At the start of this year, I made my very first game design document, and realised there is a lot that I'd like to add to the game. I'm very aware this is my first commercial game, so the more I can cut or push out, the better.

In January, I came up with some of the first milestones I'm planning to hit:

• March 2022 - Core game engine and user interface finished ✅; final simulation infrastructure ✅
• May 2022 - Pawns, game events, and items
• July 2022 - Pawn orders and priorities, buildings, pawn skills, and metabolism

And by July, I'd like to have the first release of a playable alpha for my Patreons. By then I'm hoping it'll be a reasonably entertaining sandbox game with at least 30 minutes of gameplay.

The game will have a somewhat-realistic element simulation behind the scenes.

Liquids will freeze solid if they get too cold, or boil to gas if they get too hot; materials will transfer heat based on their thermal conductivity; and liquids will float above denser liquids.

Most recently, I've identified the 43 elements and materials that I want in the game. These include standard materials, like water, ice, steam and oxygen – but also some more esoteric ones, like silicon gas and molten gold. The plan is to use these materials in creative gameplay mechanics.

I've been rapidly increasing my skills with art, tilesets, and shaders (GLSL). They're still a black magic and deeply mysterious, but with the help of some new friends, I'm starting to make things that I think look pretty cool.

This included inventing a technique to try and display "velocity" or "momentum" of liquids and gases; if you breach a high-pressure pocket of gas, it'll gush out!

My game engine of choice (libgdx) hits the sweet spot – it's got tons of features out-of-the-box, but is also lightweight enough to be tweaked and customised to the needs of this resource-heavy game. However there's still some stuff I need to build and integrate myself.

User interfaces are one of the first areas I've tackled, because the UI will have such a significant impact over the lifetime of this game, and most game developers find the UI side the most frustrating. As a reformed web developer, I wondered if I could build on HTML/CSS for the UI.

I'm pretty happy with the result; to date I've built a debug console and sandbox tools (which I use to create the demo videos). I also added hotreloading for faster UI prototyping.

Now that I've completed the core game engine and simulation infrastructure, my next focus area will be on gameplay mechanics:

Pawns are your little minions friends you see running around in the demos. They're the ones that you don't control directly, but instruct to do various activities; at the moment, they can dig, build, breathe, and die. They're not very smart or good at expressing their feelings yet.

Events will be a framework for adding random, triggered, tutorial, or gameplay events, and I think I'll be using this for introducing and moving along the story, too. Perhaps uncovering an artifact will start a new challenge.

Items are objects in the game world that will be used in other mechanics. For example, to build a ladder, you have to first dig out the material, which collects in a pile on the ground; a Pawn can then pick up some of the material and use it to build the ladder.

Also, the game hasn't told me its name yet... but as soon as it has, I'll be sharing the news!