Skip to main content

This Week At Gamercade Aug 2022 2/4

· 3 min read

It's been an exciting week at Gamercade this past week! Not only is great progress happening on the tech side of things (namely, audio), we've also seen our community double in size! Maybe you saw our entry in the This Month in Rust GameDev #36 article? Here's to another great week ahead.

General Updates​

In this section, we discus changes and improvements which happened over the week.

Audio Engine Progress​

The team has been very busy over at Gamercade Audio building out the entire audio system from scratch. And over the week we've reached a great state with many of the most important features implemented:

  • Wavetable sampler, and FM synth instrument support, each with fully adjustable parameters and ADSR envelope.
  • 8 + 8 Audio channels, each with configurable instruments.
  • Tracker-style playback of songs and sounds, bpm, and instrument swapping during playback.
  • Sound State rollback, which is vital for networked games.
  • A simple data serialization format to support saving/loading of sounds and editor values.
  • All of this packed into an easy-to-use SoundEngine abstraction which handles the audio thread completely.

Collaboration Project​

While some of the details are still being ironed out, a few other members of the Rust Gamedev community has contacted us with hopes of building a collaborative, open source game together. We can't share too much about this yet, but expect good things coming soon. With this completed, we will see an even bigger rise in community outreach and more chances for collaboration with the community.

Console Improvements Odds & Ends​

  • Minor preparations being made to support Audio Api in the near future.

Editor Improvements Odds & Ends​

  • Improved handling of images with multiple "colors" with each set to a zero alpha value. No longer rejects these images.

Website Improvements Odds & Ends​

What's Next​

In this section, we discus primary focus areas for the project. This includes features actively being worked on, as well as things potentially coming in the near or long term future.

Console & Editor Audio Engine Integration​

While the foundations for audio are in place, they still need to be integrated into the engine and editor. This includes designing and implementing the audio api, editable parameters, as well as building out the entire audio editor feature set for the editor. Both of these tasks are quite a big undertaking, but solid progress is being made in all areas. We are also making minor tweaks and enhancements to the audio engine to support cool new things like stereo output and special effects.

More Complex Examples & Showcase​

We are continuing to work on showcase examples to really show off the intended use case of Gamercade. Currently, this is primarily the collaboration game featured above, with actual 2d art assets, and a proper game loop. We are still working on a cutting-edge 3d example game to show off the raw power of WASM, with all Gamercade features pushed to the limit.

Call to Action​

What can you do to support the project?

  • Consider sharing the project with your friends, and getting them involved with the community.
  • Building out more examples and have them featured on our page!
  • Contributing code and documentation to the project's GitHub.
  • Hang out and chat with everyone in discord.