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[alspal]

this is looking fantastic, I love what your doing with this.

[Shizin]

Sorry, I don't even know why I said that, 
I feel really stupid right now 

I really love the atmosphere of the screen shots, very lonely looking... by the way, will there be any other character?

Keep up the great work, maybe some game play footage in the near future?

[Ed]

Thanks guys!

@astrospoon - I think there's enough room in the wilderness for both projects
The 2D/3D thing was indeed a tough choice, for exactly the reason you describe. Hopefully keeping everything simple and non-realistic will make progress smooth enough.

@aliceffekt - since the plot and scope is being simplified (but is still very vague) I'm not sure if those concepts will be exactly reflected in the game. We'll see Watch this space!

@Shizin - what? I missed whatever you said :D  Anyway, I'm glad it looks lonely. Other characters... yes, there will probably be a few. Maybe a few villagers/hermits... maybe some ghostly figures that you glimpse running through the trees... maybe some other strange wanderers. 
I'll have a look at capturing some footage....

I'm currently reading a book called The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane. There are some paragraphs that are so inspiring and relevant to this project that I might retype them and post them here later.

[Ed]

So, I tried to capture/edit some footage but got annoyed and depressed :D
Maybe I'll have another go tomorrow. My in-game camerawork is horrible...

Meanwhiles, here are those bits of book:

The Koyukon people of north-west interior Alaska use intricate stories to map their landscape: narration as navigation. According to the anthropologist Richard Nelson, who lived closely with the Koyukon, the landscape is to them:

"filled with networks of paths, names, and associations. People know every feature of the landscape in minute detail. The lakes, river bends, hills and creeks are named and imbued with personal and cultural meaning. People move in a world that constantly watches - a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature, however wild, remote ... is never truly alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel."

Walking in the dark to an irish ring fort:

Eventually I reached the fort, navigating by a mixture of map, memory and luck. Three rings of pale stone, partly grown over by grass, and the central enclosed circle a jungle of thorn and briar. I sat between the first and second walls, under the guardian arm of an old elder, which had curled round and down upon itself to form a nearly closed hoop.

[Ed]

I managed to make a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OqQ6-ESp4
(made with camstudio and windows movie maker)

The camerawork is pretty jerky at times, and I found that making a video really highlights all the graphical glitches and rough edges, but it was quite a useful excercise.

Known ugly bits:
- tree trunks sometime not meeting the foliage properly
- flowers are placeholders
- terrain texture is still grid-based
- the huts are (badly) randomly placed and don't sit on the terrain properly
- the cloud layer is moderately broken at the moment

[Xion]

 

This looks awesome as nuts, man. I love the trees.

[alspal]

whoa, looking fantastic amazing!

[Shizin]

I think it looks wonderful too, especially the music.

[Ivan]

This is really really great. I love the minimal style. Inspiring stuff!

I know that it's partially because it's a WIP, but I really like the bareness of it all. It made seeing those little huts an exciting event, as I'm sure it probably would be if I was wandering around there.

Looks absolutely amazing, keep doing what you're doing!

[Ed]

nyah thanks for the nice words!

I just wasted an evening playing Blood Bowl   
... not quite the whole evening though, as I had a suggestion for an effect to enhance the collage-y look. See this paper. Figure 4(d) is the tl;dr bit.

Ivan - depending on performance issues etc, it will probably look slightly more populated (with plants, other landscape stuff and wildlife) but hopefully it will still be special to discover a village or other interesting location.

Here's another nice quote from The Wild Places, quoted in turn from one Stephen Graham:

'As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.'

[TheCube]

This reminds me of the best part of Noctis IV: Exploring the unknown, finding things that (literally) nobody but you had ever seen.  Except this has plants and stuff.  Love it to death, just from the screenshots. 

Soo...good luck and all that! 

[Ed]

Small update: Currently working on making the different regions totally data-driven, so you can have "dense pine forest" or "medium mixed forest". This will also pave the way to the terrain texturing being much improved (more like procedural painting than tile-based) although this is probably a little way off. This is also getting ready for graphically improved roads and special features like woodland clearings.

Also, I'm trying to think of a new semi-permanent name that reflects the "maybe-sentient wilderness" theme. Current candidates are

• Widdershins - pagan-ish thing about going anti-clockwise around stuff... fun-sounding word and will probably connect with some interactive discoverable stuff in future
• Wildward(s) - "towards the wilderness" and maybe also the meaning of "ward" as "to guard" or "region"

@TheCube - Thanks!  Noctis is probably a good comparison, from what i've read, but sadly I never managed to work out how to play it. I used to play Frontier (Elite 2) in a very exploration-focused way, trying to find weird star systems and land on interesting moons.

PS: Has anyone read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood ()? I discovered it fairly recently and it's in tune with some aspects of this, although a bit more malevolent. Wikipedia blurb, Project Gutenberg full text. It was a favorite of HP Lovecrafts, which might give you some big clues.

[DrDerekDoctors]

I like Widdershins, although it might give people Pratchetty preconceptions.

[swordofkings128]

ddude, I'm incredibley interested in this project . if you need some music, holla at me.

[Ed]

if you need some music, holla at me.

Thanks! There are some long-distance plans for music, but I'll PM you... 

---

Update time!

Stuff that I've been doing today:

• "Biomes" (I nicked the term from Dwarf Fortress and am misusing even more here) are now data-driven and there are a few different types of forest.
• Rework of the terrain texturing to make it more "painted" rather than strictly tilebased. Still pretty rough but has potential I think. Also improved the beaches a bit, and made the texture painting ini-file-driven.
• Roads now use an improved "painted" texturing system and also divert around trees at the texel level.
• Last-minute bonus item: Raindrops that can be sheltered from under trees. This is fairly horribly hacked in, but it's been one of my key (but strangely trivial) desired bits of gameplay for about 2 years. There is currently no effect, except the word "WET!!" appearing on screen, but the gameplay is pretty close, right?!

Pics:






(the lame placeholder flowers are still there)

Names.... I think I'm going to leave it for a while. DrDD, you're right about the Prachettiness, hadn't thought of it like that but it's obvious now. Probably my favourite (relevent) name ever is "Where The Wild Things Are".