This week only half the team was around, as Dani and Nacho were on vacation, which slowed down the new project a bit. As we mentioned in the previous update, we were focusing a bit on reviewing the current state of 2dcl.

It is very important for us to create a membership system where our community feels comfortable, which is why we decided to give options other than Patreon. Now you can apply directly from our website, on Patreon and through GitHub Sponsors.

New Game

We are not yet ready to provide much information about this game. Mainly because we want Dani to be in charge of the presentation, and she was on vacation. The idea is to do it in the next update 🤞.

Juli focused on concept art for backgrounds, I hope Dani doesn't get mad but I can't hold back any longer without showing anything, so here is a concept of the aquatic world that drives me crazy, and one of the countryside.

2dcl

Pablo and I spent most of the time working on closing the largest part of 2dcl: the scene preview and the client.

Boundaries

One of the biggest problems with the client was that, despite having defined parcels, we were not limiting the area where one could place objects, so one could "invade" other parcels.

At the same time, we don't want to leave an abrupt cut between parcels.

That's why we defined that:

1. Objects can only be placed within your parcel (obviously).
2. These objects can exceed the limits of your parcel by up to 50% (up to half of the other parcel).
3. Object collisions stop working outside of the scene.

To make this 50% overlap with other parcels not a problem, as you walk through 2dcl, the parcels become transparent.

We'll see if this is the right solution or not when we launch and receive feedback. There are probably ways to abuse the system that we are not aware of at the moment, and we may have to change things later on.

This limitation exists only in the "hubs," that is, the first level of the scene that is drawn when you are walking through 2dcl. The levels you access through the parcel have no limits.

Hot Reload in Preview

Until a while ago, we had hot-reload working in the scene preview: when you modified the scene.json, the preview scene would also change.

Unfortunately, Bevy has some limitations with this that we did not have time to resolve, and it may involve making changes to the engine, so it will probably take time to resolve correctly. We had to remove this functionality for now, but we made it so that pressing a key recompiles and reloads everything.

We believe this is the best we can do with the time we have, and we will report these problems in Bevy. If we manage to resolve them, we will implement hot reload in 2dcl.

Other stuff

In addition to the above, we also:

• Updated the engine to Bevy 0.10 and removed unnecessary dependencies.
• Added a command to be able to jump to any 2dcl coordinate.
• Fixed some bugs in scenes that loaded multiple times and scenes that were mistakenly downloaded.
• We have a first version of the documentation on how to create scenes.

Call for testers

We are now at a point where we can gradually bring people in to test the system.

We will prioritize people with LAND because we mainly need to test scene deployment.

If you have LAND and want to upload a scene to 2dcl, please contact me on Discord (Fran Tufro#2202) 😊.

Objectives

As is now customary (after two consecutive posts of doing it 🤣), a summary of our objectives and where we're heading in the next 2 weeks (I've removed what we've already crossed off the list in the last update):

• We're going to publish 2dcl. We are ready to start testing 2dcl with people outside the team. This week we will be contacting people who have already volunteered to test both the client and deployment. The idea is that if there aren't many bugs, we'll make the first release in the next 2 weeks.
• We're going to announce a new game that aligns with our current team. As mentioned above, if all goes well, we will announce the game within the next 2 weeks.
• We're going to announce an open-source project that we've been working on and that will be part of our next game. The truth is, we haven't been able to put enough time into this to make it worthy of being launched. It is possible that we may not be able to announce it within this cycle.
• We're going to start streaming once a week parts of our games' development and testing beautiful things that other people do. This has a problem: the idea is that most of the streams will be done by me (Fran), but I'm about to move to Halifax, Nova Scotia (literally about to: mid-April). Therefore, it doesn't make sense for me to set up what I need to stream here in Martinez for two weeks. So I guess I'm officially kicking this to the next cycle. What I might do is a 2dcl launch stream if we manage to release it before I leave (which is the plan), but it would be more casual.