Exipelago [Early Access]

Showcase
1

The game has now reached Early Access, but for the sake of completeness, I’ll leave and reuse the original ShowCase Thread when the game was in WIP state :slight_smile:

Some of you may know me from a series about my own implementation of a voxel engine with some distinct features like terrain slicing and such.

So after a lot of time tinkering with the engine itself and working on to make an actual game out of it, I am now here to announce Exipelago!

exifull6_1024
exifull6_10241024×576 224 KB

Current State of the game: Pre-Alpha (no, in the meanwhile it’s Early Access)

So basically, Exipelago is going to be a village simulation placed on a voxel island, where you control a tribe of people building their own thriving village. There is different block types, different materials, procedural trees & plants (which grow in realtime!), dynamic water, potential day/night cycle, mining ressources, digging caves, gathering food and building stuff.

And I made an ingame editor for almost everything. You can make your own plants, own trees, own textures, own assets. One fundamental of the game is it’s material system, where each buildable asset has some sort of source material (like a table needs plank, which needs logs, which are gathered from trees) - and depending on what sort of material (different trees will yield different looking wood) was used, the item itself will reflect that visually (that’s somehing which made the whole game pretty complex)

I also want to have complex production chains and also plan to have each villager have some sort of their own mind, like they all wanna eat different things for example, so the challenge will rise with bigger villages to just keep everyone happy.

While still in heavy development, I’ll do regulary “behind-the-scenes” videos about progress and more detailed insight into the current state of the game, right now there is only 1 episode out, but the next one will come soon.

The game is already available for wishlisting on steam (don’t wait. wishlist now)
I’ve made a subreddit
and also a discord server

as I really would love to get players involved into what will ultimately become the game I regulary look into those places and check for feedback and/or questions

5 Likes
2

That looks cool, nice work :slight_smile:

3

In the latest Behind-The-Scenes Video it slowly reassembles itself into a more and more complete game. Production Chains (at the technical level of possiblities) is getting pretty finished. Still hunting and fixing bugs, and finishes rough edges for a first Alpha-Version

1 Like
4

Spending most of the time with bughunting. Especially in relation to the complex logistics and item system. Anyway. Preparing everything for a first Pre-Alpha playtest. In order to do so I heavily playtest my own game to find technical issues.

Playtesting will start with a small selection of people and I plan to increase that number over time in order to get feedback about game mechanics

5

Exipelago is now finally available as Early Access!

2 Likes
6

So since EA release a lot of things were added, fixed … I was so busy with coding I have a hard time keping any devlog posts up to date

new Block Shapes were added, social mechanics were extended, world sizes are now filled with more landmass, UI has drastically improved.

I do still experience some issues with Alt+Tab during Fullscreen, so I recommend everyone to use borderless window instead … I am not really sure where this comes from, but it seems to be related, that windows sends a RESIZE message even when the window is not yet displayed after maximizing (still animating to do so) - not really sure if this is a windows bug or whatever, but what it does it leads to monogame calling some fullscreen functions multiple times in a row and that will crash the game due to DEVICE_NOT_READY error from SharpDX … very weird. Also it only happens in release conditions and not under debugger it also dont happen when there is a delay to it (what the debugger introduces on its own).

Anyway - beside from the technical aspect … I really hope general interest in this game is picking up at some point - there is a lot of rant about lacking content, maybe players have wrong expectations from Early Access … but those who actually play it for what the game currently giving very good opinions about it. So I hope I can come up with some game challenges soon, but it’s all in the works - still would love more feedback.

So far so good, I try to post back more regulary to keep this “devlog” alive and may also try to keep this in here more focused on the actual engine aspect of the game, as it seems more fitting than a general devlog somewhere else

I also updated the steam page with some new screenshots, let me know what u think about it