mid_gen's Launch a Game Studio Thread
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Several, but only one in development.
Was good to have some time off last week (although I did study and pass an exam, and do a vlog while I was away). Been nice to sit and spend some time on the game today.
Decided to migrate the main weapon systems code into Mass, which is Unreal's ECS implementation. I considered doing this up front, but opted for a hybrid of UObject + ad-hoc components inside subsystems. But the design is moving more towards bullet hell type numbers of projectiles and stuff so might as well implement everything in ECS.
Various benefits to this which I'll cover in a video some time, but mainly performance, and also enforces structure to the code which will make it easier for LLMs to understand and work with it.
Actually I did write a blog years ago about ECS, which I may use as the basis for the video :
Cashworth.net - What is Mass, And Why Should You Care? Part 1
Game Development, UnrealEngine, Unity
www.cashworth.net
Boring update here.....finally run payroll and have my first salary from the business....little things!
Have just about finished the migration of all the combat systems to Mass (Unreal's ECS framework).
Now to implement some of the energy management systems which I think is going to unlock the main gameplay loop.
Have just about finished the migration of all the combat systems to Mass (Unreal's ECS framework).
Now to implement some of the energy management systems which I think is going to unlock the main gameplay loop.
Soldato
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Well it's gameplay rather than code...you'll need to have looked at some of teh gameplay footage to understand.What does this mean? to the non-programmer
At the moment when the game goes to Alert phase, you get the warning of which grid cells have threats in them (and what type). You have ONE fixed move for each ship in your fleet, then combat starts.
What I want to do is introduce a fixed energy system to each ship....say the big dreadnaught has 4 energy units.
Moving the ship during alert phase costs 1 energy unit, but you can move it more than once.
Each weapon system needs 1 energy unit to fire.
The shield needs 1 energy to power.
So you will need to balance your ability to reorganise the fleet, which weapon systems will be active, and whether the shield is powered.
Also adds opportunity to overcharge things, double shield, less weapons maybe if the ship is knackered and needs to limp through to the destination for repairs.
That's the idea anyway! Good to be back on gameplay.
Soldato
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Thanks! I thought it was something to do with processing power from the GPU or something 
Well that was an expectedly productive day.
Also done a whole bunch of admin
Now, time to get outside and have a friday evening
- Finished the Mass migration (this would literally have been weeks if not months of work before Claude....done in a couple of days, praise the sun!)
- Added the energy management system
- Made shields require energy
- Made weapons require energy
- Made movement require energy
- Re-purposed the manual targeting UI to now assign energy to systems
- Added energy bar UI.
- Added VFX and light to projectile weapon impacts (now an absolute doddle the Mass).
Also done a whole bunch of admin
- First payroll (hurrah, first paycheque of 2026 )
- Made sure all accounts are up to date, all receipts etc.
- Full maintenance pass, updated source control server, TeamCity, WikiJS to latest versions.
- Refreshed Github tokens for various CI bits
Now, time to get outside and have a friday evening
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Some bonus pew pew footage of a stress test I was just running. The fruits of the last few days migrating everything to Mass. Everything a first class entity now and it's super easy to extend the gameplay from this point.
Because everything is an entity now (ships, projectiles, missiles, drones)...it's trivial to make new interesting systems. Making the drones have beam weapons that fire at projectiles and missiles was a few minutes work.
Priority targetting is now on all weapon systems (anti-ship/projectile/missile/drone)...and target count tracking added to all entities too to distribute fire better.
Will be doing a more in depth video on the Mass migration if I get time in the next week or so.
Because everything is an entity now (ships, projectiles, missiles, drones)...it's trivial to make new interesting systems. Making the drones have beam weapons that fire at projectiles and missiles was a few minutes work.
Priority targetting is now on all weapon systems (anti-ship/projectile/missile/drone)...and target count tracking added to all entities too to distribute fire better.
Will be doing a more in depth video on the Mass migration if I get time in the next week or so.
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And since I have a claude skill that will stage these stress tests automatically for me....thought I'd push it until framerates started dipping. And added a debug option to turn off screenshake
Got all the performance I'll need I think! Not even an optimised build, and not done any profiling passes at all yet. Just well architected code.
Got all the performance I'll need I think! Not even an optimised build, and not done any profiling passes at all yet. Just well architected code.
What's your main and render thread times on that and draw?
Games I've worked on recently tend to be heavily compute shader based with many threads on parallel command lists and gpu driven so have achieved a lot going on through that rather than cpu cache friendly beyond the hot paths. Have yet to work on an ecs based one.
Games I've worked on recently tend to be heavily compute shader based with many threads on parallel command lists and gpu driven so have achieved a lot going on through that rather than cpu cache friendly beyond the hot paths. Have yet to work on an ecs based one.
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It's game thread limited at the moment (PIX capture below). There's still a few Mass processors that are unnecessarily reaching into UObjects which I can clean up and get moved off the game thread easy enough.
Render side of it is not my area of expertise at all. There are an insane amount of lights in the scene, every weapon impact spawns one and there's lots of emissive surfaces doing smoke and mirrors (the detonation flashes are just an instanced sphere mesh with a bright emissive material).
I've got tons of headroom performance-wise now for the gameplay I have now. Need to get my game designer hat on now and start figuring out the player journey stuff.
Made some real good progress this week. Lots of work on the combat framework.
Today I was able to spend a bit of time iterating on the map screen. Before was just a flat grid, going from A->B.
I had this idea to change the layout to this one, where you have the destination at the center (when the studio was called Moth Empire I wanted to have the ships crewed by anthropomorphised moths, and they were trying to just get to the star in the middle...because moths....light, might still do it tbh
)The idea now is that you're trying to get to the center. The difficulty increases the further in you go. So you have the choice of doing more jumps on the easy outer rings, getting more salvage and upgrades, before tackling the inner ones).
I want the game to be playable in 30 mins, like FTL, Hades etc. So You only need a short sesh to enjoy the game but you have the roguelike elements, permanent upgrades, maybe a narrative, drawing you back.
Anyway, black holes are ****ing cool...there's a guy called MakeMake that has awesome space assets, which is where this black hole cam from.
Anyway, I am teetering on the brink of burnout at the moment, has been such an intense week. I'm now avoiding any more engagements, conferences, discussions etc until after I've got moved house....or I'm going to need a month off to recover!
Next round of branding on Monday, hopefully get that wrapped up and can make the website and youtubes look nice, and 'launch' the studio properly. Yay
Cheers! Good to know it's sounding interesting to some people at leastKeep up the good work man. This really is starting to sound like something I want to play
Will try and get another vlog done this week even if it's just another walking one.
It's tempting to only stick to doing the videos that get lots of views, but the vlogs are good content still, and pretty easy to produce.
Once the branding is done I'll do more searchable videos, how tos, guides etc.
Will it cost more than a fiver? If so @TNA will have to wait it out. He only beta tests Star Trek games and FOTM FOMO games.
Will space be proper black, like 0 value? Always bugs me when I’m in space on my OLED and it’s too bright lol.
Will space be proper black, like 0 value? Always bugs me when I’m in space on my OLED and it’s too bright lol.
I’ll make sure to at least have a colour grading/starbox option to keep the background fully black.
Think I’m going to brush up on my 3D skills and make a few ship models. Seems hard to find concept artists and I know what look I’m going for.
Allowed myself a full day off yesterday. Sat and played Marathon for about six hours….haven’t done that in a long time. I do really like the aesthetic, will explore it a bit.
Even a toggle would be cool like ‘oled mode’, I think that’s why I liked Tetris Effect from a design standpoint, pure blacks with the bright effects going off. I also remember a few old games like Dizzy which were like that but probably due to technical limitations.
Most the games I play are spacey themed so looking forward to this. My peak gaming time is when it’s autumn/winter and I can get total darkness in PC room. Of course I could also get a blackout blind but we’ll ignore that.
Good you took some time off. I imagine it’s hard when you work for yourself because your brain may try to fight and tell you that you should be being productive. No point burning out.
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I do agree, have a few OLEDs now and it's annoying when the image is graded so the blacks are washed out looking.
The aesthetic I want to go for it kinda very black, realistic looking backdrops....then for the ships and UI a very bright, block colour kind of palette, (did I mention I really like the art direction on Marathon
). Homing in on the scale of the combat, like number of ships etc.
Since the core interactivity is going to be setting the location and confoguration of the ships, it can't be too many ships. I'm thinking 6 ships is probably optimal.
I'm in the process of refactoring the ship framework, so they have configurable hardpoints. So each ship has a 3x3 grid where hardpoints can go, there's an energy supply from teh reactor. There's a limited number of ship hull archetypes, with different hardpoint and reactor/shield configurations.....but the player can change weapon loadouts, shield upgrades etc.
So rather than the 'cool' factor coming from masses of ships all firing at once, it's a limited number of ships, but much more detailed and awesome weapons, like drone swarms, railguns, EMP, point defence, etc etc.
Also starting to brush up my modelling skills so I can explore the visual style I want.....will draft a couple of designs.
Tedious but necessary day today. Needed to rework all the ships with a new system to enable the player customisation. Ships are now just hulls with hardpoints. Weapons are now configured as standalone blueprints. You can assign a default weapon to a hardpoint.
This is all the wiring to enable the player to customise the ships and mess with loadouts, upgrades etc. Just about done now but has meant redoing all the ship data setup to date....so took the opportunity to fix the scaling of everything. I wasn't familiar with the new import process in 5.7 and kinda hacked everything together before....all sorted now and everything is the right size
Just got the one player ship and one enemy ship now though. Want to spend a bit of time looking at building a couple of concept designs to explore the look and feel. Was going to farm out to a concept artist but think my 3D skills are good enough to mock up what I have in mind to get started.
This is all the wiring to enable the player to customise the ships and mess with loadouts, upgrades etc. Just about done now but has meant redoing all the ship data setup to date....so took the opportunity to fix the scaling of everything. I wasn't familiar with the new import process in 5.7 and kinda hacked everything together before....all sorted now and everything is the right size
Just got the one player ship and one enemy ship now though. Want to spend a bit of time looking at building a couple of concept designs to explore the look and feel. Was going to farm out to a concept artist but think my 3D skills are good enough to mock up what I have in mind to get started.
Another boring but necessary day today. Properly setting up the UI in the game, giving myself a crash course in the CommonUI plugin which is a ton of boilerplate to learn but will be me a solid re-usable UI toolkit.
The joys of indie dev, don’t have other people to deal with the boring stuff!
Tomorrow off to what is looking like a very wet festival for the weekend.
The joys of indie dev, don’t have other people to deal with the boring stuff!
Tomorrow off to what is looking like a very wet festival for the weekend.