Change is underway. Here's what's coming.
Hello, it’s time for a community update. I haven’t published a lot about Socially Distant lately, but I’m thankful to everyone who has been keeping up with my work despite that. This year didn’t exactly go as I planned, but I’m glad that’s the case.
Socially Distant never stopped being worked on
I’ve still been working quite a lot on the game as part of this merge request. My goal has been to split the game from its underlying game engine, which for several months now, has been a custom engine I wrote specifically for the game. The role of that engine has changed, I would like to re-use it in future games after Socially Distant. That being said, it is still Socially Distant’s engine.
Goals of the engine
My goals with the custom engine are simple. Run it on relatively cheap hardware, have a robust UI system with screen reader support and great keyboard navigation, and have an editor that I can actually use. I would like to have the convenience of engines like Unity or Godot, but without feeling like I need to fight the engine or my vision impairment. So far, the goals are being met.
Challenges
The biggest challenges, so far, have been:
- Wayland: I consider Xwayland to be a crutch, and not a solution to not having Wayland support. That being said, C# and .NET lack useful bindings for writing a Wayland client, and SDL3 currently lacks functionality I need in Socially Distant.
- Screen readers: AccessKit is great, but many screen readers misbehave on Linux.
- Getting to an in-game desktop: I can compile the game, but I still have to write a scene editor and a whole lot of other crud before I can boot the game. I’m one person working on the engine. :(
Because I tend to hyperfocus on things, juggling between Socially Distant and my KDE Plasma accessibility work is tough as well. Once I get focused on one, it’s hard for me to break the concentration and look at the other.
Anyway, it’s still happening.
Despite the ambitious yet simple goals, and the challenges I’m facing, the engine is very far into development. Here’s the code. Its current working name is “Ritchie’s Toolbox,” however I plan to rename it to Inertia. It currently supports OpenGL, but I plan on native DirectX and Vulkan support later on when there’s demand.
We needed a refresh
If you’ve been on this site before, it looks different now. Why?
The game’s story already happened
My original idea for the game was directly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has already happened. I do not want to re-tell that same story, we’ve lived through it.
I would instead like to tell a fictional story set in the near-future. This allowed me to explore different ideas of what a cyber terrorism attack during a deadly pandemic could look like. I started rewriting the game’s story from the perspective of a few characters including the player, and realized I have a burning passion for arson. Neurotoxin is fun too.
A much-needed visual refresh
Alongside rewriting the game’s story, I decided to redefine the game’s art style. Instead of “let’s just rip off the Linux desktop,” I decided to style the game visually around what computers look like to me. High-contrast elements that almost seem to glow, illusions of depth where none actually exists, and a mix of nerve damage and emotional state affecting the colors and shapes of things.
I want the game’s desktop to look like it is being viewed through the lens of the player’s mind. Working on KDE allowed me to improve my graphics programming skills, meaning I’m finally able to try some of these ideas out. By treating the game as being viewed through the eyes of a character infected with a neurovirus, I can now experiment with visual effects that’d ordinarily be out of place on a desktop operating system. Imagine your taskbar pulsing to the beat of the music you’re listening to.
I have yet to nail down the final look and feel of the game, but some of the changes have made it to this site. The new visual design is called Lucidity.
Website updates
The site needed to be fixed. It has been fixed.
Posts now have authors!
Did you know, Socially Distant has a team? We’re just hobbyists, doing it on our free time, but we do indeed exist.
Instead of having all of these posts be written by me, since it can be time-consuming, I’ve opened up the site to everyone on the team. You can now see who wrote the post by reading the new “About this Author” section.
Heads-up: If you’re a team member, you might want to look at this issue.
Day / Night Mode + Accessibility Improvements
As part of the Lucidity update, the website now has a dark / light mode toggle. If you prefer or rely on light mode, that is now available to you.
I have changed the typeface used for paragraphs and most other text on the site. It should now be far more legible. I have also made headings far easier to spot.
This is the end. For now.
I will be posting more updates on the status of the game once it no longer boots to a black screen.
For now, enjoy this Spotify playlist I put together.