We're back!
Yep, you read that correctly. Thornefall was started by Cody and I back in 2011, with progress being made for a few years. We recently reminisced about our past progress and realized how important this game is to us--and how much we want to see it become a reality. Cody, Hadyn, and I have all grown significantly as game developers over the past few years, and we're approaching this project with renewed vigor and experience.
These announcements will be made every 1-2 weeks to share the progress we're making. We are building a custom stack from the ground up, and will be demoing various gameplay ideas in Unity while we pin down the core experience we want to build. These demos will be made available to the community once ready. Seeing as you're the audience for this game, you should certainly have a say in how it plays as early in the development cycle as possible.
Announcements in the coming months will be primarily geared toward the technical aspects of the project--building an engine from scratch requires assembling a lot of individual pieces. We currently have two active engineers: Ben and Hadyn, so these development blogs will be providing regular updates on their progress as the technical game stack is assembled. Expect screenshots for visually relevant work.
Development Blog 1Ben's dusting off some old code...Code has a tendency to decay over time. Mostly this comes from third party code changing without updating the code using it. We have a bunch of game engine code that was written ~4 years ago that hasn't been compiled in the last couple of years. Ben needed to update the code to be able to compile on 64-bit Intel/AMD platforms, and fix all of our old automated unit tests due to changes in our custom testing framework. This proved to be a bit more challenging than expected--the framework also had its own pile of bugs to fix! Nevertheless, the engine is now back to a point where it's ready for development.
Hadyn's re-articulating rickety old asset formatsHow do you represent a game animation in a data file? There are many answers to this question. Ben, in 2013, apparently had one which later confused Hadyn, in 2019, as he tried to update our assets to a more versatile format (protobuf). Hence, a long discussion ensued between Hadyn and Ben regarding why our animation format conflates 'chunk' and 'bone', and why our fonts apparently require both a size and a height.
The discussion was eventually resolved, and we now have converters for animations, fonts, images, and materials over to new formats that won't require us to write our own code for reading and writing the assets. Hadyn is continuing to migrate the remaining assets, which will save significant time later on when we start loading these assets into the frontend and backend game engines.
Sign-offThanks for following along on our update for this week. We have a lot of work to do, and we'll be chipping away at it. We look forward to updating you on our progress in the next announcement. Until then, share your questions, and tell us what you want to get out of Thornefall.
- Ben
