Development Update – Take One

As promised, here is my first development update on Crea. We’ve made tremendous progress over the past month but to keep things short I’ll just cover what I worked on this last week. The majority of my time was spent working on water simulation. At first I was not sure what the best approach was, but after some research I discovered the joys of cellular automata. For research I found these articles to be quite useful: Gamasutra article, Compressing Space and Time and Cellular Automata for Physical Modelling.

Simulating fluids with cellular automata is reasonably cheap, which is needed with worlds as large as the ones in Crea. A bonus to implementing a cellular automata system is that it can be used to simulate other things – fire! I am rather pleased with what I have written thus far and would eventually like to write a more technical blog post about it, but that will have to wait. It is time to break up my wall of text posts with some actual content. So without further ado, here is the first look at the game and its water simulation.

In other news, while I was watching last week’s Indie Chatter, he mentioned a website that he uses for project management, Pivotal Tracker. I looked into this and it has some cool features such as automatically calculating what tasks you will be able to complete over the next iteration (typically a week). The thing that really stuck out to me is that projects can be public, which means that anyone can see what is currently being developed along with when releases are set and basically everything else.

Last week I said I want to try to be as transparent as possible, well here is the Crea Pivotal Tracker. It is a little bare at the moment because I just started it up on Friday, but I will be doing my best to keep it updated and filled with all of the stuff I am working on. Perhaps I will even be able to convince Aaron and Kelley to join in on it.