Hello yet again and welcome to this weeks Dev Diary!  This weeks topics are;

• What's happening behind the scenes.
• Various ideas that have been popping up.

How Is Your Memory?

As mentioned in last weeks Dev Diary, I have been trying to order an affordable pair of high performance, 16Gb RAM Kit, which is necessary before continuing the video processing with After effects, as 8GB is simply not enough. The second options (F3-2400C11D-16GXM) panned out and was sent to me at last Friday. When the 16Gb memory kit arrives, I can either have a little better performance and much better system responsiveness, or significantly better performance with the same level of responsiveness, that I currently get with 8GB of RAM, while video processing is running background. I just hope that there really is as significant difference in system responsiveness as I have come to understand from various sources that discus the topic of "system build recommendations for video editing", as it would allow me to be much more productive to have my main computer usable while the video rendering is running.

With a little bit of tweaking my computers BIOS settings, I managed to get a tad more performance out of my current RAM, which should work more or less on the same values with the 16Gb Kit once it arrives. This is due to the memory Kits being of the same series; RipjawsX, but they still might have different memory modules, which is why it is not a guarantee that the current settings will work on the new RAM Kit. Usually though, especially on older systems, the overclockability of RAM kits are much weaker on 4 stick kits than 2 stick kits, which might make up for the difference in memory modules. Only one way to find out, and that is to try it out. More on that when I actually receive the Kit.

More Ideas On Top Of Ideas

One of the ideas I had, was that there is a second option for a first 2D game that I could make (as a practice run before the RTS game), which could be even simpler than an RTS - a side-scrolling crafting game, Similar to "Craft the World".

For the past week I have been gathering ideas for all the possible games that I could make. Many of them are overlapping and could be used in conjunction with each other, but one thing is clear - I really do like RPG elements, maybe too much for my own good, as a comprehensive RPG game is not one of the easiest to pull of as a first project.

here is a quick mockup that I did while trying out how to differentiate my side-scrolling crafting game from the "Craft The World";

The idea was to try out, what if I made the game with blended textures, rather than tiles? This mockup does not represent how it could look, when done properly, but gives a little hint, if it could work. Using tiles could be seen too similar to several other games that does it that way and in "Craft The World" the tiles look really good (pleasant to the eye) in my opinion.

If I did try to make the game with blending textures rather than blending separate tiles, the playability might suffer, as when you have a greater degree of freedom to move, besides left and right, up and down, while digging, there is a risk that you might leave hanging little bits of sand or stone, like could happen in Worms games. To avoid this, there should be also gravity and possible particle physics for the materials (sand, stone, metals), which would end up making the game more complex than a RTS game.

Another idea was to make a game that was similar to "Wings", a 1996 DOS Cave-Shooter video game (by Miika Virpioja), as a practice run before the RTS game. It would be rather simple to make, as you only need background and foreground layers, ship and weapon ammo and effects graphics and the rest is placing and programming.

It's good to keep options open, even though I was too quick to say what my first game should have been. Realistically speaking, starting from a simpler game should be more sound and practical choice, which would also enable me to polish my plans further for the RTS-Citybuilder, all the while being able to have something released while doing so - as I would prefer that the RTS title turns out as good as possible.

Conclusion

I will be away for couple of weeks as it's midsummer festival or "Juhannus" in Finland and other Nordic countries on this weeks weekend. I'll be spending time at the country side with plenty of grilled food and cold drinks and might miss one weeks Dev Diary because of this. I will make a small update that will be auto-released on next weeks Monday in order to not break the continuation of these releases. and let you know some more game mechanic ideas I have come up with.

This is it for this weeks Dev Diary, and I'll see you on the next one

And as always, you can check out every possible mid week announcements about the project on these official channels;

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