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[eigenbom]

For more insights you could add debug functions in game, like revealing the whole world, zoom, scrolling with arrow keys, point and click info...

I played the alpha (got the "alpha" pledge on your kickstarter). Very amazing game, keep up the good work!

Yep I have all those things too. Much debugging over the years and slowly added all that stuff. My favourite feature is pressing delete when hovering over a creature will kill it with gibs.

And thanks for backing the KS and playing the alpha!

It was originally going to be an ANSI style character game

Haha, if only I had stopped there.

That's a great idea. Should make it an unlockable feature :p

I *really* wish I could. If MM does well I might release my own demake of it with ansi graphics.

[TheWing]

I would really love an ASCII version... but yeah they're rather different in terms of development, so it'll obviously need a proper rewrite.

[eigenbom]

You can now travel to different areas via these doors / entrances

[cubit]

Great looking game and congrats on the kickstarter. Not sure how I managed to miss this until now

[eigenbom]

Thanks cubit

Update: More world building this week, as I head towards getting a fully playable Forest ready. I'm revisiting the algorithms for generating the mossy zone under the forest floor and designing how the level flows. One arc for a forest level, for instance, will have a a hard clay stratum between the mossy area and the caves. It will require a tool of DIG power 2 to get through. There will be a few of these staging elements throughout the game .. although they are not necessarily hard constraints and there may be ways around them.

I've also solved a chicken-and-egg problem: The hatchet (a simple tool for chopping trees) is made out of stone .. but stone is a tough resource that requires a more advanced tool to mine. I wanted the player to be able to get the hatchet early on in the game, and so I've added a "Stone Cove" subregion to the forest. If you find a cave entrance, you can now go in and (if its a stone cove) there'll be some Stone Slugs there. Kill them and they'll spawn 'sharpstone' which you can use to craft the hatchet.

The subregions will play a bigger role than I first expected, as I've been having a lot of fun generating tiny little cave systems that are connected up in a chain. Some of the subregions are very small. If you dig out far enough from them you'll be blocked by the indestructium, but I imagine I can hide a few things out there (with a few clues as to where they are).



I started work on The Hive, the boss subregion of the forest. Here's one of the generated plans. The red 0's are mounds of hive eggs. The Hive will also contain some cobweb-type structures, which will stick and slow you down as you walk through them.



The web has been particularly tricky to design and today I worked on a simple prototype to procedurally generate web-forms. The early results look pretty promising, but I'm not 100% sure that I'll go down that path. It may be too time-consuming, when a simple tiled sprite will do the job for now.

[happymonster]

Yeah, I think those web forms look like a different style than the rest of the level graphics. (Maybe the anti-aliasing?)

[eigenbom]

Oh that's just a prototype done in Processing, hence the AA. Not sure what I'll end up doing.

[TheWing]

Oh that's just a prototype done in Processing, hence the AA. Not sure what I'll end up doing.

They do fit the style and feel, ofc the gfx needs to be made fit.. just make sure you have other things that are in motion in the levels, so that the web isn't the only thing moving!

[Green Gospod]

I've also solved a chicken-and-egg problem: The hatchet (a simple tool for chopping trees) is made out of stone .. but stone is a tough resource that requires a more advanced tool to mine. I wanted the player to be able to get the hatchet early on in the game, and so I've added a "Stone Cove" subregion to the forest. If you find a cave entrance, you can now go in and (if its a stone cove) there'll be some Stone Slugs there. Kill them and they'll spawn 'sharpstone' which you can use to craft the hatchet.

But cave man didn't make stone tools out of mined stone, but out of small rocks found scattered everywhere. I like the idea of having pickable rocks scattered on the ground. Not too many though. I don't know how your mining/clicking scheme is setup, but maybe this makes mining more annoying then? Maybe bashing stone blocks for a bit with or without a tool will break off some small pickable rocks. Plus rocks can be thrown into enemies. 

Otherwise everything looks so good. 

[standardcombo]

Oh that's just a prototype done in Processing, hence the AA. Not sure what I'll end up doing.

Those look cool but to me the webs would be achieved faster as hand animated tiles with some variation to be picked procedurally, with bigger web compositions for larger areas. It would look the way you want instead of spending the time trying to figure out the math.

[eigenbom]

Oh that's just a prototype done in Processing, hence the AA. Not sure what I'll end up doing.

Those look cool but to me the webs would be achieved faster as hand animated tiles with some variation to be picked procedurally, with bigger web compositions for larger areas. It would look the way you want instead of spending the time trying to figure out the math.

Thanks for the suggestion. I spent maybe 2 days drawing all different kinds of webs, tiled and non-tiled, and eventually started toying with the procedural idea.

But cave man didn't make stone tools out of mined stone, but out of small rocks found scattered everywhere.

Well it's more or less the same now, except the rocks are moving creatures that you have kill. Throwing rocks could be fun, I've had 'throwables' as a planned category of weapon for a while, but it's not yet implemented.

[happymonster]

Does it have to be a web? I'm thinking of some kind of slime, fungus here..

[eigenbom]

Nope, just a thread-like thing (u can mine to make crossbow)

[eigenbom]

UI/Map concept

[pixelballoon]

Nope, just a thread-like thing (u can mine to make crossbow)

How about hanging silkworms, or cotton flowers or something similar? Unless it has to be a tile.

Everything is looking fantastic though, can't wait to play.

[nickd3000]

I just wanted to say well done Ben on this fantastic devlog.
 It's a real inspiration, there's always something to see and the animated images really help to show the game off.

Great work!

[eigenbom]

Nope, just a thread-like thing (u can mine to make crossbow)

How about hanging silkworms, or cotton flowers or something similar? Unless it has to be a tile.

Good ideas Cotton flowers could work ... maybe they could be an alternative that appears later on.

@nickd -- Thanks, glad you are enjoying it.

[eigenbom]

Update:

This week I've brought in eggs and cobwebs into the Hive boss area. The eggs are just an easily smashable tile that will clog up tunnels. Smashing stuff is fun.



Alongside that I've done some refactoring of the high-level game system. This is the system that generates full worlds with many regions, is responsible for handling the inter-region transitions, and lets each region generator create high-level plans. The high-level plans are just vague outlines of what each region will contain .. but they will be important later on when generating full worlds. Until now the regions have been fairly self-contained, but as the world grows and multiple regions come into play, we need to start sharing information between them -- like which ones contain NPCs, whether a door in one region leads to a door in another and so on. These plans also update as the game is played -- so if you kill a unique creature in a level then the plan will remember that and be sure not to spawn it again.

I've been thinking about adding a mini-map to the game. It's a little lazy from a design perspective, but it'll be a clear way to help the player navigate the world. The idea would be that as you talk to people or find clues, the mini-map fills itself in. Over in this thread we talked about generalising this concept to allow non-map items, such as compasses and magic totems, etc. Then someone talked about umbrellas that eat pies and I lost the thread.

I've also stumbled across a potentially massive optimisation in the game renderer. Or rather, I've found out that SFML (the graphics library I'm using) has a big weakness when it comes to a particular component (its RenderTextures, or FBOs). I was assuming they were being implemented one way, but it turns out that they aren't, and Moonman is taking a big hit in performance because of that. (The technical details can be found in these threads). I kind of stumbled across that by accident and it led me on a 3 day deviation to learn more about it and come up with a workaround. I've yet to incorporate the changes into Moonman but some early tests show some really positive results. I try to avoid big optimisations until the last moment .. but I think I'll try to get this one in as quick as I can.

And a funny (but not haha funny) problem also appeared when I was investigating this: I noticed that my laptop was behaving very strangely when running tests through the graphics card. To cut a long story short .. my laptop has been overheating and slowing right down because of it. This makes testing Moonman unbearable (on my laptop) as it was often dropping to 10-20fps. Today I took everything apart and cleaned it all, and that seems to have fixed that problem.

Overall it was a strange week and I feel that I need to push back the next big milestone because of it. But these problems happen sometimes, especially when you roll your own engine.

[happymonster]

It still sounds like a productive week   

[eigenbom]

Yeah it was productive, but I've set up milestones and its hard to feel great when you get sidetracked on non-milestoney stuff. Still, that FBO issue would've had to be dealt with at some time. Thanks HM!