One Year of Development

2024-03-15

It's been exactly one year and one day since I seriously started working on eXoSpace Combat Engineer. I've been creating game prototypes since I was a kid, but this time, I'm dedicated to developing a game until release, and it's a LOT of work.

Luckily, I've got almost two decades of experience as a software engineer, so the technical part is manageable. Unfortunately, I have little experience in game art, so as a solo developer, I have to practice and work around my limitations.

So what is eXoSpace Combat Engineer? In one line:

eXoSpace is a unique blend of spaceship construction and top-down bullet hell shooter.

Inspirations

I'm a big fan of Reassembly. It's a game where I can spend hours tinkering with spaceship building. However, one thing I miss in Reassembly is a clear purpose or progression. The open world is beautiful but seems a bit aimless. Another game I love is Nova Drift, a bullet hell shooter with interesting evolution mechanics. eXoSpace is mainly inspired by these two games: the great ship building of Reassembly combined with the intense bullet-hell shooter of Nova Drift.

There are some other inspirations as well, such as FTL which inspired eXoSpace's star map, offering some interesting meta-game choices. Also Counter Attack: Uprising, which is fun to play with up to 4 players on couch co-op, and I plan to support this in eXoSpace as well.

State of the Game

So far, I have laid the groundwork for the game:

• Ship editor with a great amount of flexibility (snapping, rotating, mirroring modules, attaching at different angles)
• Combat system with encounters consisting of multiple stages. Each stage spawns a few (or a lot!) of enemies controlled by different AI scripts
• Star map in which the player can plot the route to the next sector (where a boss blocks the exit)
• Partial modding support: ship modules, encounters, game parameters, and ship AI are all defined using JSON files or LUAU scripts.

Technology

eXoSpace Combat Engineer is being developed for Windows (I'd like to add other platforms later, but no guarantees) using the Rust language, Rapier for physics, and the WGPU library for graphics. This is quite a low-level approach, but it works well for me. Some other things I've tried:

• Java / LibGDX: really easy to work with, lots of functionality, but a bit too slow for my use case (lots of physics in eXoSpace).
• C# / MonoGame: a nice library and great cross-platform support, but I found it hard to work with and there was a strange lack of documentation.
• Rust / Bevy Engine, which is really promising. However, I found Bevy's ECS approach, where everything is an entity, including all parts of the rendering pipeline, hard to work with. I found myself struggling with Bevy and its ECS more and more until I just gave up and worked with the underlying libraries instead, which was surprisingly easy.

Back to development!