September 1, 2020 at 11:39 am
It's been 10 years since the first release of Synekism: September 1st, 2010. The original Synekism was made by three of us in one short summer with zero clue on how to build anything. And it worked, somehow. For a short while after, updates were consistent. At some point, I even added multiplayer support (never really released this).
I wish I can say how far Synekism has come since 2010, but I can't really claim that. In fact, the current build of Synekism is a few triangles spinning on a black background. There's no UI, no gameplay, no camera controls, no world. I can say that "life got in the way" but it's not really that. What happened was that I learned a lot about game engines and general coding hygiene. This has made me question earlier decisions and led to what is now the third complete rewrite of my completely custom special-snowflake game engine.
If you look up the Wikipedia page on "Anti Pattern", I still suffer from the top three Organizational anti-patterns: analysis paralysis, bicycle shedding, and bleeding edge(ness?). I have a bunch of high-level industry-wide game engine patterns I learned over the years and I can't help but try and mash them all into my tiny little engine.
With that lovely retrospective out of the way, let's look at the future. I've tried to avoid setting goals publicly since about the first complete rewrite. But today is different. I'm setting myself a hard goal. As mentioned in my last update, I will be focusing on a simpler RTS-style multiplayer game for the next little while. The point being that I get to mature the core engine while working on a real product. So on this game, I'm giving myself until September 1st, 2021 to complete it and publicly release it on Steam.
To be clear, Synekism is still the long term plan. Most of the work on this new project will benefit Synekism as all core engine code will be shared between the two games.
Well, there it is. I haven't decided how much and when I'll share more on this new game but will do so over the next few updates. With this deadline, I hope to (better have) a playable build by the end of 2020.
For the 4 of you still reading these, thank you for sticking around! I'll get there eventually. :)