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[RoboB0b]

Hi! Gnomoria is a game I've been working on full time for the last 9 months and I thought maybe I should tell someone about it -- so I decided to start this devlog!

James Primate of BR1GHT PR1MATE is working on the audio.  James is my new hero, so I'll be giving him some praise whenever I can.

Update: Rhopunzel has now starting working on art!

Overview
What is Gnomoria? I don't have a good concise answer, but for now let's say it's a village management game.  Some of you might say that sounds like Dwarf Fortress and well, you wouldn't be wrong.  I'm not setting out to recreate DF but I would be lying if I said it wasn't a big inspiration.

I have a programming background and really enjoy systems design.  I wanted to make a sandbox game where I could learn and practice procedural generation techniques and design gameplay systems that work together in a meaningful way.  I figure a good sandbox game is only as good as the underlying systems and the level of interaction you expose to the player.

For this game, I think of the individual mechanics as gears in a larger system.  Those systems are in turn gears themselves in an even larger system, culminating in the game itself.  Wherever it made sense, I open up the system and let the player poke around.

Gameplay
You start off with a small group of gnomes who have set out to uncharted lands to fulfull their dreams of a gnome utopia.  Gather resources, farm and craft items to meet the growing demands of your gnomes.  It's a sandbox game and you just play until everyone is dead.  As you progress, the game scales with you and you attract more gnomes and tougher enemies.

The game world is a discrete 3D world.  Saying it's a voxel world might give a better idea, but I feel like it's not totally accurate.  Some may call me crazy, but I decided to write a 2D isometric renderer for the game.  I've given up perspective but gained pixelly goodness!  I think that's a fair trade.  I'm tempted to post some screenshots but without an artist it's pretty much all placeholder art.

What's next?
I'm in the magic final stages of the game where I'm polishing features, fixing bugs, balancing content and where progress is more difficult to quantify!  As it usually goes, I had to cut some cool features along the way to hope to finish in a timely manner.  At some point I'll consider the game "done" but if all goes well I'd like to add a few more things after that.  Right now though it's all about trimming the fat.

Thanks for reading through my first post!  I'll try to get to any questions and I'm looking forward to seeing your comments and feedback.

Video
Gameplay trailer

Screenshots (click the image for full size)

Hill with water

Here's the same hill from 3 other angles:
90
180
270

You can play at 1x or 2x

Moving the camera up/down gives you cross sections

Castle


Gnomes busy at work


Stocks menu


Assign profession menu
Mining UI
Farms and a pasture (at night)
Mined out copper vein
Furnace, forge, weaponsmith, armorer
Bedrooms
Great Hall
Windmills and gearboxes
Windmills and gearboxes with axles toggled on

[jamesprimate]

welcome to the forums Rob! 

I think this is going to be a fun devlog, cuz were right in the fun part of the dev process!

[RoboB0b]

Today, I added re-configurable controls and the appropriate UI screen.  It was never a priority along the way, so it was all too easy to keep putting off.  Better late than never :D

[peous]

hmmm seems nice; looking forward for first screens, even placeholder graphics ^^

[RoboB0b]

hmmm seems nice; looking forward for first screens, even placeholder graphics ^^

Soon!

I finally got around to adding lava today.  It is painful to stand in. 

Fluid simulation is cellular automata based and uses a local model for pressure.  I'm not 100% satisfied but it gets the job done and does some things that I wanted.  Pressure allows for the fluid to flow up (think pouring liquid in one end of a U shaped container) and makes it so that it can flow faster, like when poking a hole in the bottom of a large body of water.

[jamesprimate]

Here is placeholder art!




Now for some spec music! Here is a little night-time loop for sleeping gnomes
http://soundcloud.com/james_primate/village-of-peace

As the game is classic isometric pixel-style (which you will soon see), the soundtrack will be predominantly classic hardware chiptune and so i'm trying to give it that kind of "epic rpg" vibe that i love from, well, pretty much every breath of fire or jrpg on snes.

Since the game is sandbox-style without defined "levels", we are working with the idea that the music will be event-based. So, the above track would then play for the night-cycle... provided gnomes were safe and no enemies were spawned at the time.

Mixing this "ambiance" style with chiptune provides some interesting challenges, as chiptune is traditionally though of as loop-based, but with liberal fade-ins and clever pseudo-detect schemes, I am excited about the atmosphere that I think we can create with it

[RoboB0b]

I was working on having fluids push objects around when I remembered I should test out rain.  I turned on rain and it was a gnome nightmare.  Objects were getting pushed out of their stockpiles.  A few objects got pushed off a ledge and fell on a gnome.  One poor gnome got swept up into a lake and drowned

While I was fixing up the rain situation, I realized I could just change the fluid type and make it rain lava.  I had no choice but to try it out and it went pretty much as you would expect.

I don't think I'll put it in the game, but I like knowing that the option is there. :D

[Dragonmaw]

Regarding rains, that's a pretty good option for "heavy" rain. IE flooding

[RoboB0b]

Regarding rains, that's a pretty good option for "heavy" rain. IE flooding

Yeah I was thinking that too.  I'm not sure if it would end up being too annoying or not.  Maybe just enough so that a storm could be a problem but not too much.  Do you think a rare heavy storm could be interesting?

[Rusk]

I love DF and similar games, looking forward to seeing some screenshots or videos.

The name, however... I suppose you should pronounce it gno-MOR-ia, but I can't help but read it as gnome-orrhea, you know, like the disease. I guess it could be what happens if you don't keep the gnomes busy enough.

[RoboB0b]

Hahaha, I hope to never contract gnome-orrhea.  That sounds like a horrible disease.

I brainstormed a big list of names a while back and narrowed it down to Gnomoria and Gnomgard.  I went back and forth a bit and then just started going with Gnomoria to see how it felt.  So, who knows maybe it will change one last time before all is said and done.

[RoboB0b]

I added "self-powered" traps today.  I think this needs a little explanation.

There is a mechanical system in the game that I'm just calling "mechanisms".  Mechanisms fall under 1 of 3 types.  There are power sources, links and devices.  Devices have some function they perform but require power.  You build your power sources and then build axles and gear boxes to connect it to your device.  Every device has a power requirement and the total power in the system needs to be greater than the total requirement for anything to start moving.  There are special links that act as toggle switches that will engage/disengage its connections to merge or separate entire mechanical systems at that point.

I like this system, but it takes some time to get everything up and running.  For immediate defense your only option is to draft gnomes into your military.  The problem with this is that since it scales off the number of gnomes in your village it can be slow to grow into a stronger military.

So as another option that instead scales off your ability to get metal, I added self-powered traps.  They are spring loaded and need to be reset after triggering.  The reset trap job gets queued automatically but it won't trigger again until a gnome actually goes out there and resets it.

[jamesprimate]

 

this mechanism idea sounds AMAZING. clearly i need to dive deeper into the game! on my playthroughs i usually just dig a huge pit, then spawn infinite water and a goblin army to see who wins 

[RoboB0b]

You might have noticed mechanisms in the build menu, but it starts out disabled.  It gets filled out as you research.

[RoboB0b]

Rhopunzel is working on the project now and will be doing the art.  I should be able to start posting some screenshots soon!