibrant landscape of Seitung Province!
Nayos was not easy on us; the force of that Kryptis turret’s blast left my plating cracked and my servos crushed and fragmented. Repair and recovery will be a slow process and, as grateful as I am for my jade technicians, it pains me to be away from the Commander for so long. Though perhaps, as I rehabilitate, I too can help build something meaningful.
Heyo, Alec here with some quick notes about working on Seitung Spring Clean ! This is a little fan game I’ve been making in order to experience the entirety of the game development cycle (and also because Guild Wars 2 – Cantha in particular – is very special to me). I’ve touched on many aspects of development that really excite me, so I’d like to write a little bit about them and where I’m at with fitting all the pieces together. This will be a mix of a progress log and some personal aspirations, so thank you so much for taking a look!
The design brief for the game is a simple one: GW2 homesteads meets House Flipper, set in the verdancy of an End of Dragons-inspired map. I am trying to keep Seitung’s scope very small, but to think in a modular, extensible, systems-driven way! The truth is that my interests lie much more in environment art and music than in engineering, but the reward of having a system to drop all of that art into is quite satisfying. Two of my favourite parts of the process have been UI design and shader-writing. It’s cool seeing painted UI architecture being built up to frame the 3D-world; and shaders are just magic – being able to make things wobble, ripple, dissolve, and aberrate feels like some kind of arcane spell.*
A lot of the core mechanics of the game are now in place: you can move and scale decorations (relative to either their current orientation or world coordinates), and the ‘fishing’ minigame used to clear weeds exists in a basic form. Next I’ll be completing the feature set (rotation still needs to be implemented, for example) and fixing and tuning existing ones. Then the step I’ve been looking forward to is producing the visual effects and a variety of decorations for building with, a practice I really wanna improve and develop.
I’m hoping to have something to share in the not-too-distant future; I’m going to test (inflict?) Seitung on some friends as soon as it’s in some kind of MVP state, and then polish it as much as I can before sharing it with a wider audience (while keeping the scope of the game agressively tiny and cozy). I’ve already learned so much from it – both by looking closely at the beautiful props of the world of Guild Wars (getting distracted for perhaps just a couple of metas along the way, xD) and by implementing a game world with mechanics from start to finish. Thank you so much for checking all of this out!
*Just a quick little tangent! A lot of the core mechanics and visual bases for Seitung came out of a dream-diary project I was messing around with at the same time, Dwelt. (Basically more prop art studies – here’s one!) It took me so long to work out simple things like the MMO-style camera and the foliage spawner – I’m really not so good with math. But having them done made it a lot easier to modularise them and put them into Seitung. If I can polish them enough I’ll try and make public available versions of them, if they’re gonna help!
Here's a tiny bit of WIP gameplay footage!!
— Alec 🌸 (@slyllama.net) Nov 26, 2024 at 12:42 pm
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