Updates
July 2024 Update
July 1, 2024 at 11:32 am
It's been a slower month than I would have liked, despite having some vacation too. Life got in the way and Played some games (made by other, more talented, more focused, peeps). Going back to routine next week.
June 2024 Update
June 1, 2024 at 10:02 am
Progress is good. My engine supports sound for the first time ever. Gameplay features were added. And I finished a long overdue update of my compilers and other dependencies. Most important, so far, there was progress every week this last month.
May 2024 Update
May 1, 2024 at 12:03 pm
As I mentioned in my last update, I spent the last 4 weeks working full time on this project. It was great! I didn't get all the things I wanted, but definitely made a lot of progress. This might finally be the kick I needed to have an actual public release date in mind. I'll have more details in a month or two.
To be clear, this won't be Synekism. It's a far less ambitious game idea but it's still all built on top of the same tech that I want Synekism to use. The goal is just to gain some experience shipping a real game, plus confidence in my questionable tech choices. I've spent far FAR too long in the shadows.
More to come.
April 2024 Update
April 1, 2024 at 8:34 am
It's finally happening! I'm coding again! And no, this is not an April Fool's Day joke.
Around the same time last year I took 2 weeks of vacation to isolate myself and work full-time on the engine and game. It was a very productive 2 weeks. After that run, there were some major life events that took most of my limited free time away so the work almost halted. Any remaining time went towards upgrading my cross-platform setup, which is now more or less complete and up and running.
Now, actually 3 days ago, I started another such isolation work-ation, except this time, it's going to be for 4 weeks.
The main goal for April will be to produce a playable demo of a yet even simpler game. Again, the engine is still the custom engine that was made for Synekism, but with a simpler game I can get to something shippable sooner and stress test the engine sooner. I'm also just tired of invisible low level engine work for decades now. I want to play something.
Given the progress over the last 3 days, I should have a lot to share in the May update. That's assuming I don't go crazy down here.
March 2024 Update
March 1, 2024 at 9:33 am
Well, took more than a week or 2 to get over my day job's commitment. Still recovering. Slowly started to resume working on my cross-platform build "farm" (hardware) that started just before the 2023 holidays. Almost there. Then I can finally come back to actual coding.
February 2024 Update
February 1, 2024 at 9:11 am
Gonna be a quite update again. I had a brief spike at the beginning to set up all my new hardware for cross-platform development, but then my day job dumped a giant demo to do last minute and took away the rest of my free time. This fun should be over in a week or so and then I'll be back.
January 2024 Update
January 1, 2024 at 1:02 pm
I've started the experiments and setup of that new hardware I mentioned in my last update. Looking promising so far.
It's silly at this stage, but I always made sure to test the engine on all 3 desktop platforms: windows, linux, and mac. And while I have a descent windows box, the linux and mac builds were tested on whatever scrap hardware I had lying around. Now I have proper hardware for both linux and mac builds, including ARM64 variants for all 3.
But yes, I've also been distracted by my new toys and indulged a bit more into the world of virtualization and emulation than I really had to. Almost done with that.
Happy new year!
December 2023 Update
December 1, 2023 at 7:15 am
There hasn't been much movement on the code front, apart for some cleanup, but instead I've been upgrading my hardware (it is xmas time soon, after all) for a bit more velocity once I do start serious coding. With the holidays coming up, I see some chunks of solid coding soon.
November 2023 Update
November 1, 2023 at 8:44 am
Distractions are winding down and I already started warming back up to the code base. Will take a bit more to start moving again but getting there.
October 2023 Update
October 1, 2023 at 8:11 am
Not a lot to update this month. Traveling far these weeks and didn't have too much time to work. Can barely provide this update. Should be back well before the next update.
About
Synekism is an attempt at a modern city simulator rooted in procedurally generated content. The project was started in 2010 to address some frustrations with the city simulation video game genre. It is actively developed on and currently in a purely alpha-experimental stage. Updates on the project are posted on the first of every month. Note that work on this project is more or less done by one person so progress will be slow, but steady.
The game is a sandbox where control is not explicit but indirect. The player can designate residential, commercial, industrial, and government zones and watch them grow, instead of explicitly plopping each building manually. The game tends to lean towards macro-management.
The key features of Synekism include grid less 3D environments and procedurally generated buildings. The lack of a grid results in total freedom when zoning and building roads allowing for more realistic looking cities. Procedurally generated buildings allows for more visual variability. Instead of querying a finite list of static models, a building is generated uniquely upon creation using local as well as city-wide conditions.
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