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[Nugar]

## Final Update (28. August 2013) ##

Game is finished and released!


Pirtan (working title)

Pirtan is my first game ever, I have begun different games, but they didn't get very far, mainly because all the ideas I had were too big, so I decided to make a smaller game and finish it, so I can release something.

It is a digging game for android (mainly). The premise is that you are deserted on a planet, and you want to leave it (don't know why yet). To do so, you must build a spaceship. To build the spaceship, you must gather several different materials, which you can mine underground.
You will have different smaller "quests", like, "get me 50 aluminum nuggets to build the hull", and once you have build every part of the spaceship, you can assemble it and escape, thus ending the game.
But not every part will be that easy to build. You will need to gather extremely rare materials that are deep down in the earth, and in order to reach them you need to mine, sell, get rich and buy better equipment.

That's all I got for now. I'm fleshing out the gameplay as I go, adding more features as I see fit.

It is mainly inspired by older atari/c64 games which have a similar goal (mine, sell, buy better equipment, mine more, get rich) and the modern implementations of that.

enough of that, let me see some pictures!

Alright, I'm gonna recap my progress so far, beginning from the start. Keep in mind it's all programmer art:

First of all, I wrote my own little tile-map-engine, originally for another game-idea. I then redesigned it to fit for this game. This includes basics things like generating, saving, manipulating, movement etc.

A shitty-quality gif of all of that, sadly my only picture from that state (warning: 3mb)

You can also see other little things like a minimap, basic "looting", particle-effects and ore-veins in there. I wrote a really simple vein-generation algorithm, you can see some examples here:

generated maps with veins

I just have different minerals with different variables (spawnrate, depthrange, veindecay). When generating, it decides for every tile if an ore spawns there, and expands this as a vein. After every expansion (in a random direction), the chance for another expansion decays depending on the value the specific mineral has. So I can very easily specify minerals, how deep they spawn, how often they occur, and how big the veins will be, which is enough for what I need.

After that, I rewrote big parts of my engine to get better performance, and after that added another big feature, which is lighting. Some pictures:

a freshly generated world
a torch illuminating that world
a torch illuminating that world (animated)
multiple lightsources blending together

I also added a simple inventory and decided on the font:

inventory

The last few days I did some UI stuff and added vendors (which will also be "questgivers"). A Picture of pretty much everything I got now:

torch vendor (warning: 4mb)

You can see selling, buying, placing torches and looting ores. The selling and buying is done by flinging the item out of the box, which is a nice, fun touch in my opinion.


And that's where I am today. The most basic game is done now, I can start a game, loot my first ores, sell, get rich. Next up is more gameplay, "quests", upgrades.



## Update 1 (21. January 2013) ##

Small update, didn't have a lot of motivation the last week, but did some small things:

Added item-tooltips
Implemented a basic oxygen-supply-thingy (on the right)

The deeper you are, the faster your oxygen-supply decreases.
When you don't have any oxygen left, you will fall unconscious. You will be rescued, but you will lose all of your inventory (may change that to a randomized amount), and lose some money.

You can see all that in this little gif too. (warning: 5mb)



## Update 2 (11. May 2013) ##

Did some work again this week, after a longer pause.

 - added a map! (there were other styles (1, 2), what would you pick?). Also can't decide on the block style yet (outline or 3d).
 - added "quests" (questgiver, locked on, quest-description).
 - added a proper titlescreen! The logo of the game will be infront of the sky.
 - added dynamite!

 - also did some smaller things like an exit confirmation or a loading screen(wow!) and some behind the scene changes for faster loadtimes.

Thats it for now, hope I won't run out of steam again.


## Final Update (28. August 2013) ##

After a longer pause, I finished up the game in the last month and actually released it 2 days ago!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nugar.pirtann

The graphics are still mostly the same because I am unable to make better ones (I tried), but I still got great positive feedback on the game.

[Quarry]

How do you do that lighting? If it's per pixel then must be super costly

[Nugar]

How do you do that lighting? If it's per pixel then must be super costly

As you can see in the screens, the "pixels" are pretty large. In the screens my lightpixels are 16*16 pixels large. So for my standard res of 800x480 i only have 50x30 real pixels, which I render to a 50x30 texture and rendering that scaled to fullscreen.
I save positions of lightsources and calculate the lightmap at the start of the game and recalculate everytime I place a light. I keep that lightmap in memory (only the illuminated parts of course) and render to my small texture accordingly. very performance friendly (only need to render a small, scaled texture, and only need to calculate when placing a light), but a little more memory heavy. At the moment, even if my whole map is illuminated and stored in memory, I have more than enough on my older smartphone, and it runs on nearly 60fps. I also think it fits my pixel-look as a side-effect, and if I want I could add an option to up the resolution of the lightpixels for higher-end phones.
I used this method because I myself have an older phone and want to play my game myself, and other options such as shaders were just too slow for my phone.
I hope I explained that good enough.

[Nugar]

Small update, didn't have a lot of motivation the last week, but did some small things:

Added item-tooltips
Implemented a basic oxygen-supply-thingy (on the right)

The deeper you are, the faster your oxygen-supply decreases.
When you don't have any oxygen left, you will fall unconscious. You will be rescued, but you will lose all of your inventory (may change that to a randomized amount), and lose some money.

You can see all that in this little gif too. (warning: 5mb)

[Nugar]

Did some work again this week, after a longer pause.

 - added a map! (there were other styles (1, 2), what would you pick?). Also can't decide on the block style yet (outline or 3d).
 - added "quests" (questgiver, locked on, quest-description).
 - added a proper titlescreen! The logo of the game will be infront of the sky.
 - added dynamite!

 - also did some smaller things like an exit confirmation or a loading screen(wow!) and some behind the scene changes for faster loadtimes.

Thats it for now, hope I won't run out of steam again.

[hryx]

- added a map! (there were other styles (1, 2), what would you pick?).

I would pick the very first in that list, where each tile has one shade.

As for the overall look, don't dis yourself too hard for having "programmer art" because it seems like you have a decent start (says this non-visual-artist). But I would suggest, if you are going for a pixel look, picking a base pixel size and sticking to it. Your assets are kind of all over the place in that sense -- sprites, fonts (most obvious in the outline), and particles. Avoid scaling by non-integer ratios, if at all. And if you do want to use particle emitters, having the particles themselves use that base pixel size would at least help. In this case, the torches looked out of place to me, whereas the grey "explosions" aren't so bad.

I think the 16px light blocks are great and support the look and feel. (Though upon close inspection I can tell they don't line up pixel-perfect... just another example of the same point.)

Apologies if I've commented on things you've already corrected. You've documented with screens quite thoroughly!

[Nugar]

-snip-

Thanks for the feedback!

"first in the list" is a little ambigous, which one do you mean? the first one linked (with the word "map") or the first alternative (with "1")?
As for the pixel-size: generally, 1 pixel in my game is 4 real pixels. I experimented a little with the font, but the problem is that if I want the 4 pixel-ratio the font gets either too big or jagged/stretched, and you can't really do an outline thats 4 pixel-wide. But I still think the font fits.

I will redo all the particle effects as they are placeholders too, and will experiment with the sizes, maybe I can get a good looking flame-effect with pixel-particles.
The lightmap is actually half a lightblock shifted, because it looked weird/too obvious (especially on the border between tiles) when they were aligned, might revisit that though.

The (x) for the tooltips is only 2/3px too, because I thought they were too big otherwise, but as it turns out bigger is better on a touchscreen, so I changed that to be 4px.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, and good to know my art isn't too bad, because I will probably keep most of it for the release (well, I will polish it up a little), because finding an artist is pretty hard.

[Nugar]

After a longer pause, I finished up the game in the last month and actually released it 2 days ago!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nugar.pirtann

The graphics are still mostly the same because I am unable to make better ones (I tried), but I still got great positive feedback on the game.