Welcome to our first Research Log!
These type of posts will be published every Friday and show what we managed to do this week.

It’s been an amazing week, as we finally managed to publish our websites. Furthermore, our (2D) Tech Demo is nearly finished, allowing us to test out the gameplay concept while the other systems get reworked to full 3D.

Website

As mentioned in our Hello World Post, we plan to fill up this blog regularly, at least once per week, with so-called Research Logs (you’re currently reading the first one). Furthermore, we’ll also write extra posts describing specific topics off-schedule in the near future.

I’ve been implementing the websites for the last 3 weeks and learned a lot, as I’m actually quite new to this field. However, Web Development is pretty rewarding when you finally see the pages active!
Both websites will be expanded starting with next week to include even more functionality (Newsletter, Google Analytics, …) and also some bugs will be fixed!

Concept Art

We also have some temporary Concept Art live, describing what our game is about. You can see these images on our About section. There’s the plan to closer describe our 6 main points on separate pages in the near future.

Tech Demo

Bio Colonies is currently a 2D game, and we failed to make it look good enough (see Screenshot). We are aware of the “distorted” rendering! Therefore, we’ll rewrite some parts to make it a full 3D-Game in the next weeks. This should remove all rendering problems and also opens up a lot of new possibilities!

For now, the goal is to get a more or less stable Tech Demo ready, presenting the main game elements: You start with your Mother Cell (the large green Cell) in a secluded area of the map, build a small base, harvest resources and use them to build the first Titan, which is used to breach the wall and access the other parts of the map. Eventually, the opponent gets aware of you and starts attacking. In the end, the goal is to destroy the other colony.

The reason for this Tech Demo is to test out whether the concept is actually fun and get some first feedback. If it isn’t, we definitely need to adapt our concept. If it is, we’ll focus on reaching the 3rd dimension next!

Next Steps

In the next week, we’ll focus on finishing the 2D Tech Demo, and also rewrite some buggy parts like the Area System. We hope, that we can get some more screenshots done in the next week!

Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram to get more updates and to leave feedback. Don’t forget that we’re completely new to this scene and Bio Colonies is our first game, so we try to make the best out of this situation!