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[Squishymonster]

Worlds Below, or Echoes of Worlds Below

Explore an infinite overworld, find abandoned dungeons built by old civilizations, and loot whatever remains, if you can get past the new residents. Get deep enough and you may find map fragments that will lead you to allied dungeons in other parts of the world.

The game loop is heavily based on inventory / load management, and looting. You place a tent on the overworld near a newly located dungeon entrance. The tent has a large inventory and allows you to fully heal. You venture in and out of the latest dungeon, looting each floor and dragging your treasures out a little bit at a time. Inside, you can set a bedroll that allows you to heal half of your health.

Full devlog: http://worldsbelow.com/echoes/

[Squishymonster]

I felt it was necessary to start using textures that I have the rights to, so for now I switched to a desert theme using some purchased temp textures that are reduced down to the currently supported dimensions. I have an artist lined up (my fiance!) and I expect we'll be going higher res.

Below is a screenshot from the latest build. Here I'm experimenting with fog distance, fog range, streaming distance, horizon curvature, hand-building dungeon entrances, and the primary thing - an in-game command console to facilitate commands for making prefabs out of my dungeon entrances. More details are at the main site.

Another thing to note here, is that rather than relying on the roguelike style teleport stairs, this dungeon entrance experiments with standard "physical" stairs. I'm trying to find the absolute minimum entrance footprint required for both types and then decide which to use. This entrance is able to squeeze in at only 3 blocks above ground, because I can push and pull the height of terrain cell corners to make a nice transition onto the steps. Chunk-edges currently rip though but that's easy enough to fix.

I like the footprint of this entrance. I may just axe the roguelike stairs, and contextualize that feature as teleporters, or maybe I'll have "physical" stairs to transition between overworld and 1st floor, but then once in a dungeon use roguelike stairs. It sort of depends on how that feels in terms of consistency.

http://worldsbelow.com

[Squishymonster]

I'm moving toward functionality for hand-building set-pieces and exporting them for procedural placement. This required that I add support for multiple worlds and saves per world. The 2nd world is a special one called Construct. It does not have terrain, and is made of an infinite plane of special Construct blocks, with visualized chunk boundaries. In this world I will be able to edit one set piece per chunk, and then export via the command console. The export process will strip off the Construct blocks, adding just the meaningful parts in the prefab. Once exported, set piece prefabs will be selected by various procedural systems while generating the game world.

Set pieces may include things like dungeon entrances, special dungeon rooms or building blocks, village buildings, etc.

The linked video demonstrates my progress toward these objectives.

http://worldsbelow.com/echoes/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/08.02.15.mp4

[Squishymonster]

I'm still using mostly placeholder art, but things are about to turn a corner. I spent some time dialing in the tech. It has transitioned from a block world with traditional terrain to something a little more along the lines of Bethesda tech. That is, heightmap based overworld with prefab based dungeons.

There are some differences though, the main ones being that the overworld is still infinite and random, and the dungeons are random as well.

I've also worked out the key gameplay mechanics which involve venturing in to a dungeon in order to find information about the location of others along with story bits. The world will generate a random number of story dungeons within a certain soft radius, and then additional infinite dungeons beyond that which do not contain story advancement just character development and battle mechanics / exploration.

I made a new video of the tech prototype using placeholder art. It includes an initial quest scenario, along with overworld and dungeon test.

Next focus will be to replace assets and shore things up in order to post an executable so that folks can play along as the more interesting bits begin to happen.

http://worldsbelow.com/echoes/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/12.29.15.mp4

[Squishymonster]

Packing the tent, moving it from the Pack inventory to the Quick inventory, then pitching the tent above the first story dungeon.

video: http://worldsbelow.com/echoes/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/01.04.162.mp4?_=1

[Squishymonster]

Cleaning up some odds and ends in the current build, and trying to learn about auto-updating.

[Squishymonster]

Here is debug rendering of the smoke column from player's camp fire. The fire and column are important to the gameplay. The fire is used as a respawn point, and can only be placed on the overworld. So if you die in a dungeon, this is where you'll go, regardless of how deep you were. Also, though the overworld is "inifinite", you'll be able to see the smoke column off in the distance if you wander away from camp - at least for a ways.

It's doing its job already because I was getting a little tired of losing camp when hunting for the first story dungeon

By burning a special item in the fire you'll change the color of the smoke and that signals the Wandering Merchant to find you. He shows up the next day and that is how you sell your loot. It's like a mobile version of the typical rogue-like city above the dungeon. In Echoes the player is a wanderer, and so to is the merchant.

[Squishymonster]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVY9eXMIeAo&feature=youtu.be

- larger terrain & chunks
- fog instead of horizon bending to hide streaming margin. - bending counteracts height perception.
- experimenting with flat shading and ground-bands shader to show movement
- fog color calculated from time of day & sky
- Sped-up time of day significantly to experiment with fog color

Overall I like the general direction of the textureless experiment. More things to try out. The interpolation between night and day on the fog kinda hurts my eyes. That'll change.

Going to sprinkle little "junk" meshes all over the place to assist with movement perception. And realized a good gameplay mechanic related to that.

[Squishymonster]

Been a while, but things are still moving forward.

I decided to take the leap and port from my custom C++ engine to Unity 5.x, so that set me back a couple of weeks. It's not a 100% port - I've just moved over the really critical stuff, like ground...

Over the last several evenings I've been working on crow behavior.

Once I started walking around in the endless desert I thought "how can I direct players to the dungeons that are out there?" I shouldn't rely on players finding them randomly, that would be a pretty boring experience. I started thinking about enemies pacing around in the desert, and how you might kill, and as they die they turn toward the dungeon that they came from. I kind of explored that route for a few days, but it just didn't seem to fit quite right.

Luckily inspiration struck. I decided that the overworld would be inhabited by crows, and these crows make homes of the old dead dungeon entrances. But they don't stay there indefinitely - they wander, and scavenge. As the player wanders the desert, he comes across these birds constantly, and if he can distract them from their scavenging they just might return turn, inadvertently guiding the way for the player.

The video below demonstrates infinite terrain in the unity port, default skybox, ground bands shader, and most importantly, a test of crow behavior for finding dungeons in the middle of nowhere.

I'm pretty excited about this idea because I think it plays in to the world and gameplay perfectly. I can't wait to explore it further.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcxym-Ob1N4&feature=youtu.be