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[Hangedman]

Small games keep turning into big games. So I'm going to make a big game instead. One I've been planning for a while, and I finally have the means to commit to making. If I need a break, I'll work on my small games.

I'm tired of making amusing or mildly interesting games. I want to make an intriguing, fascinating, bizarre and interesting game.

Working title is Aust.
Using Unity, Blender, GIMP, and a whole lot of help from allies.
No percentages. My own milestones and a long view. Already got a headstart.

Concepts will appear alongside the progress updates.
I'll also be rambling about things I need to learn to get this done, and things I learn along the way. Like PCG, shaders, architecture, weapon design, linguistics, time concepts, 3D animation, cellular regeneration, animal and human behaviour, adaptive sound design, mecha illustration and construction, and all that.

[Hangedman]

Here's a chunk of my inspirations, right click view bigger.

ART:                                                                                GAME:

Paper Mario - Dark Souls - Captain Blood

Yuichi Kumakura - Roger Deans

Borderlands - Nethack - Iji

Ooguchi - Tsutomu Nihei

Radio the Universe - EYE - Siseon

[eigenbom]

shadow of the beast, woo. that game changed my life.

[Hangedman]

shadow of the beast, woo. that game changed my life.

Mine as well. It made me kind of sad years later when I finally beat it and realized it was only like 10 minutes long without the brutal difficulty. But it's still amazing for that.

[Hangedman]

Night 01:
Here's a Vine. Sorry I can't embed it.
I've already created randomly generated chains of rooms in 3D. Currently they only follow one pattern from point A to B but I'll be adding multiple other methods, which I'll explain in a post to come.

Basically it picks a border entrance and exit for X, Y and Z faces of 8x8x8 grid, and draws a set pattern of rooms between them, tagging room exits as it goes. A 'block' (8x8x8 rooms) contain 3 of these paths right now. Neighbouring blocks will inherit the adjacent block exits/entrances.

Block (but in 3d):









This evening I very quickly added the proper tower structure to the generation: 2x16x2 blocks per tower. Blocks will connect to each other at edges, basically forming a massive 16x128x16 mess of rooms, hallways, shafts, etc. Size may vary in the final version, we'll see.

Every room node contains an array[6] of its exits, [9] tower xyz, block xyz, and room xyz, so saving will be super easy later once I pare all that down. Good for keeping track and debugging now. Each room will also be assigned an architectural style, according to the chain of hallways it's in. Overlapping rooms can have multiple styles, with weird mixes of props and walls.

[Hangedman]

Night 02:
Tonight I made the blocks connect nicely to each other in all directions. It took me a while to think out how to do it and what order to do it in the code. And then I did it, and it worked perfectly, ima genius.

It really wasn't too complicated, just populating a list of entrances based on previous exits throughout the build. The trick was getting the order right, because each room's exits isn't necessary based on the last because they're being built

01
23

0 exits to 1 and 2, 1 exits to 3, 2 exits to 3.
All 4 get their y exits from below during build.

Here's some stuff to look at:

A tower nicely building itself. Click on it to see a Vine of it in motion cuz I'm not putting a 10sec video on YT.


Me figuring out what numbers I needed. Taking non-awful pictures of paper is hard as hell

[Belimoth]

Something great is going to come of this.

I'm looking forward to it.

[Hangedman]

Night 03:
Kind of a quiet day today, just ruminating a bit while I do other things.

Trying to figure out what the optimum height for a single room would be, in terms of player heights. Too cramped and you get camera/play/claustrophobia issues, and too big and it's a slog.

To that end I'm trying to think about how rooms will connect. I'm starting to think I'm going to be more traditional with my generation after all, because my newest thought is to keep the shafts and hallways w/ some overwriting to put in unique stuff, but also to put in many bigger setpiece rooms and things. 4x4x4 chunks that will overwrite anything in their space and have exits stolen from the removed rooms. Also, secret rooms that don't have ordinary exits.

I'll start experimenting with inserting them tomorrow.

My aim is to create a lot of unique events by overlapping generated/premade all over the place, and adding a bit of chaos, like predamaged walls, missing hallway chunks, and etc.

If you're still wondering what kind of game this is going to be, think about what kind of stories can be told in a randomly generated superstructure of linked rooms of varied interest.
Maybe I need to add Isaac to my inspiration thing as well.

[Hangedman]

Night 03-04:
Friend's birthday evening, super busy family dinner and etc.

All I did was think about better level structure. Got a good idea of what to implement.

Missed the Famicase deadline and I'm mad at myself so I'm going to bed

[Hangedman]

Night 05:
Decided on my rework.
As FARTRON rightly pointed out, my algorithm would do far better for a Descent-like. I don't expect players to jump up and down tall shafts with a thirdperson camera and fall damage.

New plan.
Same 3 paths, x0 to x7, z0 to z7, but y(floor) to y(floor). for(;floor<8;floor++) and you have 8 floors in a block, a little interlinked maze on each floor, with one vertical exit up and one down per floor.
I got the exits up and down matching, now I need to work on getting the exits to the next blocks in line. Shouldn't be a problem, will just take me a bit more time.

Will also give me more variety per floor, since I'll be able to make up many more complex path generations from x0 to x7 and etc.

After that, I'm going to start working in override chunks, inserting larger pieces, 2x2x2, 3x3x3, by simply overwriting chunks of the array, but maintaining the exits.

If you ever wanted to make a procgen Descent-alike, and want to get the idea behind the original algorithm, let me know. But it's super simple, and can be scaled with corridors as elaborate or as simple as you like.

I'll post my notes specifically on the different path generating algorithms, as soon as I get this sorted.

[Hangedman]

Night 06:
Fiddled with the algorithms more and experimented with bigger rooms. Bigger rooms feel much better.

Also messed around with some simple 3D, want to make a couple actors of various size for scale before I do anything more complex.

3D is a right pain.

[Hangedman]

Night 07-08:
Fiddled some more. Getting this crap right is a pain cause I have no sense of scale at the moment. And Blender units don't match nicely to Unity units.
Taking an evening off. This weekend I'm going to tackle a new part, so I don't slow to a stop.

[Hangedman]

Night 10:
I'M WORKING ON IT AGAIN
That was a short slump. Head down and get to work!


HERE'S A SCREENSHOT
Any simple suggestions to make these plain blocks prettier? Need to get hype.

[happymonster]

Lighting?

[Hangedman]

Lighting it is.

[Hangedman]

Well, I didn't think I was going to do milestones, but I realized for something this complex I have to. So many of these things are tied into each other, that I need some kind of roadmap so I don't end up with spaghetti code. Probably going to edit this a million times.

WORLD
□ Room
    ■ Walls
    ■ Exits
    □ Lighting
    □ Decor
    □ Damage
    □ Age
□ Tower
    ■ NEW Block Rooms Algorithm
    □ NEW Block Y Algorithm
    □ NEW Block Exits Algorithm
    □ Tower Infrastructure
    □ Tower Shell
□ Curve
    □ Tower Algorithm
    □ Tower Links/Bridges
    □ Curve Structure

ENTITIES
□ AI
    □ Aggressive
    □ Passive
    □ Mindless
    □ Pathfinding
□ Models
    □ Bio Base
    □ Synth Base
    □ Biosynth Base
    □ Digi Base
    □ Alloy Base
    □ Metal Base
    □ Props

MECHANICS
□ Simple Movement
    ■ Basic Thirdperson
    ■ Jumping
    ■ Camera Control
    □ Better Thirdperson
□ Combat
    □ Attacking
    □ Blocking/Parrying
    □ Evading
    □ Clocking
    □ Stat Adjustments
□ Weapons
    ■ Weapon Designs
    ■ Weapon Arrays
    □ Weapon Models
    □ Weapon Generation    
    □ Weapon Effects
□ Interaction
    □ Interaction UI
    □ Glyph Fonts
    □ Font Handling
□ UI
    □ Mechanical UI
    □ Menus
□ Effects
    □ All Of The Effects
□ Time
    □ Plot
    □ Aging

SAVING/LOADING
□ How
    □ No, seriously, how

[Hangedman]

Blame the Game Club and cool new friends

[Connor]

looks pretty damn cool!

[Hangedman]

I know this isn't much yet, but I'm still percolating.
The structure can now be navigated top to bottom, with proper vertical and horizontal room exits. They're just doorways and steps for now.
Still have to reconnect blocks, but soon it will be a massive contiguous tower.
Going to have to break out the pro trial soon because the lack of occlusion is already causing issues.



One of the other reasons why I started a bigger project was because I reasoned that if I slowed down on it at all I might want to work on other smaller projects.
Turns out I was right.

[paste]

Here's a chunk of my inspirations, right click view bigger.

ART:                                                                                GAME:
*Images snipped*

would you mind captioning these images for me with their titles? they all look appealing and i can only identify a few (the most obvious) games.