CENTRATION

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12th Nov 2020
Noms

A few days ago as I was checking through Discord messages, I noticed a member of the community brought to our attention that some repositories of links/information were displaying Centration as "dead" or abandoned. A couple of years ago, this wouldn't have concerned me so much, we had our heads down trying to figure out this whole game development business, let people believe what they want to believe.

It's harder than it looks

Today however, that's not so much the case. Game development is difficult to begin with, but throwing in doubts and people thinking the project you're actively working on is dead just saps at your motivation and passion to keep developing. I'm not going to lie to any of you, we've had a super bumpy road. We've been at this for many years and have very little to show for it. We've made mistakes, and more mistakes, but we're now at a point where we want to start taking this seriously again. Not that we weren't taking it seriously to begin with, just that we're kinda like, ramping our seriousness up?

Centration's current status

All that aside, let me be very very clear and concise: Centration is NOT dead. We are actively working on it.

I want to make sure that we're at a certain stage before we start showing stuff off again. We don't want to post pictures of a grey box and say "it's doing this and that" and expect you to believe us, we don't want to show you a bunch of words on a screen and expect you to believe us when we say it's generated in a certain way, and we don't want to show you a video of boxes flying out of a door and expect you to believe that it's airflow simulation. We want to be able to show you something interesting and special; and to be honest there hasn't been that much of that in our development so far.

What's the deal?

There are two important things to note about our development progress over the last few years to better understand why it's been as long as it's been:

  1. Part-time developers None of us do this full time. We are funding Centration out of our own pockets, and working on Centration in our free time. Those of you who work full-time jobs understand how tired you are at the end of the day and how little you want to spend another 3-4 hours working on something else. We put in time when and where we can, but we've always operated on the concept that life comes first. This has contributed to an elongated development cycle.

  2. Mistakes & Lessons Learned After our initial Unity project, and our first few Unreal Engine builds we learned that we can't throw together a barebones framework of a game and expect to be able to build a substantial amount of stable content on it. So all of our efforts since then have been on building and polishing a stable framework to build content onto without us having to go back and dive into core systems after the fact. Things like a functional game loop, dedicated server management, handling of players joining a lobby, selecting character information, joining the game when it starts, new players joining while the game is in progress, players leaving and then returning. Accessibility concerns and keeping multi-platform support in mind. For a small group of people with only a few hours a week to spare, that's a lot of things to polish.

TL;DR

To summarise, we're still working on Centration. We don't really have anything to show off yet; and we probably won't for a while either. All we can do is thank you for your tremendous patience thus far, and ask you to continue to be patient with us as we slowly make our way towards our vision of Centration.