Bernkastel
Ask me about my fanboy energy!
Glad to see a post from the dev himself. Very excited of what comes from this project.Hi I'm the dev of the tech demo. I've also recently started working with an artist and sound engineer (will show up in future devlogs). I do these devlogs because I value feedback and suggestions and they can help shape the final game. I see some concerns about lack of gameplay, and we're working on fleshing out among other things. Currently the idea is an elemental bending combat (like Avatar) game with local multiplayer/co-op (with cloud streaming you can also do it over the internet).
We might focus on the Chinese classical elements instead of the more well-known system: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal & Water. Wood is kind of hinted at with the voxel displacement video and some of my older fibers demos. Fire, I still have lots of work to do. Earth and Metal in some of the solid destruction demos, and then water in the latest demos.
Some moves you might be able to do: Collect and place blocks/shoot out your material, apply forces to your material (attract, repel, drag, vortex), Other move suggestions welcome.
Perhaps there will also be a non-natural faction that chooses to attack via weapons like swords, spears, arrows. Maybe you won't play as them but there can be some kind of tower defense mechanic. Like Fortnite with the zombies before it became battle royale. I really want the gameplay to take advantage of the fact that the whole world can be taken apart to individual voxels or be manipulated and rearranged. So it might be a waste to play as someone who shoots arrows.
As for the console wars, not interested in fueling that. I started to work on this game more seriously when I saw all the Threadrippers coming out last year and yes it will be able to scale up as well as scale down based on your specs. I think when I said "high-end" it got taken too seriously. When I saw the XSX specs I was like, wow, the specs better than my PC on paper and will probably be super affordable, and it uses DirectX, which my game already uses, so might as well roll that into my list of targets. As a small indie dev, I think it's probably best to focus on a single platform and get it right. Lastly, barrier to entry for PS5 is pretty high. No publicly available Graphics API specs or code and pricy devkits.
The current demos are still DX11 and do not require any advanced features. The GPU usage is ~30% and both CPU and GPU code can be optimized further, so I have quite some room to upscale things. I do have some plans to upscale with DX12U. The DX12U feature I'm most excited about is mesh shaders (of course will also be using other features). With mesh shaders instead of being limited to cubes I can have mesh based blocks with LOD. For example, the bricks demo but it can upscale from the cubes to much more geometrically detailed rocky blocks. Or grass and leaves via geometry as opposed to transparent textures.