Dev blog

Creation of new content now has started. The roads are being redone with a much higher quality, the assets a being overhauled with better shaders. And the new world map is being created.

It’s always a good sign when you read the last devblog and conclude that everything that was said to be “in progress” or “to come” has been delivered! 2022 was a big year for Snow Plow Project with the project being accepted on Steam, the playtest being launched and major mechanics being implemented.

After a few months of playtest, community feedback has been overwhelming! Even though some features or fixes were already planned for the future, it was made evident that they were needed quickly.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy! On february 14th, we opened access to Snow Plow’s playtest, and the following days and weeks were overwhelming!

Physical snow has been time-consuming for the last weeks. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that emulating snow is a big challenge. Still leaning towards a playtest demo and a campaign mode, but there is a bit of foundations that need to be laid prior…

Optimising a game is a matter of reducing litterally everything to the bare minimum, but without degrading the visual realism of the scene. That’s exactly what’s been done to Snow Plow during the last weeks.

Snow Plow Project is getting to a point where, with all the mechanics and aesthetics working, I’m more and more confident in having more people trying it. It really gained much potential over the last months.

As winter is rolling in, snow is blowing in Snow Plow! Good thing we have a new machine coming out of the factory right in time! The brand new dumper truck is out! Plus: Procedural clouds, moon, northern lights, multiplayer, world creation, and more.

It’s time to start creating the world, and we’re starting from zero… Let’s start now and create a small map that will be a creation playground, we’ll call it a sandbox.

Here’s the problem with snow: it is made of billions of particles that collide with each other and with the environment. In other words, something unmanagable for a computer. So the challenge was to replicate that behavior in a way that a computer can calculate in realtime. Some funky stuff have been tried in the past, but here’s the solution I came up with.

Creating Snow Plow Project is also a learning journey. Several attempts at creating the game were made in the last years. Before getting to the actual version, a few ugly versions have been made. Want to see what it was looking like?

Amongst all the questions I get concerning Snow Plow Project, the most frequent is: Why is it taking so long? It could be that when I started this project about a decade ago, I didn’t know how to make videogames. I just wanted to create and play a snow plow simulation game, so I decided to learn everything I needed to be able to create it.