A lot of work has gone into making Evoli. Let’s take a trip down memory lane together.

February: It’s alive!

This is the very first video @khskarl made as he was putting together the foundational pieces for the MVP release.

shortly thereafter our creatures started looking more life-like, but they were still struggling with the concept of walls.

This culminated in our first sort-of-devlog posted February 20. (topic timestamp reflects latest edit).

April: Second life

After getting started in February things stalled for a bit as we were figuring out Amethyst organisation practices and the purpose of the showcase team. But before long the project was back in action, and suddenly the initial creature was no longer alone

At this point we felt comfortable talking more out in the open about what we were working on, spreading the word on the Amethyst Discord and other channels.

After telling my good friend @jakob_t_r about what we were doing he went diving into his treasure chest of old explorations and came back with a handful of excellent music samples for Evoli:

https://community.amethyst.rs/uploads/default/original/1X/d0f16f640abbc2b9970e7eab4900d1c2915a60b0.m4a

https://community.amethyst.rs/uploads/default/original/1X/28ceccd4b283e7ad92f431f5a336f221e452c661.m4a

https://community.amethyst.rs/uploads/default/original/1X/3ac4ac9d3774fe8e580eb977d4e4e82bf0941c08.m4a

https://community.amethyst.rs/uploads/default/original/1X/013753b1b64bc356d648c52848e4b7970dc23ec0.m4a

We had our first meeting to discuss plans of world domination.

Team Meeting #1 - 2019-04-27 Evoli With the influx of contributions in the past few days we’ve decided to capitalize on our momentum by having our first team meeting this weekend, at the following time: 2019-04-27T10:00:00Z https://meet.google.com/mto-zdjz-yqu Unfortunately the time that worked best for myself and @khskarl isn’t going to work well for any North Americans who’d be interested in joining. We’ll try to make up for that the next time we do one of these. Draft agenda Refresher on project agenda and short to long t…

May: Life gets more complicated (and that’s a good thing)

By the start of March we had been joined by @marot and @sunreef and the project was really picking up momentum. With the addition of plants and a debug inspector (many thanks for the help with that @Awpteamoose) the game was looking increasingly real, complete with pesky new bugs to sort out.

A second dev-log was written.

A spawning system was added.

…and out of nowhere wild bees ixies appeared.

Before long they were getting organised.

So much had gotten done that it was time to talk about cutting a release for the MVP milestone. We had our 2nd meeting.

Team Meeting #2 - 2019-05-11 Evoli Continuing the discussion from Team Meeting #1 - 2019-04-27: I’m thinking we’ll do another team meeting in about a week. We’ve got more contributors getting involved so we need to talk more about development practices and good workflows. Draft agenda will soon follow; feel free to start editing your own agenda items in. For the date and time I’m tentatively thinking around 2019-05-11T20:00:00Z → 2019-05-11T21:00:00Z Anyone is free to attend as long as they’re there to discuss our agenda, or …

Meanwhile the ixies were growing ever more unwieldy. (This was @sunreef doing a bit of ECS bottleneck testing)

Perception system lets our herbivores hunt down those pesky plants with pinpoint precision.

How about using boids algorithm for herbivores?

Rotating our sprites looks kinda off. Maybe this will look better in 3D? (foreshadowing!)

Camera movement is in!

Debugging with, I wanna say lasers? pew-pew

June: First Release

We started June off with our first official release, having successfully completed the original MVP spec and then some. Major props to @marot for driving this release to the finish.

amethyst.rs Evoli - an official Amethyst showcase game | Amethyst Game Engine Evoli, the first of many Amethyst showcase games to come, has now finished v0.1.0, our "MVP" release. In light of this stability milestone we're better prepared than ever to engage with anyone looking to experiment with an example Amethyst game...

Some more foreshadowing of things to come…

One thing inspired another as some mockups of a possible 3D future came into being.

We had a 3rd team meeting to discuss whether we should consider going 3D a bit sooner than planned.

Team Meeting #3 - 2019-06-14 Evoli Continuing the discussion from Team Meeting #2 - 2019-05-11: Our next team meeting is scheduled for tomorrow next week, Friday. Anyone is free to attend as long as they’re there to discuss our agenda, or just quietly observe. 2019-06-14T16:30:00Z → 2019-06-14T17:30:00Z poll Meeting link Agenda Erlend will do a quick verbal summary of the Oslo meetup Getting back into the habit of posting publicly (we’ve been interacting a bit too much in our private group chat) Karl will talk at more leng…

The decision was made to go 3D sooner rather than later, and our art direction was updated accordingly.

In mid-June @marot stepped down from an active developer role in the project. He’s gonna be busy with a on the way; major congrats and best of luck mate!

July: A new dimension

In early July we rather quietly released v0.1.1. While this release headed up by @sunreef didn’t bring any flashy new features it got us up to date with the latest v0.11 version of Amethyst, which catapulted our engine backend 6 months forward in time

Every night I light a candle for pr#79.

With the momentous transition behind us, the path to 3D was expected to be easy. To our great delight, that bold statement turned out to be quite true. Parting with our original placeholder sprites was bitter-sweet.

After some troubles with OBJ (especially materials) files we made the decision to use gltf instead, which has first-rate support in Amethyst. This quickly garnered results.

…a day later and the game was really starting to shape up. Finally one of our videos is also featuring more of the menu work that @Str4ngeL00p has been steadily working on.

Things really start to liven up with the addition of a 3D ixie model.

And as usual, ixies end up behaving creepily.

With the addition of “herbivore slime” and “predator devil-slime” the reign of placeholder spheres comes to an end.

Now it’s time to play with perspective.

erlend_sh: could eventually be spiced up with something a bit more like this (but still a cube) sunreef: Or even better

Perspective explorations land on a sweet spot.

Then we encounter perhaps our strangest bug yet: The mysterious MEGA-SLIME!

The “cubic slab of terrain” look is introduced. (look closely around the 5s mark for a rare sighting of a mega-ixie)

“Playing around with ffmpeg codecs” ~sunreef

Current-day version