A house with only a couple thousand pieces of junk in it would not make for a very interesting Dehoarder 2. Trouble is, having more than 600-800 pieces of physics-enabled junk in the room at the same time really drags down performance.
What to do to keep within the limitations of today’s hardware, and allow each room to have an inventory of thousands of pieces of junk? Containers. Boxes, drawers, cabinets, closets and more can and will contain tons more junk than initially spawns in the house. Only open-able when the amount of junk has dropped below the room’s threshold, containers will spew mountains of junk, re-sullying the room in a satisfying hail of whooshing items.
Containers might also regurgitate long-lost but useful items, like garbage bags that can be used to provide area-of-effect clearing of trash. Another system I’ve long wanted but have finally started are “dirtmaps”, dirt overlays for the walls and floors that can be cleaned using appropriate tools.
The holidays are upon us, and as is my custom and need, I will be working a little less through the rest of the year. While this year got off to a rocky start due to my mother’s passing, the remainder of the year has seen some exciting moments. Breaking Block became by far my most downloaded game, and still see steady download and play activity daily. In fact, Breaking Block has been on an upswing since the 2nd annual Ohio Game Developer Expo, another exciting event at COSI that I was proud to be a part of. I had a great booth this year, and many people got to try out a demo of Dehoarder 2. I’m told that attendance nearly doubled from last year, and that our hosts at COSI were very glad to have had us there. We had developers from a wide area, and attendees from across most of the U.S. Two booths down from mine was the booth of Phil Peer (Dioram), who has helped continue the expansion of Vintage Pachinko this year with three new pachinko machines added gratis, part of the continuing “Deus Penguin” saga.
Hopefully 2015 will be just as exciting, maybe even more so. Work on Dehoarder 2 will continue into 2015, and then after that, well, I can’t say much but no matter what happens, it should be good.