Development history

Written by Hydrablox

Intro

This is not my full biography but rather a relatively short story about my work as a developer in general, and it will mostly focus on the parts that truly defined the way Space Construction and Astrocraft came to be.

Story

I remember always enjoying building games on Roblox than any other genre because of the potential to create and the uniqueness of builds that didn’t have the repetitiveness of other genres. The game that truly got me into building was B0BBA’s ''Ultimate Build'', it was a popular building game back then where inventive people would build lots of crazy stuff. I specialized myself in building mechs and occasionally sea and space ships.

Someday I finally found out how to create and publish a game using Roblox Studio, discovering free models was amazing, you’d just insert something, and you could play around with it and there were lots of them so it was quite amusing content, until you inserted a lag script that would crash Studio. After inspecting many free models, I got a basic understanding what scripts were and I began coming up with game ideas, there we lots of them but one of them was basically Ultimate Build in a space setting, a baseplate with glass walls that represented a space station, parts and tools to let you build. However, after messing around and trying to find ways to make my game work I decided to look for inspiration on the game page. What I found was MaxR3d’s ''Build your spaceship and explore the universe'' game and enjoyed playing it so much that I had forgotten about my own game, I remember building space fighters very often and evolve their design over time. Each game session ended either with giving my ship to a stranger to enjoy or my ship getting deleted by trolls, there we admins to moderate and punish griefing but they were not always there or competent enough to understand the situation. I contacted head admin alvicate and became an admin myself, not because I wanted to moderate the game in general but rather to protect my own builds, in the beginning at least. With time I also got to know the MaxR3d and together with alvicate we three formed a nice bond, this trust gave me access to the game files and by reading the code I improvement my understanding how lua worked and began making small additions to the game I enjoyed playing.

We liked the concept of our own sci-fi military group on Roblox and felt like we had the skills to make one, the groups we made were not successful in terms of activity, but game development wise the places were built and scripted quite well, this also led me to improve my developing skills. However at some point most of us got less time for Roblox because of responsibilities so we took a break, some left, others hang around a bit but after my break I considered restarting my own space building game with what I’ve learned from MaxR3d’s game but also combine it with a build saving feature, I found Roblox’s Welcome to ROBLOX Building game which utilized data persistence to save blocks and found it’s source files in free models and so I copied some code for my work.

I named my game ''Build and explore the universe'', the saving feature was more or less a success and so was the game overall except for the minor bugs that needed fixing. A certain developer named JaJesttemPolakII aka MeltingBrain reached out to me after discovering my game, with the proposal to improve it. He did not want anything in return because we had the common goal to one amazing game that utilizes features never seen before, his only requirement was me not to betray his trust and run off with his contributions, but I would have never do so considering what potential and knowledge he had. Most of the code I wrote was conceptually right but needed a rework, especially the save system and while he was doing that, I proposed several new features to implement, during that time I learned a lot from reading his code. However there we still conceptual issues remaining that required solving, the most important one was that people still found ways to enter other people’s hangar and mess around with their builds, either with glitches or exploits, the solution we came up with was to create a private hangar place for every player to build and save those builds in a safe manner. This would have been a change too big for B&ETU, the game was also a bit outdated and needed a rework because the save system relied on Roblox’s Data Persistence feature which was notorious for failing to save data at random times.

All these changes and new ideas led to the development of a new game called ''Space Construction'', development went quite well because we had experience from making the previous game, features were added, and the game had a good number of visitors, it even got featured on a The Next Level Roblox show. As time went on small features were added but nothing major and we didn’t have a plan to go beyond that stage because personal matters needed attention, so the game sat there for a year or two and after that I did not feel like updating it anymore, my partner has left the development at that point and I was left with a game that I considered too old for the features I wanted to add like resources, mining and faction warfare.

And so I started thinking about a major rework that eventually changed into a brand new game called Astrocraft, I must have come up with so many ideas about what fundamentally the game should have been and if it was achievable with the available technology it was pretty much an existential game crisis because it took me way too much time to decide on how all the systems should be developed. During this time I entered college so I got even less time to work on the game but continued coming up with new concepts and making the first prototypes, even though I was not even sure if I would actually make Astrocraft into a real game, but I enjoyed making those prototypes and some ended up being implemented into ''Space Construction'', these were things like the new jetpack, the global chat and the new save system for ''Space Construction II aka Cosmechanic'', which was the same game but could be edited by a few developers, I created this separate game to allow the community to update the game on their own because I did not want to. Then one day, Roblox announced that non FilteringEnabled games are going to be unplayable for security reasons, this was bad news for Space Construction because it was not compatible with FilteringEnabled, enabling it would break many scripts and rendered the game unplayable. Even though I stated that I would not care if the game died, I felt like it would be a shame to let the community, the factions and their history disappear. Summer vacation had just begun, so I got lots of time and considering the prototypes I have developed in the past I decided it was time to turn Astrocraft into a real game. First a made the editor place, I used the save system I made for SCII and made some modifications to the famous F3X buildings tools so that they can be used in Astrocraft. While I was doing that I told a few SC players what I was doing so that I would get some feedback from them and I told the rest of the community I was working on some sci-fi battle royale game just to cover up the fact that people could see that I was developing something on a secret game. In slightly less than a month the game was playable but lots of bugs had to be fixed, I announced the game and my plans for it anyways since right after that I started studying for exams again, after that, with time i resolved some issues and added features bit by bit. In the next year that which I had planned to develop and improve got delayed because of more important real life stuff, I expected to have a whole free month that summer like last year but unfortunately I had other work to do and that seriously delayed some progress, nevertheless I continued to update and move on because the community was always there to support me. As i am writing this a new decade is about to begin and I hope to finish Astrocraft and all of it’s most critical features in 2020.