Marek's Dev Diary: May 1, 2025

What is this

Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll share what caught my interest.

Why am I doing it

I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I'm passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren't set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don't like spoilers, then don't read this.

Space Engineers 1

• This Monday we released a huge Fieldwork update for Space Engineers 1
• Check out Zer0's Legion overview video

• You can read the full release blog post here: https://blog.marekrosa.org/2025/04/space-engineers-fieldwork-live-now.html

Personal

• I missed last week's dev diary because I took a vacation to a remote offline place without internet access. But I want to share with you some things that excited me:
• I spent 3 days staying on a remote sheep farm in the Karoo (South Africa), with no signal, no electricity, and the nearest neighbor about 30 km away

• The forced deep-focus was incredible - with no internet or email notifications, I could only think, sketch, and draft ideas the old-fashioned way
• It was strangely liberating not being able to "just ask the AI" or to google or open some documents - every question had to go in my notebook, which helped me see which problems are truly worth pursuing later
• I finally completed a reading sprint, finishing "Designing Games" by RimWorld's Tynan Sylvester - got lots of great mental models on player motivation, pacing, and emergent story arcs that I'm bringing back into SE2 and AI People
• Explored the farm's canyon system and discovered a century-old settler dam that's now partially breached, plus an ancient camel-thorn tree that I named the "Tree of Life"

• Had an amazing "Palaeo day" where I:
• Toured the Gansfontein palaeosurface with Marinda Oberholzer in Fraserburg - hundreds of 255 million-year-old proto-mammal trackways preserved in mudstone
• Visited Jaco Groenewald's personal museum in Sutherland to see dicynodont skulls and amphibian swim-trails - his DIY exhibit at Sterland shows how the Karoo records the Permian-Triassic extinction
• Both amazing people who love their work and passion!

Space Engineers 2

• Our water team is optimizing the simulation and making it more stable across various test cases (water dam, underwater base, aqueduct, submarine, etc.)
• The water rendering looks much better now and more flat - making spherical water for a spherical planet was a very challenging task, but it's working well now
• We'll soon need to start adding sound effects for water, which I think will be substantial work - we need to detect where water falls and splashes without over-spamming the audio system, plus create muffled sounds for underwater (though this part should be easier, just needing an "if" condition and a dynamic effect in FMOD)

• We've improved camera shake for both character and ship:
• It feels great during jetpack flight - shaking during the initial charge-up period and during boost flight
• It works for ship acceleration too, but it's currently too strong - we'll reduce it and implement a cooldown so after about 2 seconds it will gradually stop shaking or shake very little
• We also plan to implement this for deceleration
• The ship drill now causes rock debris to fly off when drilling asteroids
• Our main focus is now on:
• VS 1.5 Modding update - this will be amazing for modders and players, providing new tools to mod the game. We've done several playtests and the workflow is becoming more intuitive and simpler while maintaining freedom and flexibility
• VS 2 - focusing on survival, planets, and real gameplay (at least the first stages). We're transitioning from polishing small creative mode details to the bigger picture of actual gameplay - turning SE2 into a game about space colonization with exploration, combat, and engineering. For me, this is the most important part and one of the main reasons for making SE2 - to reimagine the SE experience without constraints
• Animations continue to see incremental improvements:
• The debug gun now has better positioning and distance
• We still plan to improve jump animation, uphill and downhill walk/run animations, tool usage (drill, welder, etc.), stopping animations, and more
• First-person camera and animations are already very good, about 90% of our target quality

AI People

• I've started working on my own AI NPCs experiments and my own LTM (Long-Term Memory) system
• It's incredibly fun to be back programming after 10 years of CEO-ing - being in those fast iteration loops (idea → experiment → feedback)
• AI-assisted coding makes you tremendously productive these days
• I'll be sharing my progress later