Fides Star Studios

Notes From the Studio

Here's how things are coming along, plus whatever else is on our minds.

  1. Wax on, Wax off

    Well, it had to be done.. Completely rebuild achievements, scoring, high scores, the save system, game time, pausing, and about 7 billion iterations on the game balance tweaks. I always hate this part of dev... The first 95% of the work is the easiest. Once you have all the systems in place, it takes a nearly infinite amount of time trying to tune and tweak things to get it ready to ship. Eventually you can't tell if your critiques are good or you are just being overly critical. Now, a short season is about an hour if you let it play out, but I can get through one in about 15 minutes. The longer sessions are a lot more fun now. Maybe it's just from all the testing I did in the first 30 days, but the weather variety month to month really adds a lot changes. I think I'll dub month 2 as the 'hurricane cannon'. If you get lucky on the forecast for some nice warm waters, the slower wind allows them to build enough that it almost seems like Africa is just yeeting Cat 5 storms at the gulf. I love it!

  2. Shop added for tool upgrades

    This update is a bit more focused on polishing off the gameplay now. The new map looks great, the new storms look great. Despite using an AI to generate the new map as a starting point, I still ended up spending half a day hand tweaking the thing, but it was so worth it. The game is looking great now. With those out of the way, it was time to think about high scores, finishing up achievements, tool upgrades to reward players for actually following through on the goals system and storm multipliers, etc. With the new map, it also made sense to increase the resolution so there's now a Classic and a Detailed graphics mode. I still want this to be reminescent of 1980s games, but the new Detailed mode is super polished without losing that pixel aesthetic I wanted.

  3. Let there be life

    The basin was too quiet so I've added boats and planes. I put in some little easter egg there too, so they aren't completely pointless. Oh, and of course, storm hunters in their planes HAVE to be part of the game, so that exists too. With the particle system finally running performantly and on the GPU instead of CPU, I can spare the extra counts, so planes get contrails as well. This also meant I can use other effects in GPU to modify the texels, so now we have sunlight glinting across the water, wave/chop effects, a nifty pseudo-caustic effect, though that just highlighted the bad map generator that I need to replace. looks like I'll be spending Saturday working on that now. I'm doing a little experimentation with the new tiles affecting tiles system.. I think it would be pretty fun to store these direct tile interactions and reload them across game sessions. This way, if a player always throws hurricanes down the easy route (following the coriolis effect, basically), they would get penalized with low storm growth. Think of it like rewarding players who actually take storms through new paths, perhaps chasing after the randomized goal city. This required a little thinking though, so for now I'm just putting in water depth to calculate heat density for the surface temperature change as a storm pulls from it. The sun moves, and the air warms and cools with it. Small things. It may be pixelized and arcade-like in how the gameplay comes across, but I want systems depth in here for the next project. This one is just some accidental fun we happened in to.

  4. The town with the red ring

    Smaller update today, but I've added in the goals system and updated the scoring models. Now hurricanes score by a damage multiplier factoring in a bunch of different things about the storm, duration of landfall, other storms (since a crowded season may impact emergency response efforts)... The goal city was added in just for a little spice and variety in gameplay. As much fun as it is to target Tampa all the time, there are some nice people there and it feels like they need a break. Starting to get the values dialed in for wind, humidity and pressure zones affecting it, the interactive effect of a tool cascading out across multiple tiles for wind and weather... Lots of interaction here and I want to be really mindful on the calculations needed to do this well. Planning to try out a system which lets every tile do its own thing based upon the base data, the model, and the randomization, and then take a smaller influence from surrounding tiles.

  5. Night comes on from the east

    The dark doesn't fall all at once any more. It comes from the east, the way it ought to, and the lamps come on about an hour before the sun is gone in that town. We'd already set the city generator in place with weighting by population size. Now we needed to make them feel more real, so the city glow was added while taking a break from the particle system. Just to give it a little spice, the lights flicker when the city is being hit by a hurricane. We want to keep it lighthearted, but a little bit of drama never hurt anyone. Also added in the GFS scaffolding, but not a real GFS prediction. Since the game only has a 50/50 simulation accuracy on weather to keep it more approachable to game players who aren't weather nerds like me, had to improvise with good 'ol RNG. When you click a storm the game will draw out the spaghetti model lines but its based upon some randomized predictions of the weather. On the bright side, I thought it would be fun to lock in those weather predictions to ensure at least one of the lines became reality. ;-) Last big change today was rolling in the rest of the weather model for the season and compressing it into 4 game-time months of play. Now you can play early, mid, or late season, or across all of them, and the weather system tracks out pretty simular to a typical year. Obviously this being an el nino year it won't match (seriously, no hurricanes?) but the pattern should hold a lot of the time. Oh, and now the achievement system is enabled we went ahead and wrote out a bunch of our favorite historic storms as achievements, plus some encouraging things to lead towards regular gameplay.

  6. We decided to raise them

    The day before was a test on the kitchen table once we had built the initial pixel engine we've been working on for awhile now. This is the day it became a game. Scrolling through social media and reading about Champi, we saw a meme post about that hurricane a few years back that went across Florida and decided to turn around and come back for a second pass. From that moment and the following conversation, this game was born. The idea is simple: You don't run from the hurricane. You raise her. Warm water, wet air, and the pressure set on either side of the road you want. She'll follow a wet patch and shy off a dry one, and she will not give up the trade wind just because you asked. A strong one leaves the sea cold behind her, and the next storm hates that road. You and the Atlantic basin become one. You don't control them but instead have gentle influence over the weather to see what happens next.