4D Miner Progress Update + New Concept Art

Hello everyone!

The next update to 4D Miner, which will be released on itch.io, is coming along a bit more slowly than I was expecting. Don't be worried though, it's still coming along nicely!

In my previous post, I showed off 4D Miner's new lighting system, but unfortunately, it made the game run much slower. The problem with making a 4D game is that there is so much more data to process, which means introducing new features like 4D lighting can make everything much slower.

In order to fix this, I needed to make some optimizations, which required me to tear apart a large amount of the game's code.

I still need to do some polishing, and there are a few features/fixes that I want to work on before I publish the first Patreon-exclusive early release.

As I have stated before, my primary long-term focus for 4D Miner leading up to its full release is multiplayer.

I have been thinking a lot about how player models will appear in multiplayer, and I decided to take a short break from programming to sketch out some concept art.

As you can see in the attached images, this 4D Miner player model concept has a lot more detail than its Minecraft counterpart. Since 4D Miner features other shapes besides squares and rectangles, I wanted to incorporate more unique shapes into the player models as well.

One thing you might notice about the 3D shapes used in these player models is that they all have six faces. This is because of the way I want player skins to work.

In one of the attached images, you can see an image of two 2D beings that exist in different 2D planes. Since the planes are perpendicular to each other, one of the 2D beings can see inside of the other 2D being.

A 4D equivalent to this phenomenon will also occur in 4D Miner, so I wanted players to have a relatively easy way to texture the inside of their player skins. I decided to make the player model entirely out of cuboids, which allows them to be textured in the exact same way as the 3D cube faces of the game's 4D blocks.

Each cuboid can be broken up into slices that correspond to 2D textures. You can see an example of this in one of the attached images, where a player head is made up of smaller cubes, which are colored to show both the inside and outside parts of the head.

I tried to make the most of each cuboid when working on this design, and I didn't want to use too many of them. The design is still in its early stages, so feel free to provide feedback!

It will be quite some time before I am actually able to incorporate these designs into the game. This is going to be a ton of work, and I want it to look good if I'm going to be spending this much time on it.