Although this is our second game, we are starting from scratch in many ways. Here’s to a fresh start on a new game.
Septaroad Voyager started off as an expansion and total conversion mod for Himeko Sutori. We had fun seeing what we could do with the engine and how we could use our existing code and content in new ways. Soon we realized that we could make Septaroad much, much bigger than the free little expansion we originally envisioned. After a little encouragement from our community, we decided to start making an entirely new game.
As the game started taking shape, we realized that the old game engine needed some work. Himeko Sutori was originally built for DirectX 9 (a standard now 12 years old, and soon to be abandoned, to be accessible only through emulation) in order to run on the oldest of hardware. But some of the fun special effects of Septaroad Voyager, specifically the dynamic lights from the sky and from special abilities, needed DirectX 11. So we started a major overhaul of the code.
Then there was our website, built years ago using the Amazon Linux AMI, also 12 years old, and which had reached end-of-life and wouldn’t be receiving any future updates. Considering that, plus our old Apache web server and PHP versions that would not update, we decided to revamp our web presence too. And now we are starting again on our image, with a new server, new site, new logo, and new socials.
I’ve said before that it feels like game development is less than 50% actually making a game. And the last couple of weeks have definitely confirmed that feeling. But now, with the launch of our latest trailer, the launch of our Steam store, and the launch of our new web site, I think we can finally get back to making the game.
We’re hoping to launch into Early Access in early 2023. I’ll be posting updates here as we go. Maybe our news will be of interest to our fans. Maybe it will be of interest to other techies. Maybe it’ll just be nice to have a journal to record our progress. We’ll see what happens.
