Thread by @krajzeg

For today's #screenshotsaturday, I want to take you on a trip through memory lane and show off the procedurally-generated planet closeups in Slipways evolved. 🚀
This is how they look today, but we'll be going as far back as 2017 in the🧵below!
#gamedev #indiedev #indiegame

We're starting in August 2017, when I decided to push #pico8 a bit and make it render a textured planet in 3D.
At the time, I didn't even know if this would work. PICO-8 did not have any texture support back then - I had to do it the hard way, carrying pixels uphill both ways 😤

A few months later, in early 2018, I was working on the #pico8 version of Slipways.
No room for fancy procgen here, so the planets became #pixelart sprites. These humble 9x9 images would define the basic look of the various planet types in every future iteration.

The PICO-8 release was received very well and I soon started working on the PC version.
This first attempt did not pan out, and almost nothing of it remains in the game today - but I still have this clip of an earth-like planet from back then, dated March 2018! 🌏

For this iteration of the game, I stuck close to my pixelart roots. I forced a limited palette despite the move to 3D, going for a slightly cartoonish feel. 🎨
This did give the game a distinctive look, and I think this clip of a mineral is the best it got in that version.

This first attempt got scrapped in August 2018 when my somewhat strained savings ran out, along with most of the energy to continue 😶
I spent a year working a gamedev job that turned out to be even more draining - but it did restore my finances and taught me a lot of new stuff.

I left that job with a firm goal of getting Slipways done and also some newly-found confidence that I can pull off a more "realistic" look if I want to.
It took about two weeks in September 2019 to get from the first sketch on the left to the mostly final version on the right.

As soon as I was done with that first version, it was already time for a rewrite! I originally generated the planets on the CPU, which was horribly slow. 🐌
For speed and flexibility, I moved all this code to the GPU, which let me do fun tricks like this animation. 🌊

The big idea behind these closeups was to make the planets feel alive. The first time I felt I achieved that was when I added ships and their slipgate animations in December 2019.
It's funny how gigantic the ships are in this clip, compared to how they look now 🚢

The planet system got another small rewrite later on, in June 2020 - this time to support animations for the various new techs I kept coming up with, which tended to blow up or transform the planets in some way. 💥
This meant the planet shader needed to get some new abilities 🌟

The last planet type to get its visuals was Lava.
It doesn't look that good in close-ups, which is why this GIF from Jan 2021 sticks to the map view 😅
The crunch was very real then and corners got cut - this planet would rarely be colonized, so close-ups were not a priority. ✂️

And we're back to this clip!
This is Dec 2021, when the last missing feature was added to the planet closeups: the hyperlanes.
They were actually missing for 6 months after release. 😇 I was expecting cries of "unfinished, what is this" but somehow, almost nobody noticed 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for joining me in this nostalgic romp through my Twitter GIF archives! 🥲
If you don't already know, the game has just had it's final update and is currently on a 30% sale across all major (and minor) stores. 💸
Do check it out, and see you around the galaxy 🚀