Since it has actually been a long time since I gave a progress update I might as well make this more than a joke post.
The original plan with Hapax was for it to take place on a fairly small alien ship, larger than the house from What Remains of Edith Finch and smaller than the island from The Witness. I'm not the best artist so I chose this size primarily to decrease my workload. However in practice even this was too much. With custom tools and a lot of iteration I could maybe get something that looked good but I'd never be able to get something that looked good compared to other small handcrafted games. Plus a lot of my gameplay mechanics felt cramped at this scale.
Essentially I'd have to spend a lot longer than I expected just to get results that are serviceable.
Instead I'm using a different approach so I can spend a similar amount of dev time but have a massive alien ship that plays better and looks great in trailers. I'm almost ready to show off this new ship but too many parts are still unfinished. I also need to optimize the graphics and make sure my rendering system works on the base PS4 at this scale. It would suck if I showed off the current ship with ~5 million tiles only for the final game to be significantly downgraded.
