Equilinox - Two Years of Game Dev: Part 1

hello everyone and welcome to this week's special video where we're going to be having a look back at the two years of Aquila NOx development starting at the very beginning and going up to the point where we're at now in this video I'm going to show you how the game has progressed from month to month and I'll also talk a little bit about some of the decisions that I made along the way how I feel about those decisions now and things that I do differently next time so the story starts way back in September of 2015 and I'm not really sure how many of you were already following me back then but if you were you'll remember that I was previously working on a different game and I had just done a Kickstarter campaign for that game which was unfortunately unsuccessful so at the time I was looking to find a job and I also wanted to start a much simpler project that I could work on at the same time as having the job and I think I said in one of my videos at the time that this new smaller game was just going to take a few months to complete um that was over two years ago so obviously estimating how long things are going to take is not one of my strengths I can't quite remember where the idea for acquitted NOx came from but I do remember that one day on the train to Wolfsburg I was writing down a lot of plans for the game a lot of features that I wanted to have in the game and I managed to find those notes you can see them here and I was just looking through these the other day and it turns out that the game did actually end up quite similar to how it plans it's on that very first day before I started actually programming and quina NOx I needed to decide on the art style that I was going to use and I'd been considering the low-poly art style for quite a while so one day I decided to try it out in blender and create a low poly scene and you can actually see that no pun scene here this is a scene that I created way back before I'd even started Equinox and a lot of these models actually ended up being the first models in the game and I think two or three of them are even still in the game now so obviously I was happy enough with this nobody seen and I decided to get started with actually programming the game so pretty quickly I got started with creating the engine for Aquila NOx and I studied off by generating the terrain I generated random terrain and I also added some color-changing abilities to it so that I could later implements biomes and you can see that here this is the very first version of Aquila NOx that I can find on my computer with just the terrain and it's color-changing abilities and then we've done to creating a better rendering system for objects which took quite a while but eventually I got that all working and I started implementing the ability to place objects and for those objects to spread biomes on the terrain and around this time I made the first develop video about Aquila NOx which you can of course still check out on my channel going into October of 2015 I continued working on the engine for Aquila Knox adding new features such as the low poly water which I was extremely proud of at the time I think this was pretty much the first time that I'd ever kind of come up with my own graphical feature and worked it out myself rather than just learning it from a tutorial online and this was something that I sat down worked through and implemented myself and for me that was quite a big milestone in my learning of OpenGL I also then implemented text simple main many folk with an ox and also shadows into the engine in November I worked on a post processing pipeline for Aquila NOx and added a couple of effects like the bloom effects and the depth of field effect which again were things that I hadn't worked on before so this was the first time that I was learning about them and I also implemented a very simple audio system into Aquila notes and I added the first growing tree so this for the first plants in the game that had multiple model stages and actually grew over time so it was the first species in the game that had some sort of actual life cycle and to finish up 2015 I added support particle effects into the engine and also made a few Christmassy models starting off in 2016 I made it possible for entities to have customizable colors so even though I was just using the same tree models I could make the leaves of the trees different colors and I could make the wool of the sheep different colors and at the same time I started work on an extremely simple basic reading system for the Sheep where they basically just duplicated every few seconds but when they did duplicate they passed on their color with a slight variation and because of this I remember having quite a lot of fun at the time just trying to simulate evolution because by simulating a predator that couldn't see the color red very well by just making sheep less likely to die the more red they are the whole population of sheep would slowly over time evolved to be red in February things were really starting to take shape and as I implemented the UI system and added the very basic toolbar into the game I also made it possible to select objects by implementing a color picking system and when you clicked on an entity it would bring up the entity info GUI which showed some simple stats about the entity the concept of diversity points which is like the in-game currency was also added to the game back then and I started thinking about the shops as you can see here finally it was also possible to now pick up entities and move them around in the world by right-clicking on them and the concept of biomes was also added into the game at that time and you can see the biome picker tool here which tells you how much of each biome there is that's any given point on the terrain moving into spring of 2016 the game really started expanding in some cases literally as I increased the world size about four times and with that I had to do quite a lot of optimization to make sure that the game could still run well the in-game shop also open for business in March looking very different from how it does now but this finally allows you to easily select which object you wanted to place Plus you know how to purchase the species with your diversity points most importantly in that month I started implementing the life cycles for all the different species in the game so I gave them all multiple model stages so that they could all grow over time as I added the breeding system so that they could all reproduce plants could spread over an area and then of course after a while each plant or animal would die I also added the first couple of new species since the game which was the birch tree and this rather strange looking rapt creature the birch tree is actually still in the game's day the way director sadly is not in April I started making some very good progress redoing the shop to pretty much how it looks now I also implemented locked items in the shop the inventory was added so that you didn't have to buy items one by one I also implemented the species information panel and that design for this has changed so many times over the last two years as you'll see in this video but the idea of this panel was to give general information about a given species as well as then I also worked on the evolution trees which allow you to evolve a species and unlock new species and I remember making the UI for this took me ages I had a lot of problems with it but I did eventually get it working as you can see here in the species information panel and in order to unlock a new species you had to meet certain breeding requirements which were usually getting a trait to a certain level and in order to change the traits of an animal or plants you had to selectively breed them and to make it easier to selectively breed them I also added this button here so while I've been preparing this video I've been looking back through the release notes that I made each month when I release the game on patreon and the release notes for me say that there are only going to be a few more of these releases before the final release and that was a year and a half ago so I was still obviously not getting any better that's estimating how long things would take I did however get quite a lot done that month with the addition of the tasks system which allows you to complete tasks in order to get rewards and the rewards could either be diversity points or it could unlock a new species I also added a notification system so when you breed a new animal or plant or a task gets finished you get notified about it and they will show you a couple of little graphical changes such as the addition of the skybox and the Sun with the lens flare effects it also looks like I was just starting to implement the environmental requirements system at that point but I didn't fully implement that until June where I also created a health system for the plants and the animals so you can see now in the entity pop-up GUI that each animal implants has a health bar and also an environmental satisfaction bar showing how happy it is with its environment and you could melt over these to get more information the environmental preferences of each species were then also displayed in the species information panel which as you can see received its first of many makeovers there was also a new tab added to the entity pop-up GUI to separate the traits from the current status of an animal or plant and this also allows you to alter the traits in return for DP making it possible to basically genetically modify the plants and animals to have crazy traits such as these extremely high bouncing sheep and this made the whole evolving new species system a little bit easier I also redid the main menu of bits but that also didn't last very long I got redone again a couple of months later and you'll find that redoing things is a bit of a recurring theme in this video there were quite a few instances where I implemented something and then we implemented it multiple times later but I think that's mainly because I'm learning and improving as I go so although I would implement something as best as I could at the time a few months later I'd be more experienced I'd have a better knowledge about stuff and I'd look back at those things that I did previously and I'd realize that I could do better now and obviously I wanted to redo them so I don't necessarily think that the constant redoing is a bad thing unless of course it's just due to bad planning um it obviously takes time to redo stuff but I think that's just how it goes when you're learning and trying to improve you're not always gonna get everything right first time next up I implemented another graphical effects for the plants and the trees which was to make them look like they're moving in the wind I also added some spawning restrictions to make sure that trees didn't grow into each other there was a a new custom cursor for when you're placing items into the world and the biomes got a bit of an upgrade with some buying particle effects and sound effects and as I mentioned the main menu also got changed again in August I then decided that I had pretty much added all of the basic game mechanics into the game and that it was about time to start concentrating on adding the content into the game I think all the species and the hey vias so before I started this I wanted to start with a completely clean slate so I removed everything from the game species and the tasks and I wanted to go through all the species and add them into the game one by one so I started off with just the grass and the sheep and while I did that I am committed some improved behaviors for the Sheep such as a hunger system which meant that animals now had to eat to stay alive and therefore you had to make sure that food was available in the nearby area there were also some changes made to the AI system so that I could implement some more interesting a eyes and I used this for the young sheep to make them follow their parents on top of that there were also a couple of UI changes that month so I made it possible to edit the name of sheep by edit the commands tap into the entity pop up GUI and I also made it possible to edit the color traits of a species and once again I also redid the main menu and of course the species information panel in the following months I was mostly working on adding new species into work when an ox and as I went I was also improving the entity system so for example in September I added a couple of new trees and bush and I made it possible for trees and bushes to produce fruit like the fruit bush and I also added in death animations for plants and animals in October a few more species what had aids like the wheats the chickens the fern and some new flowers and I also completely redid the task queue I say that in the tasks panel it would show overviews of the tasks and then you could click on one of those overviews and it would bring up the full information about that task the panel on the right here and that allowed me to provide a bit more information and description about the various tasks then in November something quite important happens you

Channel: ThinMatrix

Views: 302,463

Rating: 4.9577627 out of 5

Keywords: indie game, java game, opengl game, opengl, java, lwjgl, 3d game, devlog, game development, Games, 3d game development, indie development, game programming, opengl 3d game, glsl, Independent Video Game Development, Video Game (Industry), sandbox game, indie sandbox game, low poly game, low poly art, thinmatrix, AI, simulation, gamedev, equilinox, low poly tree, blender, low poly water, species, low poly model, 3d model, Blender, indie developer, look back, two years

Id: HK1ajrItIh0

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/The_DrLamb]

That water is incredible looking.

[u/Theberzer]

ThinMatrix is awesome! He's literally the only reason I passed my computer graphics class :p

[u/aWilkens]

Found this on Youtube earlier. The creator seems very dedicated and game is just stunning!

[u/wordpass6656]

Been "soon" for like a year

[u/LeMads]

Check out his mmo, which sadly went unfunded on kickstarter, Socuwan.