I meant to send this out back in February, but I kept adding stuff. I’ve decided to split it up and will send out a couple smaller updates over a few weeks.

Introducing Solar Slam and Superconducting Games LLC!

Solar Slam is my first big post-google project. It’s kind of like Super Smash Brothers in space. It’s inspired by a StarCraft 2 arcade map that someone made and my group of friends have been playing it weekly since Covid. It’s the only game that’s gotten each of us in trouble with our significant others for laughing and shouting too loudly. I’ve even gotten in trouble for clicking my mouse too loudly. Even my 3 3⁄4 year old daughter thinks it’s great, so I think it could have broad appeal (she only knows about it because I’ve woken her up a few times playing). I wrote a short design doc for it. I’m a little worried about publicly publishing the doc because I feel like someone will feed it to an AI and make their own version in an hour.

This is my third attempt at making it, which I take as a good sign because I’ve noticed I often have to implement programs three or four times before I settle on a good architecture. I made the first version over a long weekend in Unity3D & C#, and then I rewrote it to add networked multiplayer and hit a bunch of walls. Now I’m starting over from scratch in Rust & the Godot game engine. This is my first time using Rust so my code is terrible, and I’ll need to rewrite everything a few more times as I get better.

Pro Tip: Double your junk mail by creating an LLC. The top one is trying to get me to buy a $110 poster for my break room

It took forever to find semi-unique names for the game and company. It reminded me a lot of the Futurama episode where the only words that haven’t been trademarked yet are “popplers” and “zitsels.” I eventually found “Solar Slam,” which was only used for a wrestling tournament and an inflatable basketball game. It’s not unique but it’s good enough. I now own solar-slam.com, although I have yet to make a website. Solarslam.com is still available at the low-low price of $7,000. I think I’ll wait a little bit for that one. “Superconducting Games LLC” is a homage to an unfinished game called “Superconducting Pigs.” It is about genetically engineered superconductive pigs in a “Planet of the Apes” style setting. There’s another company named “Superconducting” and another named “Studio Superconducting,” but again, I think you gotta settle for unique-enough. Overall, I’m happy with them.

Humble screenshot showing two synchronized clients and the server. It does not remotely resemble a game yet. I feel like I’ve been making claymation.

I drafted some of the next few issues of the blog. They’re about the game’s network architecture and why I chose Rust + Godot. I just finished a naive implementation of deterministic multiplayer with client side prediction and rollback. It was honestly pretty miserable. I felt like if I let myself work on literally anything else, I would never go back and finish it, so I didn’t let myself indulge in other parts of the project until it was done. That’s the main reason this blog update took so long.

Against all odds, Starcraft re-enabled map publishing again, so I’ll eventually finish the game I talked about in my last post.