Here’s the thing: I got a bit derailed and I admit that. But it was for professional reasons and, well, a guy’s gotta earn a few bucks before he can retreat once again to the basement to work on his hobby video game project, right?

Besides the excuse-making, I have been having a re-think about my approach. I built the game in its current state as a simple 2D flat projection world, which was fine… until it wasn’t.

I ran into a couple of obstacles which I’d love to blame on technical things but in reality are mostly linked to aesthetics and the vibe of all my art assets. That’s pretty much to say, it’s not the game: it’s me, and I can’t quite get it to look and feel how I imagine it should inside my head. There is a technical piece of it which involves brute forcing the 2D engine into doing what I want it to do, but at the end of the day it really dissolves into a mist of diminishing returns on the work I can put in.

So, I got to thinking that rather than take this thing another ten clicks down the road and smash it into that inevitable wall, maybe I should take a look at a different approach altogether: 3D.

And no, that doesn’t mean changing everything about the engine itself or the style of game, but rather doing a rethink of what the game could and would look like if I thought of it as a top-down view of a 3D scene rather than a bunch of 2D layers.

Big parts of it would need to be rewritten of course, but the end result could have huge net benefits for the final game.

What does this mean?

Well, a couple things.

First, I have been poking at the code for the last month or so and trying to understand what works and what doesn’t. Does this mean a full rewrite while salvaging from the original code? Or does it mean forking what I have and trying to fit 3D bits into the 2D world until a critical mass is reached and I push forward. I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

Second, I need to make some 3D assets and at the same time get my head around 3D modelling in Bevy and Rust. I started by making a little modelling tool, basically a bare-bones Blender built specifically for making blocky 3D models and exporting them in a friendly format.

Third, I need to make a really great playlist and put my head back into the game.