Hey there, it was a long time isn’t it? Life has it’s ups and downs and I had to take a “bit” longer pause in my GameDev habits. Long story short, I had to have my laptop repaired, had to work (a lot), and bought a house where I’ll have my own office-room which I’m planning. More on that… I guess next year.
Today however let’s dig in on the topic of what is up and down: the Sun. For our next game, we want to create a beautiful landscape where the player can wander around, pick up / create / place/use various items. Also as in every good survival game we want to have an adjustable day-night cycle because when the Sun goes down, the player will face something which can be frightening and deadly.
In every game which utilizes a day-night cycle, there’s a conversion between realtime hours and game hours, like 1 realtime hour equals one in-game day. In our case, I decided that this will be dynamic. Currently, I’m using a maximum of 24 minutes / in-game day. This will create a conversion of 1 realtime minute equals one hour in gameplay. The minimum however for testing purposes is 30 seconds.
The variable day-length can be used for defining different kinds of planets, different difficulties, even to mimic seasons. And also… Imagine that you worked hard on setting up your base for the night. You go to rest, but the daylight never comes. You hear those nasty sounds coming from the darkness, you’d run out of battery. I think we plan some real fun there!
The solution will be changed much in the future I think we need to experiment with all kinds of settings but overall I’m pretty satisfied with the current state. Let’s dig into some other topics, but first: gallery time!
