The friends I used to play with online became parents, and finding a free time slot for us all became tricky. So some game you can play asynchronously was needed – and I had an idea for that in my head for the longest time: a space RTS with light speed constraints: you see your opponent’s actions only after N turns, because they are N light … turns away. This leads to an interesting design, where the game is both real time but also you don’t have to play at the same time.
To get it into little breaks within a day, I target the browser. So the game is in Zig compiled to wasm. Right now it’s still a lot of trying out different game mechanics, balancing, test plays and debugging. The bugs, oof. It’s mostly time logic bugs, with rewinding the simulation when getting actions from the opponent from a previous turn, and then going back to the present. And ofc I suffer strongly from NIH and made very brittle UI system within Zig instead of using HTML.
But so far worth it; the games that didn’t crash were really fun. (: The prototype looks like this right now:
