Ex-Zodiac Development Update - September 2023

Ex-Zodiac

A fast-paced low-poly 3D rail shooter heavily inspired by classics of the early 90's. Join protagonist Kyuu as she fights to free the worlds of the Sanzaru Star System, overrun by the intergalactic terrorist organization known as Zodiac.

Hey everyone, sorry for the radio silence! I’ve been hard at work the past few months attempting to port Ex-Zodiac over to the latest version of the game engine I use. I’ve wanted to move to the latest version for a while now, but I was waiting for it to become stable before doing so. Upgrading was important for a number of reasons, but the main ones were: future-proofing console support, editor stability and new features that enhance or speed up my work flow. Lots of little improvements have been made all across the engine and the editor, and this stuff all adds up, especially when it comes to time saving. Most of you (probably) know the game is being built in Godot, and it originally started all the way back in version 2.1. Not long after, version 3.0 became available, and I decided to port the game over to that. At that time the game only had one level, so porting it over took about a week as I had to rebuild everything from scratch as there was no automatic conversion tool available. Thankfully there is one this time around and so that's handled a lot of the work for me, but there are still plenty of things that need manually fixing. Things like broken materials, animations not playing correctly and events not triggering etc. The good news is that the porting process is almost complete. There are still some rough edges to smooth out, but the bulk of the work is done, and that means I can finally get back to working on new content. I want to thank you all for your patience and support so far, I’m really grateful for that. I’m looking forward to getting back to being creative again soon! [i]- Ben Hickling / MNKY[/i]