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[eigenbom]

HM - I'm thinking about adding texture to them, and also a simple layer foregrounded in front.

DN - Thanks mate :D

[eigenbom]

Update: http://discuss.moonman.io/t/april-10-2015/1048

It's been a short week due to Easter and some unfortunate events, but the forest world generator is coming together. I'll be starting work on generating some basic structures/buildings soon -- for the occasional hermit who has decided to shun civilisation and live out in the forest. Apart from codey things, I've been thinking about visual inspiration and the direction moonman will now head towards. The basic style won't change but I'm very interested in making the game more vibrant, more visually complexity with a few more layers, and fixing some ugly things (like the solid black terrain fill). There is a strong link between visual design and game design, so these two things need to be tackled in parallel.

Here's a couple of mockups/overpaints I've done, highlighting some regions of improvement or simply experimenting with some new effects or adjustments.

[karlozalb]

Good improvements in my opinion , but I don't like that sky ribbon. I've seen clouds in previous gifs and I think that when a cloud overlaps that ribbon the effect will be strange. This is only a guess, maybe you have a masterplan for that situation (a shader that modifies the resulting alpha channel to avoid ugly overlapping or something like that).

[Zorg]

Instead of the sky ribbon you could add amassments of stars, similar to images of Milky Way, seen from Earth.

[eigenbom]

Thanks guys, yeh I definitely need more stars and colours up there in the sky. I'll think more about the ribbon, it's only a mockup at the moment and would require a little work to give the aurora effect I want, but we'll see. There are much more important things to do atm.

[eigenbom]

Update: http://discuss.moonman.io/t/more-stone-houses-and-meet-gp-moonmans-new-artist/1055

I'm happy to announce that a third human has joined the Moonman amalgam! His name is GP (narwolf) and he'll be drawing, painting, scribbling, and pixeling to bring the Moonman world to life. You can check out some of his work over at his tumblr. I'm super excited to see what the three of us can come up with!

As for development, we've been looking at houses a little more. GP has been creating new tiles and objects and I've been working to incorporate them into the game. Here's a ramshackle structure built manually using some of these new tiles and objects. Having different shapes for the roof tiles and stone floor is a humongous improvement in my book.



As mentioned in the previous devlog update, there will be a number of different structural forms. In the final game these will be created by a system that will understand basic architectural concepts (rooms, floors, exits, etc) and can combine motifs in interesting and novel ways. But for now they will be stamped out from a library of pre-built structures.

My current method for doing this is similar to how I create the trees. I first build a template using the Tiled tile map editor, though any tile map editor would work. Here's a screenshot of one of my prototype buildings in the editor. The "D" creates a door, the "SC" a stone wall column, etc. Tiled exports json which I then process with a Python script to turn it into something the Moonman engine can work with.



After that process the world generators have access to a database of structures. The structures have annotations, like anchor position, width, height, etc, that the system can use to select an appropriate structure and know where its base is. The generators can then stamp these out into the world, according to the parameters of the region. Here's a simple example of stamping out 3 buildings close together across an undulating terrain. (I also added a few objects in there afterwards.)

[karlozalb]

procedural "town" generation? cool 

[joeyspacerocks]

Really interesting - thanks for this. I've experimented with using Tiled to help create templates of things too, although I normally then end up cloning them into other, larger Tiled maps to make levels.

Also been playing around with creating basic templates which the game engine then elaborates on at load time - e.g. automatically adding moss on the underside of underwater structures, etc.

Very interesting to see how you're approaching this side of things.

[siskavard]

damn, this is great!

[Green Gospod]

Sweeet! 

[joeyspacerocks]

Looks like Strafe are using a similar technique - hand-crafter sections that are used in procedural level generation:

http://strafedevblog.com/post/93056717598/how-we-are-handling-level-generation-in-strafe

[eigenbom]

Thanks for the Strafe link, it's interesting It's not really the same as mm, their entire levels look just like connected pieces .. as you see in a lot of board games these days, or even Spelunky. Whereas my worlds are built using a number of procedural elements, some of which are just these templates which I stamp out. I think connecting pre-built rooms together ensures that any particular area is fun, solvable, traversable, etc. The other side of that is that if each 'piece' is too detailed and there aren't enough pieces then the game can feel a little static. For the catacombs/puzzle area in Moonman, I'll be using a similar technique though, along with a combination of maze generation to lay out pieces. But that's a while away for now.

[eigenbom]

Update: Up to this point the forest area was quite simple .. it basically had soil, trees and plants aboveground, and then transitioned straight into rocky caves below. The caves opened up as you got further down, but it was still very homogeneous and boring. So this week a new layer was added, and for want of a better term, we called it the "underforest" --a damp mossy area just below the surface that will eventually contain soft soil, glow wyrms, mushrooms, shallow pools, etc.

Some new plants and tiles are in the game (just roughs at the moment )but we're aiming to convey the lushness and dampness of that layer. As you go venture further down, the caves below will become dank and more nasties will appear. The Palus (blue moon) fragment is down there so some spelunking will be unavoidable. I've also been experimenting with making the dark areas darker, but I'm not quite sure how this will turn out wrt gameplay.

There are a few more components of this prototype forest generator that I want to add before releasing the first alpha, but so far we're still on track to publish the first build in about 2 weeks from now. This first build will just be a single area sandbox with different materials, items, and creatures scattered around the area. It will be buggy and may crash but I look forward to getting your feedback and hearing about all the broken things in the game. crazy

Here's a few screenshots of the underforest - those blue things are glow wyrms, and will act as lighting for some underground areas.

[happymonster]

Looks great!

Getting almost a watercolour feel from some of the tiles. 

[eigenbom]

Thanks HM :D

[oafasting]

This is awesome.
I have read through most of this now, and I wonder:
Are you still making all the art yourself?

There has been a remarkable development, if so...

Can't wait for release

[eigenbom]

This is awesome.
I have read through most of this now, and I wonder:
Are you still making all the art yourself?

There has been a remarkable development, if so...

Can't wait for release

Thanks! GP Lackey is working on the art now and will be making everything look a lot better while I focus back on the game design and code.

[eigenbom]

Update: (discussion)

Been super busy! I've been focussing on just getting the alpha build done these last two weeks, which involves lots of patches here and there, and some sloppy code to get various things done quickly. I've just sent the build to Humble and will send out a notification to all the alpha backers when it's available.

The first build for the closed alpha contains a single little level -- the forest -- which you can jump around in and explore. These first alphas are just tech demos that demonstrate some of the basic mechanics and art. We'll continue to update the alpha alongside the main branch of the game, and I hope that in a couple of months we'll be able to join together a few areas into a 'proper game'. Then after that we'll expand the game by adding more areas, items, and interesting things like puzzles and bigger creatures.

Here's a few of the key things we've been working on the last two months.

    redesigned some sprites and tiles
    fleshed out some character concepts
    first samples of the new music
    plants distribute a little nicer now
    disabled saving for now
    added auto_zoom
    refactor background system, more layers in forest background
    added keyboard mappings: Qwerty, Azerty, Dvorak etc
    experimental controller support
    mouse overrides controller when moved
    menu cleanup
    user can now input seed for the world
    Moonman inventory persists across death
    (slightly) improved ladder climb and melee animations
    bird no longer attacks
    fix: corpses no longer re-die over and over
    added simple dungeons under forest with loot
    moonman glows underground
    new plants, mushrooms, etc
    forest: added mossy 'underforest' layer
    added basic house templates
    new and updated blocks: roof tiles, moss, wood wall, glass, etc
    new and updated objects: book piles, windows, tables etc
    major refactor of world generator, reimplementation of forest and cave generators
    block ids are processed into a header for easy access
    replacing boost::geometry with geometric tools
    destroyed chest spawns items
    chest now lock blocks they are attached to, so you can't destroy it by hitting the block
    Doors open both ways
    renderer fixes
    misc bug fixes
    centralised all resources into data/
    settings cleanup
    implemented launcher and auto-updater
    added bugsplat crash reporterg
    updated to sfml-2.2
    cleanup of boost dependencies
    improved build, deploy and misc scripts


I've been experimenting a tiny bit with the GUI, and mocked up multiple versions. Ultimately though, I think this is something that depends heavily on the gameplay and the final art style. So I will probably keep the plain green gui for a while, until I spend some time discussing the GUI with the team and play-testing a couple of things. Here's one of my *shinier* mockups:




I've been working on the forest generator quite a lot. It now generates houses on the surface, an underforest area, a cave area, and randomly scatters dungeons and spider nests around the place. I've rushed a lot of things just to get *something* out for the alpha, and I've got to spend a lot of time thinking about how to constrain the levels to make more sense and be more fun. The generator still has some major flaws, for example some houses get flooded occasionally. It's kind of hilarious to come across this sort of situation, especially as the merchant doesn't care that he's drowning.

[oldblood]

Looks like you've been busy, thats a nice changelog.

I kind of like the flooded house, especially if there was some way to drain it.

[RujiK]

I think flooded houses could be a cool addition if you have it under control and not an "Oops, that wasn't supposed to happen" kind of thing.

Adds some interesting variety.