wauzmons

[wauzmons]

Upgrade Upgrade AAAAAHHH

So, Elysian Eclipse has been successfully upgraded to the new render pipeline. But as you may have noticed, I haven't posted any other comparison screenshots last week... Well, turns out the current version of Unity has some graphical bugs...

They all appear to be fixed in the latest version of Unity. I have no idea why a BETA seems to be more stable than an LTS (long term support) version. I guess I'll upgrade Unity itself too...

Looks like V 0.4.1 will just consist of the render pipeline upgrade and the few features that I have shown before (status effects, player species microbes). A bit boring, but hey, at least we have the annoying stuff out of the way. (⇀‸↼‶)

#elysian eclipse

[wauzmons]

Elysian Eclipse V 0.4.1 will use a new render pipeline. Reworking all the shaders and effects is really annoying, but probably worth it.

The bottom is the current version of EE, which is still using Unity's Built-in Render Pipeline (BIRP). The top is the new version, using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

URP is supposedly faster and looks better, but I haven't noticed any performance difference so far. Can you spot any difference, except for the missing materials? I guess it's more vibrant.

I'm expecting BIRP to be deprecated anyway in a few years, so we better do this migration sooner than later. I'll probably have some better comparison screenshots to show later this week.

#elysian eclipse #spore #gamedev #indie games

[wauzmons]

Gonna post this here too. Your hand just looks way too much like a bunny to not do this.

New pfp just dropped!!

#bnnuy

[wauzmons]

I just realized I have more followers here than I had on Twitter, before I deleted my account. Who is the dead platform now? lol

[wauzmons]

Instead of engine development and april fool's we have an ACTUAL update again today. Creatures can now have status effects. This can be everything from speed boosts to broken bones.

As example I've implemented an "Extreme Pressure" status, which slowly drains your resilience stat while you are in the very deep parts of aquatic stage. You can see its icon right above the hotbar.

#elysian eclipse #spore #gamedev #indie games

[wauzmons]

You probably know that we're working on Elysian Eclipse, a spiritual successor to Spore, while also maintaining Delseyria, our custom Minecraft RPG server.

To make it easier to work on both of them at the same time, we decided to rework the gameplay and art style of Elysian Eclipse, so it can also contain all of the content of our Minecraft server. Here is a preview of the new art style:

We hope you like it! We also removed all the editors, so you now have to collect blocks to manually build your creature.

See you in Elysian Craft!

#elysian eclipse #april fools

[wauzmons]

remember dark spore?.So if you make DarkElysianEclipse could be a another darkspore but even better.

Funnily enough the thing I started making in Unreal Engine, before cancelling it to work on Quaxel, was going to be an ARPG.

[wauzmons]

That's easy to answer. Most modern engines are simply made to be used by designers and not just by game programmers.

First Look at Quaxel

It is time to reveal the first images of Quaxel, our own game engine!

The foundation of Quaxel has already been finished. It can render both 2D and 3D graphics and also has a simple UI now, including a cool logo, designed by Yoru.

It will be continuously developed over the course of this year until it is stable enough to make our first small game with it. I'll make sure to keep you updated on the progress. For now I'll shift the focus back towards Elysian Eclipse, until I have more to show. ^^

[wauzmons]

"Can you play Bad Apple in it?"

Kinda. It doesn't support playing videos yet, so I loaded every single frame as its own game object, rendered in its own batch.

Quaxel did not like that.

First Look at Quaxel

It is time to reveal the first images of Quaxel, our own game engine!

The foundation of Quaxel has already been finished. It can render both 2D and 3D graphics and also has a simple UI now, including a cool logo, designed by Yoru.

It will be continuously developed over the course of this year until it is stable enough to make our first small game with it. I'll make sure to keep you updated on the progress. For now I'll shift the focus back towards Elysian Eclipse, until I have more to show. ^^

#touhou #bad apple #meme #gamedev

[wauzmons]

First Look at Quaxel

It is time to reveal the first images of Quaxel, our own game engine!

The foundation of Quaxel has already been finished. It can render both 2D and 3D graphics and also has a simple UI now, including a cool logo, designed by Yoru.

It will be continuously developed over the course of this year until it is stable enough to make our first small game with it. I'll make sure to keep you updated on the progress. For now I'll shift the focus back towards Elysian Eclipse, until I have more to show. ^^

#quaxel #elysian eclipse

[wauzmons]

I'd recommend you to stick with Unity for your current project and only try looking at other engines when starting a new one. I also had a not so great time with Godot, because of missing features.

After all the drama that happened around the licensing and we got the better terms, they also added to their terms of service, that you can keep the old terms, if you stay on that version.

So if you keep using Unity 2022 or less, you can keep the old licensing model, so exactly how it was before, just without the Plus plan (even if the fees are now at $1m, so it doesn't matter anyway).

And when you use Unity 6 (It's currently called 2023 Beta in Unity Hub) the new terms apply, which also aren't that bad anymore.

So basically they can't mess with your licensing anymore (at least according to what they wrote in their own ToS. No idea if this wouuld hold up legally). They can of course do other dumb stuff, like let's say deprecate a feature you are using, without providing a replacement. But that also doesn't really matter when you stick to a version.

So basically: The Situation right now is okay, but would have been horrible, if they succeeded with what they WANTED to do, but didn't because of the massive backlash. There are a lot of YouTube videos, detailing what they were going to do, but a lot of them are filled with misinformation, simply because the announcement of the runtime fee was worded very vaguely and they edited the FAQ multiple times.

They basically lost all trust I (and many others) had in them and now we're waiting for when they are trying to do a similar thing again...

Our Own Game Engine!

Remember how Unity almost completely fucked us over last year, just like pretty much every company tries to do nowadays?

I said that my new project is neither using Unity nor Unreal and I deliberately referred to it as "project" and not a game. That's because it isn't a game but our own game engine, written from scratch, without being dependent on any corporate bullshit! 🎉

The Quaxel Engine (Quack + Pixel) is what we, Seven Ducks Studios, will from now on use to create our games. It should become usable by the end of the year and I will post regular updates here!

So, will EE be ported to Quaxel? I'd like to avoid that. Elysian Eclipse is an incredibly complex game, that depends on many very specific features and assets of Unity. Remaking them from scratch would be a massive undertaking. However, if Unity pulls shit like that again, I'd be ready to make this move.

On the other hand, Elysian Mesh, the model generation tool I made for EE, was written to be environment independent and will be integrated into Quaxel, so the engine can use all its features. This way I can also work on Quaxel and EE at the same time! Yay!

Also, Sorry that I didn't post any updates last week. I'm very busy at the moment, as you may have guessed, lol.

[wauzmons]

I have LOTS of reasons to not use Unity. It is horribly mismanaged. They cancelled Gigaya and a shit ton of packages are stuck in alpha / preview state, while others are deprecated. They literally didn't even have a working multiplayer system until recently.

Unity kept buying other companies over the past few years, so guess why they need money. Their plan for the licensing was not what we have now, but something abhorrently worse. They wanted to charge per install, so if a player reinstalled the game, it would get charged again, meaning that they could literally drain your money with a bot. Yes, this is no misinformation, they confirmed in their own FAQ, that this is how it works, before editing it out after the massive backlash. Their excuse was that their "proprietary system" would prevent such abuse. This system of course didn't actually exist.

That's why we had to protest. We only got these new, better terms BECAUSE we fought back. They would have lost all the bigger Studios that use Unity, like miHoYo, if they went through with it.

Your explanation of the new pricing is also completely wrong. You needed an Unity Pro license, if you made over $200k per year (total, not with your game) and you still need it and it's still paid per seat. The new fee is either a fixed percentage or per sale, whatever is cheaper and only past $1m with Pro.

Also they removed the Plus plan, meaning if you want to stick with an older version of Unity, you now would have to pay $2k instead of $400 per seat, if you wanted the Plus features, like being able to remove their ugly splash screen.

I hope this cleared things up!

Our Own Game Engine!

Remember how Unity almost completely fucked us over last year, just like pretty much every company tries to do nowadays?

I said that my new project is neither using Unity nor Unreal and I deliberately referred to it as "project" and not a game. That's because it isn't a game but our own game engine, written from scratch, without being dependent on any corporate bullshit! 🎉

The Quaxel Engine (Quack + Pixel) is what we, Seven Ducks Studios, will from now on use to create our games. It should become usable by the end of the year and I will post regular updates here!

So, will EE be ported to Quaxel? I'd like to avoid that. Elysian Eclipse is an incredibly complex game, that depends on many very specific features and assets of Unity. Remaking them from scratch would be a massive undertaking. However, if Unity pulls shit like that again, I'd be ready to make this move.

On the other hand, Elysian Mesh, the model generation tool I made for EE, was written to be environment independent and will be integrated into Quaxel, so the engine can use all its features. This way I can also work on Quaxel and EE at the same time! Yay!

Also, Sorry that I didn't post any updates last week. I'm very busy at the moment, as you may have guessed, lol.

[wauzmons]

Our Own Game Engine!

Remember how Unity almost completely fucked us over last year, just like pretty much every company tries to do nowadays?

I said that my new project is neither using Unity nor Unreal and I deliberately referred to it as "project" and not a game. That's because it isn't a game but our own game engine, written from scratch, without being dependent on any corporate bullshit! 🎉

The Quaxel Engine (Quack + Pixel) is what we, Seven Ducks Studios, will from now on use to create our games. It should become usable by the end of the year and I will post regular updates here!

So, will EE be ported to Quaxel? I'd like to avoid that. Elysian Eclipse is an incredibly complex game, that depends on many very specific features and assets of Unity. Remaking them from scratch would be a massive undertaking. However, if Unity pulls shit like that again, I'd be ready to make this move.

On the other hand, Elysian Mesh, the model generation tool I made for EE, was written to be environment independent and will be integrated into Quaxel, so the engine can use all its features. This way I can also work on Quaxel and EE at the same time! Yay!

Also, Sorry that I didn't post any updates last week. I'm very busy at the moment, as you may have guessed, lol.

#quaxel #elysian eclipse

[wauzmons]

You can now find your own species in cell stage! Your spikes and poisons can't hurt them, so go give them a hug!

#elysian eclipse #spore #gamedev #indie games

[wauzmons]

Other creatures can now spawn in aquatic stage! The crabfishes are supposed to have color variations, like some of the microbes in cell stage, but that's bugged right now.

This theoretically works with any aquatic creature, including player-made ones. I just chose the crabfish as placeholder.

#elysian eclipse #spore #gamedev #indie games

[wauzmons]

Imagine future AI image generators just outputting simple gradients because they absorbed too much "colour of the sky" from Tumblr.

[wauzmons]

New Project + Fishy Friends

After the Unity drama, I had decided that Elysian Eclipse would be my last project in the Unity game engine. Since then I dedicated about two thirds of my time at Seven Ducks Studios on learning Unreal Engine and starting a new project in it. The other third (as you may have guessed) was spent on Elysian Eclipse.

I'm currently putting a lot of time in this new project and it is going great so far. Although it isn't in Unreal Engine anymore. And no, it also isn't using Godot. I'll probably reveal some screenshots or at least a name in the coming months!

I'm a bit less active on Elysian Eclipse than usual, but V 0.4.1 is already fully planned and in development. At the moment I'm working on adding simple AI creatures to aquatic stage, so our Crabfish finally isn't alone anymore! You can find a list of planned features for the next versions in this post. Things that are already implemented have a checkmark in front of it.

#elysian eclipse