Updates
December 2024 Update
December 1, 2024 at 2:28 pm
Still quite on the Synekism front, but weekends are slowly opening up. Getting a lot of misc stuff (like doing company taxes, yes, even with no income) down before the holidays to have some focus time on the game.
November 2024 Update
November 1, 2024 at 9:00 am
Still another quiet month. At least, I got that 1.0 game well out of my system now. A different factory game had a major update but I won't let that one take my weekends. I should start having more coding time as we get closer to the holidays.
October 2024 Update
October 1, 2024 at 8:32 am
Not a lot to update this month. Been distracted by day job and a certain 1.0 factory game release. I'm only human. Should be out of my system before the next update.
September 2024 Update
September 1, 2024 at 7:36 am
Here we are again, the 14th year of this journal (and game project). Still going. Progress had been made. Hope continues. Could be faster.
August 2024 Update
August 1, 2024 at 9:19 am
Did I say "back to routine"? That's what I get for trying to predict the future. Had a minor security incident at home which triggered a bunch of research and implementation work on the subject of security. It's calming down again but I won't predict the future this month, though I do hope to return to code sooner than later.
July 2024 Update
July 1, 2024 at 11:32 am
It's been a slower month than I would have liked, despite having some vacation too. Life got in the way and Played some games (made by other, more talented, more focused, peeps). Going back to routine next week.
June 2024 Update
June 1, 2024 at 10:02 am
Progress is good. My engine supports sound for the first time ever. Gameplay features were added. And I finished a long overdue update of my compilers and other dependencies. Most important, so far, there was progress every week this last month.
May 2024 Update
May 1, 2024 at 12:03 pm
As I mentioned in my last update, I spent the last 4 weeks working full time on this project. It was great! I didn't get all the things I wanted, but definitely made a lot of progress. This might finally be the kick I needed to have an actual public release date in mind. I'll have more details in a month or two.
To be clear, this won't be Synekism. It's a far less ambitious game idea but it's still all built on top of the same tech that I want Synekism to use. The goal is just to gain some experience shipping a real game, plus confidence in my questionable tech choices. I've spent far FAR too long in the shadows.
More to come.
April 2024 Update
April 1, 2024 at 8:34 am
It's finally happening! I'm coding again! And no, this is not an April Fool's Day joke.
Around the same time last year I took 2 weeks of vacation to isolate myself and work full-time on the engine and game. It was a very productive 2 weeks. After that run, there were some major life events that took most of my limited free time away so the work almost halted. Any remaining time went towards upgrading my cross-platform setup, which is now more or less complete and up and running.
Now, actually 3 days ago, I started another such isolation work-ation, except this time, it's going to be for 4 weeks.
The main goal for April will be to produce a playable demo of a yet even simpler game. Again, the engine is still the custom engine that was made for Synekism, but with a simpler game I can get to something shippable sooner and stress test the engine sooner. I'm also just tired of invisible low level engine work for decades now. I want to play something.
Given the progress over the last 3 days, I should have a lot to share in the May update. That's assuming I don't go crazy down here.
March 2024 Update
March 1, 2024 at 9:33 am
Well, took more than a week or 2 to get over my day job's commitment. Still recovering. Slowly started to resume working on my cross-platform build "farm" (hardware) that started just before the 2023 holidays. Almost there. Then I can finally come back to actual coding.
About
Synekism is an attempt at a modern city simulator rooted in procedurally generated content. The project was started in 2010 to address some frustrations with the city simulation video game genre. It is actively developed on and currently in a purely alpha-experimental stage. Updates on the project are posted on the first of every month. Note that work on this project is more or less done by one person so progress will be slow, but steady.
The game is a sandbox where control is not explicit but indirect. The player can designate residential, commercial, industrial, and government zones and watch them grow, instead of explicitly plopping each building manually. The game tends to lean towards macro-management.
The key features of Synekism include grid less 3D environments and procedurally generated buildings. The lack of a grid results in total freedom when zoning and building roads allowing for more realistic looking cities. Procedurally generated buildings allows for more visual variability. Instead of querying a finite list of static models, a building is generated uniquely upon creation using local as well as city-wide conditions.
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