Goodbye to DOME-7
Hello everyone,
We know many of you have been curious about the status of our multiplayer horror project, DOME-7. Today, we want to bring you up to speed on what has been happening inside the studio and offer some clarity on our future direction.
The Future of DOME-7
After much deliberation, we have made the difficult decision to officially halt the development of DOME-7.
This was not a decision we took lightly. DOME-7 was our first venture into developing a 3D title using the Godot Engine. While it served as an incredible learning experience, we ultimately realized the project wasn’t meeting our standards.
We fell into a common trap: focusing on "cool" isolated features rather than a cohesive, enjoyable gameplay loop. We wanted to build a horror survival game to play with friends, but after working on the project for over a year, we realized we were still effectively at the beginning. Given our timeframe and resources, it simply wasn't feasible to finish it to the quality we wanted.
A New Beginning (for the second time :D)
However, this is not the end of our game development journey—far from it.
We are excited to announce that we are currently deep in development on a brand new title. By applying the technical knowledge and design lessons learned from DOME-7, this new project has already surpassed our previous work in terms of functionality and stability. We aren't ready to reveal the details just yet, but we are confident this game has a much brighter future. We hope to properly announce it early next year.
A Look Back
We don’t want our work on DOME-7 to disappear into the void (the deep ocean in the game is enough :D). We are proud of the technical milestones we achieved, so we would like to share a gallery of what we built.
At the Game Development
Consider this a "behind the scenes" look at our first 3D development cycle. For each media piece, we’ve added a short explanation so you know what you are looking at. We ordered these by development time, so you can see how we progressed.
Note: All images/videos below are from the development process. We hadn't invested time into polishing or effects yet—these showcases are purely functional.
Early Base Schema
The base was designed with three distinct floors:
- Primary Floor (Red): Contained the airlock, oxygen, and energy rooms.
- Basement (Green): Housed the server room (for quests) and the cryo room (player respawn).
- Top Floor (Yellow): The control room, featuring a map of all players, base controlls and monitoring systems.
Fishes
Peko, our Lead Dev/Producer, worked on the fish. We used a boid algorithm to create schooling behavior. These were meant to be purely environmental and passive creatures to make the ocean feel alive.
Sometimes there is such a thing as too much debugging ;D
Early World Gen
This is the world gen debug. In this image, it was not working properly—the colors are supposed to align. This visualization helped us see if the chunks were synced together and using the correct height. Even though the chunks look aligned here, that was actually a backup code kicking in.
In this image, you can see the world gen working as intended. The colors are aligned, meaning they are sharing the correct height data.
Early Cryo
This video showcases cryo pods running on conveyor belts, being picked by a storage arm, and placed onto the cryo platform. This is where the player would spawn.
These were the development notes for the system. It seems like a simple task, but because we wanted it to be physics-based rather than just "faking" the animation, it became much more difficult to pull off!
AI Pathfinding
The green line showcases the pathfinding of one of our entities walking around without a clear target.
Debug Map
You are looking at the world from above. Each small red square is a chunk that is ready but not generated yet, except for the "inserted" ones (which appear lower). This map is huge—roughly the scale we wanted for the final game.
- Fun fact: The chunks on the far left aren't supposed to be there. The grid code didn't handle large numbers well and those chunks decided to escape the grid to find a new home. The light blue lines show the error position difference.
Computer
A computer terminal where the player would use commands to order items, select quests, and finish quotas. It was designed to sit in the server room. Each server rack handled a different feature, granting players abilities like voice chat, minimap, or life support systems.
Satellite Crash Site
Players would be able to find various structures in the wild, like crashed satellites, other mining DOMEs, or even dead comrades. You could find tapes with secret footage, lore notes, or special items.
Enemy Secret Footage
One of the aforementioned tapes could contain this "secret footage" revealing an enemy. This specific entity was designed to live deeper, in more dangerous waters.
This is the concept art for that entity. It's worth noting that different enemies had different detection methods—some colored lights would attract them, while others would scare them away.
Poster
This is one of many posters that could be found aboard the DOME base.
Door Opening Pressure Gauge
This is a pressure gauge used to open doors. From the outside, opening the main base doors would take significantly longer. This meant if players were running from something, they would need a plan to get inside safely before being caught.
Biome System
Instead of using standard noise textures to generate biomes, we tried a different approach. Each circle represents a different biome. They connect, blend, and modify the terrain.
Buttons
All interactions in the game were handled through these 6 types of buttons. We realized too late that having a unique button design for every single interaction made the system incredibly hard to maintain.
Multiplayer Buttons
A multiplayer button test. Synchronizing animations across different clients is never an easy task.
Steepness Map
For enemy navigation, we needed a reliable way to know if the terrain was too steep to walk on. This is the steepness map—the redder the point, the steeper the incline.
Generator
This was the most "finished" room when we halted the project (it has seen 3 iterations!). The two boxes in the back are electricity generators that require fuel. Fuel is pumped from canisters using the white tubes. Next to the doorway (right), there is a crusher that produces liquid fuel from a coal-like material. There is only one crusher for two generators, so players would have to manually bucket the fuel into the canisters.
Inverse Kinematics
Some of our enemies required spider-like legs to attach to the terrain. Instead of static animations, we used Inverse Kinematics.
- Dev Note: Godot now has built-in IK, but it wasn't working properly when we developed this, so we had to build our own. The green lines show the IK parts; this specific IK is constrained to ±90 on the X-axis.
At the Fun We Had
Game dev doesn't always work out the first time. It's about the fun we had along the way.
Peko's Drawing
After more than a year, we are still trying to figure out what Peko (our Lead Dev) was trying to tell us with this diagram. (This is not the only image like this...)
It Works If You Don't Look At It
That's right. Everything here works... as long as you don't look too closely.
POV: Modern UE5 Game
The frame rate is actually not that bad! You just have to enjoy the... atmosphere.
Debug Utilities on Drugs
These were supposed to be outlines around the world objects. We are still not sure what went wrong here.
Undertale Reference?
We just wanted cliffs, not Asgore in our world.
At the Facts
- We originally used CryEngine for the first few weeks of development, but switched because the documentation was unavailable at the time and the engine was too unstable for our needs.
- We made over 200 commits over the course of development.
- We learned trigonometry on this project (math is hard).
- We found that making a game is not easy.
- We learned that we are not good at marketing.
- This was the blurred banner image for DOME-7 on our website:
Closing the Chapter
We loved working on this project. And we also love working on our new one. We are so eager to announce it, but we have to wait just a few weeks more.
Until then, thank you for sticking with us as we evolve. We are excited to show you what we’ve been cooking up next.
Unheard Software
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