Introduction
Hello everyone! Been a while! Hope you’ve been well - I had my Appendix removed last week.
What was originally thought to be food poisoning turned out to be a massive medical expense post-insurance. Thankfully, I’m feeling much better now and am happily back to developing. The issue is that it decimated all I’d saved up since the last post, making my budget for releasing games much smaller.
This has caused a change of plans. The original plan was to use that money as the funding to develop the game to release while SHL2 approached retirement and SHL3 neared its death. Well, that’s gone, and so I have to make some tough decisions.
The SHL4 Scope Issue
SHL4 has always been an ambitious game - it had to be. SHL3 was a let-down, and SHL2 is ancient. SHL4 has a massive debt to repay the community, and I intend to pay it with interest. I’ve been working on it for two years, yet the oldest code in the current game was only written in the last few months. I’ve restarted this massive project 4 major times (the original city, the procedural generated planet version, the SHL3.5 remake turned sequel, and the current). It’s not just that the game needs to be innovative and fantastic on release, but it needs to be stable enough to be supported long term. Previous SHL games rarely get updates due to their immense amounts of technical debt, and I didn’t want to put so much work into 4 just for it to have the same fate.
I think I’ve cracked the secret though - modular tools. The current version of SHL4 is the most advanced character movement system, and most advanced character customization backend system - yet it’s less than a quarter the size of any previous version’s equivalent system. That’s because most of the heavy lifting is being done by modular packages I’ve written and free libraries written by other devs. I’m no longer re-inventing the wheel, in fact I’m doing whatever I can to modularize every bit of functionality I can.
What’s cool about modular tools is that they can be reused. Unreal Engine actually started out as just the tools they wrote for a game called Unreal Tournament, but the tools were so flexible they could be used for other games quite easily.
Even though the current SHL4 build is only a few months old, it’s arguably more stable than any previous version. Because of this, my plan was to tackle the most general challenges first such as combat, building up the necessary tools to easily handle super-powered combat. From there I’d tackle the character customization front-end and asset creation. Then finally I’d tie it all together with a new map that uses the same modular functionality to make it more immersive than any SHL prior. The thinking was the combat only version of the game would test in July, with the customization coming August, then the map would release with the entire game in the fall. Even though SHL2 and 3 were almost at the end of their roads, I’d saved up enough money to allow me to focus all my major efforts on SHL4 for the coming months.
Then, a bad bit of luck later, those same savings were gone. I’m left with 2 almost dead games and another game which needs at least another 3-4 months in the oven with no money to pay for fuel. So, what should I do?
SHL4 was faced with two routes - massively scope down to the point of it not being worth releasing, or delay it for later and pursue something smaller now.
The Strategy
Fear not! I may have a workaround.
The cool thing about game dev is that you can swap out manual labor with making cool systems. For example Minecraft didn’t have a massive team of map artists to create each mountain, it had perlin noise. The NPCs in Grant Theft Auto V aren’t paid actors walking throughout the city all day, they lines of code running automated routines and responding to predefined stimuli. Roblox itself shows just how much entertainment can be created from an accessible game engine.
Basically, at the heart of SHL4’s vision are three unique design challenges.
World:
- needs to support a ton of NPCs moving around in a performant manner
- needs to be somewhat modular / procedurally detailed to get immersive quality across a large map.
- needs to contain a ton of city infrastructure / props that can be dynamically changed
Powers:
- needs to allow for power progression
- needs to support a wide-range of abilities
- needs to integrate meaningfully with map and NPCs
Immersion:
- needs to create a consistent aesthetic between characters while also allowing for quick yet deep avatar customization.
- needs to support smaller scale interactions through the majority of the map, such as interacting with NPCs, picking up items, sitting in chairs, etc.
- needs to allow players to run custom servers where they can set the rules and run structured RPs with friends and interested players.
Each of these challenges will take iteration and effort - so what if they were tackled individually, then recombined when all three were conquered? Here’s what I’m proposing:
The Plan
Stage 1: World - A Logistic Infrastructure RTS Game
Stage 2: Combat - An Elemental Combat Game
Stage 3: Immersion - A showcase with many small map interactions
Stage 4: SHL4 - Taking the tools developed from the previous 3 games and building the ultimate game!
A Logistic Infrastructure RTS Game
When I worked on the most recent SHL4 map, it struck me that 90% of my effort was on the boring stuff - the roads, the lamp-posts, the sidewalk decorations, the terrain - etc. The thematically relevant stuff like the Syndicorp HQ, as well as the Hero Tower, took less than a day combined. What if that stuff was just handled?
Last year I began playing a game called Cities Skylines, and that game really nails the feel of an urban environment. It shows that with just road placement and basic zoning you can generate an immersive city with a good deal of character. If Cities Skylines mechanics were available in Roblox Studio, the SHL4 city would have been completed and 10x as good in a single week.
Soooo, what if I did that. I wouldn’t make a city builder game, just the underlying technology. I learned in my recent accelerator project though, that functional code is not the same thing as a fun game mechanic, and with the goal of keeping things modular that’s completely fine. Once this tool is completed I could use it to create a smaller scale game with a time-tested core gameplay loop that I could use as an opportunity to both rebuild my savings as well as flesh out the tool for eventual usage in SHL4.
The game is a mix of Mini-Metro, Cities Skylines, and a perpetual RTS game like Agar.io. Your job is to build roads and railroads between cities, then profit by sending resources along those connections. The roads / railroads all have set operating costs per kilometer, so you have to grow carefully to make sure you don’t go bankrupt. You can also rent out your infrastructure to other players, and they can offer to sell you theirs. They can also rescind that option at any point, so don’t rely too heavily on it. If you go bankrupt, people can buy up your former infrastructure or just let it rot away into nothing. Like Cities Skylines there’s no specific win state, but there is a bankruptcy lose state. Like Mini-Metro you need to be mindful of your route-laying decisions, and like Agar.io there’s a degree of free-for-all competition against other players.
I’m currently thinking of calling it “Infrastruct”, because Construct + Infrastructure. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m actually quite excited for this. Best part is we’re starting in June and releasing in June October 
.
Conclusion
It may feel like SHL4 is taking forever, but it won’t be for nothing. Before SHL2 came out, I spent 2 years trying other games and exploring new directions after SHL. The games I know I can make are already out, everything else is an adventure with potential twists and turns.
I want to thank you all for your patience and support over the years. I want to be the best dev I can be for y’all, respecting you and the wider games you love. I want the day SHL4 comes out to be a happy one, where the Nightcycle community celebrates and says it was worth the wait.
Until that day, I hope you enjoy these smaller games.
Thank you again,
-CJ
TLDR: SHL4s technical challenges are being split into 3 smaller unique games that SHL4 will be built from at the end. Also I no longer have an appendix, thus taking me one step closer to being just like my avatar.