But I guess this happens when I create games which I want to play myself, and are not targeted at the average mass market. I had added a lot of stuff like tutorials, objectives and more, so I released it as early access on Steam.The reviews were mixed, a lot of people didn't like the unusual way the game is supposed to be played: In an empty, large world, no zombies or other types of monsters, just you against nature.
#Coppercube mist code
So I set down, scrapped all the code and re-implemented the game in C++.Īfter a month of work, the game ran nicely as it was now reimplemented using CopperCube's C++ base. The Problem: I only had the WebGL prototype with the mouse input lag problem, and this wasn't at all good enough to be published on steam. To my surprise, it was upvoted quickly, and allowed to be released on Steam. I renamed "EndTime at Home" to "PostCollapse" because I thought that name described better what the game was supposed to be about, and posted it on Greenlight.
In the meantime, Valve kind of had opened Steam for all developers with a program called Greenlight: Developers could post there ideas for their games, and if enough users voted for the game, it would have a change to be published to Steam. A lot of other developers had the same problem, and there was even a highly upvoted bug report about this in chromium bug database, but the Google Developers had answered that they weren't planning to fix this. A movement of the mouse was sent to the code with a huge lag, making the game to appear very slow. The problem was that the browser had a mouse input lag. The developers behind the JavaScript engine in the browsers really had done an incredible job. But the problem wasn't the 3D rendering speed or the generation of the world, those were now very fast. I refined the game over the next weekends to make it look nicer and contain more gameplay features such as furniture, weapons, animals and such, but I wasn't able to overcome one critical problem: The game still appeared to be very slow. Back then, the Javascript engines in the browsers weren't as fast as today, unfortunately. Not because of rendering the 3D world, but because the on-the-fly procedural generation of the world was too slow. The game had very thick fog, because the browser would slow down too fast, otherwise.
Here is a video of the first prototype running it. It was very ugly and a bit slow, but it worked. I wrote it with a procedural generated world (terrain, houses, trees etc) and self-created textures and self-composed music within about 4 weekends.
The name of the game was planned to be "EndTime at Home". WebGL was new and I expected it to replace the back then still popular Flash game scene (and it turned out I was very, very wrong), so it made completely sense to me. When I started developing PostCollapse 7 years ago, it was supposed to be a WebGL game to be run in your browser from a website. PostCollapse was my first one-man-game published on Steam, made with my also one-man-self-created 3D engine CopperCube.Īlthough intended to be a small side-project game, it sold around 4000 copies as of today, so here is a small Post-Mortem:
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