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[eigenbom]

Update: An alpha build of Moonman is now available to the alpha backers. Check out this page for details.

[eigenbom]

Update: An update to the alpha has just been released, you can now save your game. Details here..

Last Friday we released the the first alpha build to the kickstarter backers. It's been a fun week and the alpha sub-forum has been very busy with bug reports and game suggestions, and I'm happy to say that the crash reports have been few and far between.

My favourite crash report so far has been this gem by kikkosoybeanmage:

Well, I was playing moonman, I was in a cave shooting flaming arrows at two small spiders (royal crossbow) I had about 400ish arrows and all of a sudden the game freezed, then closed and crashed, then this window opened up. Btw, I LOVE THIS GAME!

Unfortunately this crash is particularly difficult to debug and I've made some adjustments to the code, but I won't know it's not fixed until it happens again.

The alpha build lets you input a four digit seed for the world, and the same seed produces the same world for everyone. This is also helpful when finding and debugging problems, for instance, world 9999 produces this weird flooded world, which is a bug in the world generator. (We will likely have intentionally flooded areas in the game, but for now this is an error and has some bad gameplay consequences, such as the merchants all drowning in their underwater houses.)



The alpha contains a placeholder background. As the months go on the backgrounds and skies will all be iterated on, in sync with the other artwork, until we reach something we all like. GP and I have been experimenting with different sky and background configurations for the forest and the other areas.



Today is another milestone because we just released the first update to the alpha. The is an important step because it is only accessible through the game updater. I've written about the update system in a previous devlog, but basically the system fetches the update files from Amazon's S3 servers, and then unpacks it locally. A major update this week is that you can now save your games using the experimental save support, which will allow everyone to spend even longer pinching and prodding the system. Other changes include:


Ladders work differently, you can stand on top of them
fix: repeatedly clicking mouse now works as well as just holding it down
log.txt is sent properly with the crash report
fix: entities no longer disappear on screen after fullscreening
fix: various inventory bugfixes
fix: game was crashing on exit
Added a full crash report option for remote debugging

[and]

I like my forests blue - there's enough green forests in the world. Although I really like the tree style of the 'greener' forest you have here.

[eigenbom]

Update: Mesa is the broken stone moon that sits above the mountainous region in the game. The mountain area will be characterised by:

- bigger terrain structures and vertical cliffs to scale
- large stone blocky forms, stacked up
- an internal cave system that winds upwards
- creatures that are tougher / more armoured / insect-like
- small stone houses that are built into the rock
- thin layers of snow and frost as you go further upwards
- death if you fall off the bottom of the screen
- ancient stone castles and structures that sit at the top
- optional aspect: blizzard (reduces vision and slows down characters)

GP and I have been trying to come up with some interesting colours and tiles that will differentiate the mountain from the other areas. Here's a few rough vignettes by GP of the volcanic, mountain, and strange areas. Below that is some awesome tiles he's been working on for some of the structures at the top of the mountain.





Code-wise I've been cleaning up parts of the system related to world generation and started implementing a new tile type: the snaking-tile-4 type. It's a custom tile type used to implement the snaking stone structures you'll be encountering in the mountain. Here's a basic demo of how the tile works. Note it has structure at the scale of 4x4 blocks as well as local structure.



Overall, this week has been very busy. My wife and I spent all weekend and most of Tuesday packaging and mailing a lot of the physical rewards for the Kickstarter. Check out this KS update for information about that and a few photos etc.

[Octopus Tophat]

How does that tiling system work? It seems pretty complex, or maybe I'm just stupid. How do the individual tiles know what sprite they should be?

[Quarry]

I assume tiles have directional flags associated with them. For example 0b0000WNES where WNES represents bits for the cardinal directions.

That gives you 2^4 = 16 tiles to choose from. According to whether or not a tile is "connected" to any neighbour, you update those flags and then decide on which sprite you are going to use.

[eigenbom]

How does that tiling system work? It seems pretty complex, or maybe I'm just stupid. How do the individual tiles know what sprite they should be?

The tiles in that gif are a new type that spreads over 4x4 clusters, using a combination of per-tile flags like Quarry said and a number of neighbour lookups at render-time. You could cache the neighbour info in the tile, but I cache rendered clusters of tiles instead.

[Octopus Tophat]

I've made a tiling system just like that before. That seems to be an explanation of how basic tiling systems work, but I'd like to know how the actual snaking pattern works. When does it know when to not connect to the 4x4 group of tiles next to it? In the gif I can see it's just a pattern, like a square wave, but in the image, it seems random. Is it random? Or does it change based on which blocks you place first? I'm just so confused haha.

What determines where the path goes? -boom, simple question.

[eigenbom]

It will just use a pattern generator when the tiles are placed. So e.g., in the gif there was a pre-defined pattern as you say. When the world generates the structures from this tile it will also generate a large-scale pattern.

[michelmohr]

Amazing as ever! Your world has so much character by the colours alone.

[mk]

Wow, the game has changed a lot since the last time I saw it and played a few years ago.
Looks really good!

[eigenbom]

Thanks you two!

[eigenbom]

Update:

Bridges are a thing now. They are static, but connected. If you destroy one part then all parts are destroyed with it. I hope to revisit these at some point and add some dynamic physics behaviour to them.





Mountains are coming along well. They will have large scale structure, composed of a range of mountains with different styles. Here's a little sketch of a few styles: tall, normal, cubic, arch.



Given a set of shapes, the system will then generate a bunch of mountains, which may join together. Here's a look at the first tests for the mountain generator. The floor will be the valley, and as you climb up it will get frostier and snowier.



The snowflakes now add a thin layer of snow to open blocks. And it works on all open block types, which means we could add a 'snowing' aspect to forest to get a different kind of forest.





But what is inside a mountain? The mountains will be full of a cave and mine systems, with paths leading upwards, towards the peaks where old monuments and monsters lie. This requires a different kind of generator to the cave generator used in the forest, and so this week I started work exploring that idea. I implemented some basic dungeon generation algorithms and can now create sets of rectangular rooms, connected by doors and tunnels.



The same basic idea will be used to generate both the chambers inside the mountain and other man-made structures, like the little dungeon instances which will be hidden around the game. The system has many parameters you can tweak and gives a reasonably interesting distribution of rooms. Most importantly, I've also set up a system so that the dungeons are well connected, which means you won't necessarily have to mine your way through the dungeon walls, although there'd be nothing stopping you from doing that (besides the durability of your gear).




Alongside the algorithmic exploits we've been exploring some styles for the new areas. Here's a sneak peak at a mockup of a 'poisonous dungeon' area. This would likely be a 'sub-region' hidden in another region. E.g., you might find a sewer grating deep in the forest and by going through it you might end up here, choking to death on the noxious fumes.

[Wyeth]

I was seeing images of the green guy on Twitter.
This is awesome. Love the coat-eyes guy in the last picture! (Also wooo Moonman nipples & belly button... or is that somesort of armor?)

Definitely keeping an eye on this.

Bridges look lovely.

[oldblood]

Awesome update. Looks like a lot of moving parts are coming together... I keep meaning to play the alpha and just havent had a chance yet. Will definitely be diving in soon!

[Quarry]

Ahaha, love that gif where moonman can't fight the snow

[BomberTREE]

choking to death on the noxious fumes.

Please tell me stuff like this happens

[eigenbom]

choking to death on the noxious fumes.

Please tell me stuff like this happens

Maybe I plan on having a gas/smoke system, mainly for effects but I could also use it for e.g., poison clouds coming off a lake's surface or out of statues. It will be a mix of a cell-based fluid system operating at the same size as the world tiles and sub-cell particles for variety. I think I saw Tyriq doing something similar.

[eigenbom]

MM mask in blitzbreaker by Blekdar.

[gimymblert]

I got so confuse with MM mask lol