Unsafe: A Quick History Lesson

So a quick history lesson on this "Unsafe" thing. One will note that this project is so old that I didn't even own a Windows PC when I started it -- I was in my Mac phase. It's so old, my devblog was on LiveJournal of all places. (Ask your parents what LiveJournal was.)

Anywho, it started with an attempt to make a simple Wing Commander clone. The "planet" in the environment is just a quick pixel art sprite in the skybox.

At some point, I came up with a clever way of generating 3D planets in a pixel shader, which I may go into detail about at some point, and started spending a lot of time on that. I moved over to Tumblr for my devblog, too.

Eventually I implemented some more cool stuff like clouds complete with shadows, and the ability to define different planet appearances and biomes using a simple altitude/latitude texture.

Then some more cool stuff like fast traveling, UI, planetary rings, atmospheres, and the first in many terrible failed attempts to figure out how to easily create 3D models...

Then a grave mistake that has sunk many space game projects: what if I implemented the ability to go down to the surface?

This led down an endless rabbit hole of implementing ground clutter, 3D clouds, ocean waves, atmospheric blending. (At some point I bailed on the Mac and flipped to Windows.) I'm not sure it was attractive exactly but it was kinda cool in its own way.

Then large amounts of time passed, because I really had no idea where I was going with this and ended up spending most of my time working on other projects besides the two official Mayfly Studio releases, some of which I might share here in the future. I did at one point have a fairly elaborate 3D adventure game in mind, which is where the "Unsafe" moniker came from, and even implemented a walking physics system to support it, but as with all efforts to put walking into space games it was a colossal waste of time that crippled development speed. Years elapsed. At one point I realized that this was hardly a heavyweight engine and experimented with just rendering the "ground" version of the planet at all times, instead of just when actually landed. It's kinda cute; I've always liked little toy planets. But it didn't answer the problem of where this was all going.

More time passed. I released a couple of small games but also spent a fair amount of time away from development completely, also shutting down my Tumblr devblog since as mentioned Tumblr is trash. But more recently I've been getting back into the scene and found myself making surprising amounts of progress. I realized it was nice to have a place to comment on anything I'd managed to implement while modernizing this engine and hopefully scaling it back into something that can become a game, and with a little luck Itch is a less pathological place to do that. And so like I keep saying, we'll see where this goes. Thanks for reading!