Good day, fellow Meeps, I considered carefully whether I should mention this here, and finally decided I should. I recently took a 4-week "working holiday" with my wife and kids - we camped in tents for 3 nights driving down to stay with good friends for a couple of weeks before heading back. Towards the end of the trip my mother unexpectedly passed away... So, I've had a couple of weeks largely away from work/developing. My mom was my biggest fan and she had always been extremely excited that I'd grabbed the opportunity to do something I loved - creating World Turtles. If my kids one day thinks half as highly of me as my mom did, I will deem my life successful... I have now started developing in all earnest again and am still loving it! I have a long list of things to tie down before the huge UI (and more) update, which we are planning for early-to-mid November. The biggest updates since the last post here are:

Objectives and Messages

Objectives (with dynamic text updating with the game state) are now displayed with messages, and the player can choose to hide/display either/both categories. Clicking on an objective/message also takes you to relevant location or opens up the relevant UI. You can also minimize the messages, which displays only the icons, while restoring the one you hover over.

New Functionality / Gameplay

The most important new functionality centers around Space and the Turtle. Feed Bales are now available from the start of the game. These can be delivered to the Turtle via Helicopter, and you can steer the Turtle around in space (with some new elements, detailed below) from the start.
The Space Minimap has been greatly enhanced! It shows you the range and sensitivity it's able to display, and how to increase that (using Lookout Towers). It also supplies a Climate forecast (the span of the forecast increases as your visibility increases), which will also be used to indicate suitability of crops for the immediate future. On the right you will find information on Feed Bales and Catapults, with progress indicators and tooltips, while the steering happens in the center of the space map. Finally, you will also notice some new "icons" on the space map indicating naturally occurring food and crystals in space. These will be the targets you aim for while steering the Turtle.
Implementing the functionality for allowing a "climate map", a static overlay (for aiming) centered on the Turtle and a dynamic overlay (for special regions) moving with space, while also allowing the player to interact with all of these and the game to know when the Turtle finds itself in which conditions, was quite technical, but it all seems to be working very well now.

Short Cutscenes

Certain achievements now have short cutscenes (skippable) as a reward. For example, the first time you feed the Turtle with a feed bale and helicopter, or the first time a fault erupts, a cinematic camera will follow the action. The game also starts with a quick zoom-in-from-high up (and runs in reverse when you exit), and the title screen has an interesting zoom-in from time to time. Let me jump right back into working on the UI - I can't wait for the next update to go live! De Chelonian Mobile Gideon

[ 2023-10-14 08:02:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Please … help us save our Turtle … it means the World to us!

Gather Some Meeps and Develop a Realm

Is there anything more exhilarating than your first move on a fresh map? A small band of Meeps have gathered together with enough supplies to construct a basic resource gathering outpost. Expand their skills, improve their efficiency and guide them towards guilds, societies and more advanced structures. They, and their children, are going to need these to have a fighting chance of saving their Turtle.

Explore, Examine and Cooperate

Find and cooperate with other bands of Meeps scattered on the map. Work with the environment to improve negative situations and affect progress without destruction. Learn about your world and push back the boundaries of physics in order to advance.

Save Your Turtle, Save Your World

Space can be a harsh and unforgiving place, especially to an enormous Turtle. Like the Meeps, their World Turtle also needs your guidance to stay safe and nurtured. And while you’re at it, maybe you can save some others as well…

Background and Vision

I am a solo Indie developer. I joined the Game Dev party quite late in life, and got my first glimpse of Unity almost exactly 2 years before making the first demo of World Turtles, my very first game, available. I'm amazed at the progress I’d been able to make during these two years and owe a great deal of gratitude to various tutorial channels, plug-ins and artists whom I leaned on during the development. None more than Catlike Coding, whose brilliant Hex Map tutorial series kickstarted this entire endeavour.

I have spent a lot of time polishing the task queueing and progressive construction systems, utilising different threads, UI and more and I feel the basic foundation and technical mechanics of the game is ripe for branching off into various promising directions. The free demo is a small vertical slice designed to exhibit the commitment I have to developing a good-quality game and hopefully pique some interest.

I have a good idea of the general direction I want World Turtles to head in, but there’s a myriad of possibilities available for the execution. For now, I’m focusing on a single-player sandbox-type environment. This will hopefully be followed by a small campaign and a map editor. Having some sort of multiplayer capability would also be wonderful, but there’s a lot to be done before then.

I would love developing World Turtles further alongside a group of enthusiastic real-world Meeps. Please, join me and be a part of the journey!