Coffee Space 
Sorry for the slow updates, I hope to release a series of articles to make up for it.
“Space Game” is the codename for a new project, which as the name describes, is a gamed based in space. The idea is to set a game within a ship on the theme of loneliness & hope (but not boredom).
The game is somewhat inspired by Markus Persson (i.e. Notch of Mojang’s Minecraft) - who begun writing a game called , which had an exceptionally cool premise:
The announced features included a fully working virtual computer, random encounters, an advanced economy system, and also single and multiplayer modes in a consistent universe, or “Multiverse”. The game takes place in the year AD 281,474,976,712,644 (around 281.5 trillion years into the future) after people start waking up from “deep sleep” caused by a bug in deep sleep cells that were released in 1988. 0x is a prefix in many high-level languages used to indicate a hexadecimal literal. 10C in hexadecimal is equivalent to 1612 in decimal, which equals 281,474,976,710,656, the number of years passed in the story since 1988.
Sadly, the game was later cancelled:
The game was indefinitely postponed because Persson found himself burned out and demotivated after so much early effort were spent into planning and designing the game, up until the point that it “sucked out any fun from the project”. Persson then stated he will instead most likely continue to work on smaller projects for the rest of his life, rekindling the reason he loves programming games in the first place. The game was later cancelled.
Possibly one if the coolest features was the DCPU-16, a 16-bit computer with it’s own OP-codes, with multiple people going away and implementing an emulator for the fantasy computer. This would then run the ship and perform various tasks.
It even had cool music!
I promise, that code name will change at some point once the game begins to shape up and something suitable comes to mind.
The features I aim for a far less ambitious, and are the following:
I’m not yet sure how I will distribute this game. It would be nice to be paid for my work, but it would also be nice if the game is out there and people enjoy it. Maybe it is enough to release it for free to get investment/interest for a larger paid game.
As I write, I have commissioned for the creation of the 3D assets to be used within the game, as my ability to make art is terrible. I will not ruin the reveal here, but they are PS1-esque and nostalgic.
For the vocals in the game I want to use AI to generate it, as it will allow me to play with the script more. For other sounds I will either use free sounds or generate my own.
For the 2D overlays I will wing it and take inspiration from elsewhere.
I decided to use the Panda3D engine, not because it is the best, but because I want to spend my time making the game and not fighting the language.
I’ve setup a Docker container, so in theory not much should change about the development environment whilst the game is being built - because a project like this certainly doesn’t need more headaches!
The person I asked to produce the assets provided that in OBJ, this is a super simple format that supports materials and this was paired with an MTL materials file and several image files. For the life of me I couldn’t get the engine to allow me to support the loading of multiple materials. I loaded it into Blender fine, exported to every format it supported, but no dice.
The game does have its own format though called an EGG which is supposed to be faster to load. 16 years ago a Python tool was written to convert it, but this was essentially abandoned and unmaintained in Python2. There is a more modern fork, but this too was abandoned 6 years ago. A few days ago I wrote my own fixes, and finally I was able to convert my OBJ + MTL to EGG files, yay!
That is it for now, stay tuned for further updates. Be warned, this will be a long and slow project due to other commitments.