We’re in the middle of a dev session, updating XenoMiner, and suddenly the Indie Gamer Chick review of XenoMiner comes out.. The cheers of shocked joy and happiness echoed through the room (and video chat session) as she concluded.. “I don’t hate it…” YEAHHHHHHH!
Category Archives: XenoMiner
Breaking: Indie Gamer Chick Reviews XenoMiner, Doesn’t Hate It
Forum is now up! Let’s have in-depth discussion!
We launched a forum on Friday so that people could log bugs and make feature requests for XenoMiner. We got plenty of that, along with an almost immediate explosion of dialogue and conversation about the game.. We couldn’t be happier!
Are you having trouble programming the bot? Do you have a good idea for us? A feature request? Found a bug? Head on over to forums.gristmillstudios.com and let’s discuss!
Xenominer to be included in Indie Games Uprising 3
The games for Indie Games Uprising III have been announced.. We are honored to have Xenominer as part of the promotion this year. We have been working hard on the game since Dream Build Play so we made this video to show off all the new things before the release in September.
Keep checking up here for when we announce the exact release date. Be sure to check out the rest of the games in the uprising here.
VoxMill – Thoughts on the Engine behind Xenominer
Our VoxMill engine has been modified quite a lot from the prototype used for the ZPoc project. Our team decided to step in the ring again for Dream Build Play, and we needed an engine that would work well on the XBox for what we had in mind. Since the XBox has 3 cores, and 2 threads per core, that meant a threaded engine.
In the beginning we tried to find something off the shelf to use. Some of the open source projects were quite promising, but when pushed hard just couldn’t make the cut. When programmers hear “threaded” they generally lift their eye brow as if to say — “Are you sure you want to go there?” You see, there really are dragons there, the multi-headed Tiamat sort of beasts. Not to say there aren’t a lot of capable programmers that can handle it, but many modern engines and software solutions keep “we” the coders at arms length for a reason. It’s terribly easy to make a mess, and many times harder to clean it up. It’s generally just not worth the time or pain….yet we did it anyway…and still have a long way to go.
The nature of Dream Build Play is that you end up with a hard crunch at the end. This was no exception. Coordinating a team that can only work nights is very difficult. Inevitably, a host of features are piled on top of the engine at the last moment. So this time, we invested up front so it would be ready for the final push.
At the prototype level of the game, we were routinely hitting 100+ fps on the XBox. Even now, after the final content and additional features, we’re still hovering around 60.
So, we have the typical blocks (voxels) any builder would have, sunlight propagation and multi-colored light propagation. But there are still a lot of features to add. Normal mapped voxels, liquids, radiation fields, “decals” and semi-complex constructs. All of that, just to get caught up with where we feel we should be. After that, we hope to start adding complex/dynamic systems that interact with the world in an accessible manner. Sounds vague — it still is to me too 🙂
Xenominer has a large story to tell. Only a fraction of the features we have on the board made it through to Dream Build Play. The VoxMill engine will continue to grow through the process, and will likely live on for more titles after this. Many of those will look nothing like Xenominer. It seems to me that the simple voxel has a long future, and when combined with its siblings in the millions, will form some very beautiful constructs!