Hey there! This week we continued working on the UI, as usual. It’s a slow process, so we sadly can’t show anything new this week.

However, we also made some improvements to our map and started to work out a new art style for the game.

Hexagonal Map

Until now our map was a… well, it’s complicated. Hexagonal grids are a very special kind of grids. If you took a look at our last screenshots, you may have noticed that our map, while having hexagonal tiles, is actually rectangular.

However, due to how coordinates work on a hexagonal grid, it was actually a parallelogram in terms of hexagonal coordinates. Which in turn had to be stored in a rectangular array.

So, after thinking about our world a bit, we ended up with the decision that the map should be hexagonal as well. We think of our world as a Petri Dish, which is usually round. So, we want to approximate that with a hexagon.

This required quite a bit of rework in our internal map storage system. But in the end, we even got an additional performance boost in saving and loading of the map.

Art Style

The game has been changing quite a lot over the past few months and thus, we need a refreshed art style. The one you see on our front page has been deprecated quite a while ago as we moved from peudo-3D to an actual 3D voxel map.

If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you might have already seen some images. Keep in mind that this is still a long way from where we want to go.

We want to induce the feeling of a digital space combined with futuristic organic and electric elements. We also want to stay relatively simple as we’re just a small indie studio, and personally also prefer stylized art over realistic art. This is still far from that vision, but we’re slowly creeping towards it.

Next Steps

Next week we’ll working on the UI and the new art style. Look forwards towards some hopefully pretty pictures!

Until next week!