Hi! I'm C# / Cormorant42, the person behind Soft-C.

The Past

The concept for ZELUS (noun: latin, zeal) began as a grounded, semi-realistic space exploration simulator, taking inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Arrival, Destiny, Starfield (which I actually haven't played because I don't have anything that can run it), and Peter Pan, of all things. So, planetary-based exploration combined with slow travel across vast distances of empty space, using minimal dialogue after the opening, but also featuring random events to keep the player engaged and spice up interplanetary travel a little bit.

The first element designed was actually the space travel physics, which I would guess not many players actually experienced due to the long opening and confusing ship layout (working on fixing both of those things). But early on I developed a 2D, 0-gravity environment where the player travelled solely via inertia, rotating their spaceship and firing off rocket pulses to change direction/speed. I then added planets and stars to this system, both of which have enough gravity to alter the course of the ship without being a straight-up magnet; finding a balance of what "felt" right, as inaccurate to real-life gravity as it is, was difficult and consumed more time than it should have.

But every spaceship needs an interior. And I wanted to have fun with this ship, playing with the player's perception of space by wrapping the ship around itself--the spaceship notably has two large fuel tanks on its prow, and there's a passageway that wraps around them, connecting the various crew quarters to the mechanical sectors in the stern. In hindsight, this interconnected design (as it stands) was a flaw, since it proved too confusing to navigate if you didn't know where you were going. Fix: provide markings telling the player which rooms lie in which directions.

At this point, time was running out for GB Jam 11--I had taken far too long designing the tileset for the spaceship, and was having an equal amount of trouble with the tileset for the ground--and so I expanded the concept. The initial concept called only for randomization in the placement of star systems around the galaxy and the random events that occur during space travel (which were, themselves, never implemented), and I decided to double down on this concept by making all of the discovered planets procedurally-generated. The randomization and procedural generation were essential, in my mind, to the core of the game--exploration. They ensured that every new game would provide the same experience of exploration, even if you remembered the story beats and names of the planets.

However, at this point the game had no polish, and it was coming down to the wire. I decided to go all-in on polishing the opening in order to make a good first impression, and even that was left somewhat unfinished, though I did manage to pull off a few technical feats I'm proud of (the endlessly-looping title screen which is revealed to be the opening cutscene, the elevator--the elevator!--and some other stuff behind the scenes), and, because I'm a musician at heart, I loved making tracks for those opening moments. I think this strategy was semi-successful; ZELUS ranked in the top quarter overall, and was #21!!! in the Game Boy Soul category, which is I think the highest rating I've ever received. The gameplay ranking was, understandably, the lowest, and I'm just thankful to have as much positive feedback (and constructive criticism) as I received.

The Present

I've spent the rating portion of the jam developing the procedural generation engine. I'm going to build an entirely different game around that engine first, to work out all the kinks and ensure it matches my vision, and then I'll retroactively add it to ZELUS. It's chunk-based, seed-based, and uses tileset swapping to make it easy on the limited Game Boy hardware, but it should be doable--though it will take time. There won't be any updates to ZELUS during that time, though this game is not abandonware. I'm still debating whether or not to release the new game (which will feature similar mechanics but more action-packed gameplay) under the Soft-C name or my original account, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

The Future

Once ZELUS gets to a passably-playable state, I am going to resume development on my current main project, Lemonade Land 2: Crow Good Deed (if you haven't checked it out yet, you should!), and do other projects on the side. You can definitely expect the procedural generation engine to reappear, however!