TIGSource Forums

Greetings members of TigSource! Our project, "Project Q" is a SandBox Adventure Game that is focusing on a very fun combat system, a large detailed world, and lots of content.

Although still in early development, we are mainly focusing on developing the core overworld first before any major content. Our plan right now is to make this pretty ambitious game strictly on our free time. Planning through our development we did not want to use Kickstarter, Patreon, or any other means of early funding until we actually have a product that is worth funding and, more importantly, is playable.  With nothing holding us two developers back we are going to try and create our dream game!

To avoid 'Development Hell' we have the entire game planned in chapters of major development all the way to a final finished product. That not only we are sure we can make in the first place, but are super excited to play in the end.

We have a lot of exciting concepts yet to share with everyone, But in good time of course. We don't want to go promising a bunch of features that may or may not make it in to the final game. We're just going to show you what we have so far and then update with each build.

We can say that right now we have working more or less a random island generator, custom lighting, multiplayer (that's right!), basic combat, saving/loading, and some other super-secret (for now) features.

(http://i61.tinypic.com/rbksh3.jpg)

Our current build is getting close to finishing up the "Guts" of our game. As of right now we're currently working on landscapes, forests, and foilage and we're moving closer to finishing up on those. Then we'll be moving onto housing and towns.

(http://i.imgur.com/5BX24yz.png)

In between the overworld and housing we'll soon be focusing on combat that is a mixture of traditional hack and slash with some skill based abilities to keep combat as fun as we can manage. But until then we'll be continue to work on the base game and properly put up worthy updates.

If you want to know a tiny bit more about me, you can read my post on the Obligatory Introduce Yourself Thread at http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45.msg1116347#msg1116347 (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45.msg1116347#msg1116347). My partner in crime, Cody, may or may not exist.

If you want to more closely follow development, just follow me on Twitter with @purenickery (I promise to start using it more)

-Nick :beer:

Update 1!
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I thought I would share a bit about how the world was generated and what part of it I'm working on currently. This will ideally give out some of the game's juicy details and ideas.

The main world in the game is generated in a mostly horizontal slice (think Castle Crashers), this accomplishes two main goals: it gives the player a better sense of direction in the world and makes it WAY easier to generate!
(http://i61.tinypic.com/i1mqab.png)
Here's an image showing a slice of something the game might generate, including rivers, different floor types, trees, and patches of flowers. However have no fear! The world it generates is much more detailed than this image shows, I use various types of noise to add variation to the grass heights and density (as you might be able to see in the screenshot above) as well as many more improvements to come.

Also no real Adventure Game/Sort-of Rogue-Like would be complete without caves and dungeons! Succumbing to this relentless pier-pressure I've been messing around with various algorithms for generating these caves and dungeons.
(http://i57.tinypic.com/313j4sw.png)-(http://i57.tinypic.com/2jaf42p.png)-(http://i57.tinypic.com/2m85x6p.png)-(http://i62.tinypic.com/6sett1.png)
After generating a couple hundred way-too-small images of the caves it generated I was able to go through and pick out a few that looked pretty nice! (It's actually pretty consistent right now :eyebrows:)
(http://i59.tinypic.com/t537sx.png)
Also opened up the possibility for giant boss fight caves in the future.
(http://i62.tinypic.com/35infkh.png)-(http://i59.tinypic.com/a2wwon.png)-(http://i57.tinypic.com/2uz3w44.png)
Dungeons! Again, some way-too-small images but they should do the job for those sprightly young eyes of yours. Unbeknownst to you, but knownst to me, the dungeons floors are generating in a way so that stairs can lead sensibly to each successive level, the single red pixels in each of the images represents a staircase.

All I have to do now is berate Cody ceaselessly until he gives me art to fill these dungeons and caves with but for now all I have are code-generated images of the layouts. The caves have to be filled with all kinds of whacky and ridiculous monsters and the dungeon corridors are begging for unseen and dastardly traps!

If anyone has any questions about the game or how it's generated or what my favorite color is feel free to ask and I will do my very best to answer. Next up, I'm considering posting about the super neat lighting system, the incredibly neat online multiplayer, or the unbelievably neat modding support! If anyone has any preferences on what they'd like to hear about I'd love to hear about their preference!

-Nick  :shrug2:

What is your favorite colour Nick? :P Haha but in all seriousness this sounds great can't wait to see more screenshots of the game!

Well it's quite a long story actually, my mind tends to share allegiance between two separate colors! They both get really jealous of each other but as long as I keep them mostly separate it works out fine. Orange came to me early in life; it never let me down all those classes in Kindergarten when all the other markers just weren't doing the job. It stood out. It was a bright shining beacon of the hope and promise that a boy of that age needs so desperately. Green came to me later in life, and I'm not sure exactly why. It could be perhaps that I began to just colors based on their individual merit and not based simply on how shiny their markers were, and while orange stood out to me in that context, green in it's many shades and forms stood out to me more when encountered in other natural organic forms. That mistress orange, however, I will never forget. She came to me in a time when I needed her most, and memories of that sweet, beautiful orange marker will never leave me.

As for the screenshots I will certainly be posting more! I tend to be quite a perfectionist when sharing screenshots so the screenshots have to be really good for me to post them. I'm thinking about setting aside a block of time today just to take a whole bunch of screenshots and seeing what sticks. And thanks for your reply MereMonkey!!

I say, wasn't excepting that at all haha mine's orange.  ;)

Awesome looking forward to them!!

Us orange bros gotta stick together  ;)       Anyways on to...

¡Actualizar dos!
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After putting a few of the more unique Project Q features into a hat and randomly pulling one out, today I will be discussing the lighting system! At least I think the lighting system we have set up is pretty unique, I don't know of any other isometric style games with a similar system.

So lets take a look at the end product to see what my end goal was. (It's still not perfect, I'll be doing some more tweeking)

(http://i61.tinypic.com/kalras.png)

(http://i61.tinypic.com/1zvvnnn.png) Things to notice about this: -The objects in the world react to the light as if they were standing up in 3D. The tops of the trees are dark since the light is on the ground, and the tip of a blade of grass will get brighter than the base. -Yeah that's about it really

This means that for every pixel I draw not only do I have to know it's x and y coordinates but ALSO a mysterious z cooradinate! I knew that normal maps would send a separate texture to the GPU giving information about the angle of each pixel when drawing an image so maybe I could use something similar to serve this purpose. For an object that is just meant to be a vertical plane I can easily generate a pixel image of increasing color value to represent the height of each pixel. The shader can then calculate the pixel's distance from the light using the x and y coordinates from the screen and the z coordinate from the height map image. For the especially curious here's how it would look:

(http://i59.tinypic.com/py4gh.png)

(and don't worry graphics programmers out there! The heightmap it uses in the game itself is 1 pixel wide to save space) This system allows me to draw any image up to 256 pixels tall. All the shader cares about is the R channel of the heightmap (this will come into play later), and the R channel of a pixel can hold 256 different values.

"But wait!!" I can hear you all screaming into your computer screens, "what if an object's base is off the ground, like a creature jumping or a magic flying tree?!?!?" Well never fear! I have a custom mesh sending all the textures in the sprite batch that has an extra attribute sent to the vertex shader containing the base z height of the texture. So all I have to do is add the z height from the height-map and the base z value!

Speedy topic change  :ninja:

I started using the cave generator in my last post to start generating cliffs on the main surface of the game, a-la:

(http://i60.tinypic.com/5vqio5.png)

But darn it all this ruins everything! EVERYTHING!!! the cliffs aren't flat vertical surfaces, how am I going to get the light working correctly with them? Well, since the shader checks the height-map for each pixel it draws, I could make a custom height-map for each peice of the cliff that contains each z height for each pixel in the cliff! All I have to do is draw a z height on every pixel of the cliff images, that shouldn't take a very long time at all...  :crazy:
Nah don't worry I already did it, finished it today FINALLY GAAAAAHHH!!!! :waaagh:

(http://i60.tinypic.com/2ueoen9.png)

It's so beautiful  :tearsofjoy:

So remember when I said the shader only cares about the R channel of the heightmap? I made a few various colors with decreasing R values, but pretty random G and B values so I could tell the different bands apart when drawing them on. Drawing on tons of shades of very very dark grey would have been HELL! I'm thinking of things I could use the other channels for but got nothing right now, they're just wasted.

Knowing the z value of each pixel is turning out to be incredibly useful as well. For example, if I have a cloud shadow going across the ground, I can use the z of each pixel to check where it is relative to the floor, so the shadow will slide across tall trees like they would in real life!

(http://i59.tinypic.com/10xqyd1.png)

Last of all, just for funsies  :shrug2:, here's what the game looks like just drawing all the height-maps instead of the textures, looks pretty cool.

(http://i61.tinypic.com/2qbzw5e.png)

Since animated GIFs seem to be all the rage these days I've cooked one up for you guys (or rather decided to post one I captured a while ago). Beware as the quality is pretty low, but you can check it out here: http://gfycat.com/JoyousRewardingKillerwhale
I posted it on gyfcat to save on making it load up here, let me know if that's the way to go with these things!
I promise I'll post another full in-depth update within the next couple days on one of the game's cool features, so hold on to your seats!

Wow, this is actually really cool. That lighting is very impressive. Looking forward to progression.

Damn.... I have like no knowledge of graphics programming at all. I wish I could do stuff like this  :(
But good job! This is very impressive to me  :beer:

Thanks for your replies!!


I actually had *very* little knowledge of graphics programming before this project and hardly knew what a shader was. If you're interested in learning I can lead you to a few websites that really helped me out! Graphics programming really feels like being a modern-day wizard once you get it down  ;D

As have many legends before me, I entered in my first Ludum Dare last weekend! Any of you who want to try it out can do so here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49927 (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49927)

A lot of people have been saying the animation and art are really good which is hilarious because it was my first time doing either of those  :o I've always been a programmer at heart  :shrug2: anyways hope you enjoy it!! It turned out surprisingly well I think ^_^

Also, since I haven't posted this yet before, if anyone wants to they can follow my game-making progess on twitter with @purenickery, I'm going to try and start using it more, haha  :coffee:

Good day ladies and gentlemen :gentleman: Who wants to hear about our modding/entity system?! I'll go ahead and assume the thunder outside isn't the weather conditions but rather everyone giving a resounding yes.
Our main goal for this system was to allow players to add their own content to the game as easily as possible. With little programming knowledge any player should be able to add their own items and entities to the world to use in their own games and multiplayer games with their friends! Not only will this open a huge door for players who want to craft their own experiences, but it also means we can get all our players to basically make the game for us! We wont have to make any content ourselves!
As fun as that would be we've decided to make the game it's own full experience while allowing people to add their own things.

How this will work is there will be a folder (either in the User folder or AppData or something) where you can store all the mods in their own folders. Inside the mod folder will be descriptions of items, entities, or even new game code (if I can get that working) that will automatically be loaded in to the game for you to play with!
(http://i57.tinypic.com/a9sqqc.png)
A subfolder will look a bit like this, images for all the added entities along with text files describing how they will work and generate in the world. In order to make the game run faster and lower the number of draw calls I've made a texture packer that will take all these textures and generate one larger texture containing all the entities images (and a separate one with heightmaps!) This might sound inefficient to do every time the game starts but right now it only takes about half a second, and I could also figure out a way to cashe it all for future runs.
(http://i61.tinypic.com/2wlu41x.png)
The observant among you might notice this packer isn't entirely optimal but I prefer to stay away from NP-hard problems in my video games and it would certainly take much longer to run had I made much more of an optimal algorithm. The text files allow you to set variables for the objects as well as specify which java class it should use. I will try and make an easy way for people to throw in their own class files for extra-easy modding. If not I might just have to go all Minecraft-style and have people inject the class files into the jar.

Next up I'll have to post about our animation system or possibly the combat, which we're working on getting integrated into online multiplayer right now! Feel free to ask any questions at all and prepare your bodies for more updates from now on. Tryin' to not slack off this summer mates  :shrug2:


I also thought I'd share this: https://gifsound.com/?gif=giant.gfycat.com/MatureWarmFiddlercrab.gif&v=S2iQDfVsVDM&s=2685 (https://gifsound.com/?gif=giant.gfycat.com/MatureWarmFiddlercrab.gif&v=S2iQDfVsVDM&s=2685)

Rock on dudes  :handmetalL: :nono: :handmetalR: thought I'd share a bit of multiplayer today! I also thought I would post an update NOT at 2 in the morning to maybe reach some more people  :handthumbsupL:

Right now multiplayer works basically in the same way it works with Terraria if you've ever played it. Essentially, one player starts up a server and also plays in it, and friends can then join in the server and play around together. What we have at the moment can be summed up in these two screenshots:

(http://i58.tinypic.com/fe438i.png)
(http://i57.tinypic.com/wioigo.png)

I hope to one day be able to program lighting like you do. Impressive sir!   :beer:

At the dawn of my 4th or 5th time reprogramming the animation system I thought I would go ahead and share it with you all. This will surely be my last time reprogramming it right?! Anyways... today we unveil the Questicamatic!

Let's talk a bit about what we want from an animation system. Of course we want character actions to be drawn onto the screen in a smooth and logical way, and since it's a randomly generated adventure game we'll want to give the player the ability to wear different clothes and have different looking body-parts. And, of course, since we're hard-core programmer types, we want this to work as efficiently as possible.

We decided to split the body into three separate parts, the head, arms, and body. Each of these being interchangeable. Now we also have to have the ability to put overlays onto those body parts, for example a helmet would be an overlay of the head, and armor would be an overlay of the body.

Now we can construct animations by piecing together frames from the different body parts, moving/rotating them to fit the animation. This way we can use a select few frames for each body part but get many different movements by simply moving and rotating them!

For example, to add in a brand new sword we only have to make 6 different images of the sword at different angles or with motion blur to have the new sword animate correctly in all the animations!

Examples!!

(http://i.giphy.com/3oEduWNLEIjaRSLazm.gif)

You can see the body parts in the top right and the animation frames in the bottom left. If you notice, body parts can also be arranged to be in front of or behind other body parts for each individual frame!

Another!

(http://i.giphy.com/3oEduItGFUNRkBgJGg.gif)

And to all you dedicated fans out there wondering if you can use this editor to add your own weapons, armor, and animations to the game you certainly will be able to! It goes along with our goal of making this game *really* easy to mod.

And lastly, to tingle your senses with another lighting gif, here's a test of flaming arrows in a dense forest!

(http://i.giphy.com/26BkMSiL18q85gHoQ.gif)

Just finished transferring most of the game loading to my brand new file format! Before I was using XML but I started migrating over to a simpler one for players to be able to mod the game a bit easier. Here's how an item is represented in text for example:

If a player wanted to add their own items to the game all they have to do is add their own block like this to the data file and an image for the item and it will automatically work in the game!

I am beginning to realize that in order to accrue a more dedicated fanbase I'm going to have to put out more updates! Thus, I have vowed to make updating the devlog a more regular thing for me over the course of summer (and hopefully beyond).
So, for today, I thought I'd share with y'all the cooking system I whipped up. It pretty accurately describes the kind of crafting system we're going for. It is less of an A+B=C system and more of a hands-on approach.

(http://fat.gfycat.com/FirsthandBlackGreathornedowl.gif)

As you can see, you throw some food in a range and it will slowly cook, first transitioning from a raw to cooked image, and then to black. The closer it is to the cooked image when you take it out of the range the better cooked the food will be! This will also allow us to give different stoves and fires different sizes to allow you to fit more or less food on them. We'll also be able to change how fast each stove will cook the food.

Also, new grass! woo!

I'd love to hear any of your comments or questions as well! We are considering releasing some small demos soon so let us know if any of you are interested in try out the game as well. I'll start posting more about combat once I get it polished up.

Particles are turning out to be much more efficient than I was originally suspecting! Working with my lighting system and my unoptimized shader I can still have around 10,000 particles on the screen while they are also reflecting. I don't see us ever needing this number of particles which is great news for us. Here's a test picture showing how many particles can be on the screen while still running at 60 fps!

(http://i58.tinypic.com/34zgltk.jpg)

Finally got an official version of equipping done! (after trying to come up with a good way for about a year) We eventually decided it would be pretty cool to just leave the equipped items in the inventory but marking them as equipped so that you have to balance what you keep in your inventory more. We want inventory balancing to be a pretty important part of the game.

(http://fat.gfycat.com/FriendlyBountifulIchidna.gif)

Dang, that grass is really pretty! Does that many moving sprites make it lag in fullscreen?

Also ingame is there always a 2x, (or 4x?) zoom applied? Asking since your gifs are zoomed.

I've made sure the game always runs at 60fps with no interruptions! (at least on my rinky-dink little laptop) Occasionally it'll slow down to 40fps or so if the screen if really full of NPCs in a town but I still have optimizing to do on that.

Ingame there will always be a 4x zoom so you can see those beautiful pixels in all their glory :)

I've also just now gotten around to polishing up the main menu! We've almost got ourselves an actually professional game here folks. One of the feelings we're aiming to evoke from this game is that similar to reading a really good adventure book, and in homage to that the main menu is designed similar to a book. Each menu is on a different page and flipping through it will let you change the settings and start/load your games. Similarly we will also have books like this in-game where you can read through some of the lore of the game! (but my lazy butt hasn't gotten around to putting that part in yet)

(http://fat.gfycat.com/BitterYoungBelugawhale.gif)

Also as another update, we've finally gotten to the point where most of the behind-the-scenes stuff is done and we can get on to adding a whole bunch of content to the game itself! It's an exciting time to be following this game now  ;)

This is a thoroughly beautiful game and I really enjoyed reading the logs so far! The lighting seems like a really great system and not too over the top which is nice. Have you got any generated caves you can show us with the sprites and things? My only feedback is that the menu items look a little flat on the curved page of the book. Maybe you could just flatten the page a little or have a drop shadow as if the text is hovering above the page?

That book reminds me of morrowind. Keep improving that milkshake.

Thanks for the comments and advice! We will try to do something about the book because I know what you're talking about, but we don't want to have to put in a system too complex for it. And here's a picture of the caves! It's just the walls right now but soon they'll be infested with minerals and monsters.

(http://oi58.tinypic.com/2rqc76w.jpg)


Haha! I'm glad you noticed the loading messages. One day me and my friend got together and came up with a hundred or so funny/snarky loading messages to pop up randomly. We just have this issue where I programmed the game loading pretty well so it loads too fast for you to read the messages very well. Guess I'll just have to make the world generation much more complex so you can actually read them!

Make it 3d. Then you'll be able to notice them

The cave looks weird. It just looks like a single flat surface with two different colors. You could be walking in a chasm, or walking on a high path over the dark rocks. I can't tell since the black rocks have no vertical transition.

We were actually considering making the game 3d at first! We decided to stick with 2d though because it's what we're used to and good at. We will definitely make a 3d version later on if we ever get the chance!


Yeah I know what you mean and I agree :/ its a pretty tough choice deciding what to do here since the dark rocks aren't supposed to be a higher path, they're just solid rock. It'd be easier to show the distinction if we did it like the cliffs where there was an obvious higher path but we don't want to give that illusion in the caves since then players will want to climb up to the higher level. They are just a first draft however so they'll probably change!

I think Jctwood just meant make the text on the book 3d so it would wrap. Not the whole game.

Hello everyone! I thought I'd brag about our first official use of the particle system, which just so happens to be sprucing up the falling of trees. It took us a while to decide how to handle cutting down trees. Should we go the tradition route and have trees just spontaneously disappear and have logs appear in the player's inventory? Perhaps we should force the players to be so pacifistic they refuse to harm even trees?

Alas, we have decided to actually visualize the tree falling and hitting the ground once it's cut down, and have it mysteriously break into individual logs upon impact that the player can cart away for construction. The ground impact is where the particles come in. I can now have it burst some dust clouds to float up and some little tree bits to fly around for emphasis.

In traditional minecraftian style, the player simple punches the tree to have it fall over (for now, this will change once Cody gets me some axe swingin' action).

(http://fat.gfycat.com/FirstAthleticCur.gif)

In other news! For selling the game we have decided to go traditional minecraftian style and sell accounts for the game that people can use the update and post on forums. To go with this we are almost done making a website for the game which we will post here once it's ready. We will be allowing people to register for free (that's right!) for the first week or so once the website goes up (you lucky bastards). The forums will be up for people to post on and we'll eventually get around to letting people who've signed up to play demo's and alpha's of the game!

That tree falling looks awsome. Makes me wish to cut down more trees. Maybe also shake the camera a little bit to get even more the *boom*-effect? Also a lot of the effect depends on the soundeffect (which you cannot show in a .gif sadly). Hope you will find a good sound effect for it :)

Great Idea! I actually added in a pretty nifty camera shake function a little while ago that will fit in perfectly, can't believe I didn't think of that  :durr:

Love the retro feel combined with the maps!  ;)

Do you plan on having a demo anytime soon?

Yes we do! I can't guarantee when they will be but we'll probably release a demo of the combat system for people to try out in a few weeks to a month.

Awesome, can't wait to check it out when it's out. :)

Through intense observation I have realized this forum tends to have a strange and ingrained obsession with gorgeous water effects. Over the past couple days I've decided to gently stroke this obsession by creating my own, new and improved set of water effects, guaranteed to turn you all on more than anything ever has before. And this time, as many have before me, however, I will show you the full effect at the beginning and describe the entire process for those interested in how it all works.

So we begin, here is a gif (on the post, most I'll just link to conserve your precious loading times) of the semi-final look (I'll still be tweaking and adding more to it later):

(http://giant.gfycat.com/VastShadowyEider.gif)

As you can see, the water flows dynamically, ripples follow anything that moves in the water around, and raindrops create little ripples!

Now, how does one accomplish such an effect you might ask? Well it's actually surprisingly simple! I started... with an algorithm, as many of these projects seem to start. That magical few systems of equations that mysterious and wondrously create dazzling effects or, you know, make a path or something. The algorithm operates over a large 2d array of floats (or ints if you're in to that). I set it up to work on float values ranging from 0 to 1. Here's the code:


Holy really simple code, Batman! The left, right, up, and down values are set to the respective locations in the buffer of the previous frames values, except for at the edges they are always set to 0 (or in my case 0.1 to add some constant turbulence to the water). First I got this algorithm to work over a small array, and converted that array into a texture so I could visualize how it was working. I started off both of the buffers with a randomly generated perlin noise so I could see how the waves were working.

(http://giant.gfycat.com/ElementaryDenseJackrabbit.gif)

Now that surpassed my expectations! With little to no effort you get a water effect that can easily support ripples that reflect of the edges and waves that pass through each other!

Now I just had to up-scale it to work with the water in my game. I gave each tile that contained water a 32 by 32 array of floats to store the height of the water at each pixel in the tile, then when it does the algorithm, it checked to see if the tiles around it also contain water, and if they do continue the simulation on to those tiles instead of calling it a day at it's borders. This way I don't have to simulate water over the entire screen, just on the tiles that actually contain it. After I finally got this working (after a few bugs) it ended up like this: http://gfycat.com/OccasionalBackElver# (http://gfycat.com/OccasionalBackElver#)

Now this is looking great! The only big issue now is that water, at least the water I'm used to, is most certainly not black and white. I also wanted to add in normal maps so the water reacts to light the way it should (I can do a separate post just about normal maps if people really want it). Calculating the normal maps is pretty easy once you have an array of all the heights of the water, all you have to do is:


where each variable is the just value of the pixel at that relative location. The (/3 + .333f) part is to scale down the normal because otherwise the waves were far too pronounced. Now I just had to throw that new array into a texure and throw it in the shader and we're in business!

Next, instead of drawing it as a gradient of black to white and set up a new gradient of blue to a different blue to make it look more like water.

Another thing I did before this next gif was allow raindrops to create ripples in the surface of the water. All you have to do is figure out which pixel you want the ripple to start at and you:


You make it .9f there because you want to add energy to the system with a larger number than is around it. You can create bigger ripples (like in the earlier gifs) by making all the pixels in an area set to .9 or 1 (in the first gif it sets a circle of radius 5px to 1).

Now we have this: http://gfycat.com/ConcernedAgileHyracotherium#?format=gif (http://gfycat.com/ConcernedAgileHyracotherium#?format=gif)
and this right when rain is starting: http://gfycat.com/ImmediateViciousHorseshoecrab (http://gfycat.com/ImmediateViciousHorseshoecrab)

So now we have some pretty nice-looking water, but it's still a little flat. We need to add some variation to the texture of the water the is irrespective of the waves themselves. To accomplish this I simply draw the water texture using an offset of the water texture we were using before, color modified slightly by the height-map of the water and with the normal maps added.

The result is this: http://gfycat.com/EvergreenDelightfulDromaeosaur (http://gfycat.com/EvergreenDelightfulDromaeosaur)

Now all we have to do is make this semi-transparent so you can see fish under the water, the lake bed, and reflections from objects (which I still have to make based off the waves, but I will do that soon enough). The part is easy, you just draw it semi-transparent. But I also wanted to add an effect where objects moving through the water would leave trailing ripples. This also turned out to be very easy. You just iterate over the collision box of the object when it's in water, and you add a small amount to the waterMap at each of those pixels.

After that you get this: http://gfycat.com/WellgroomedLividAndalusianhorse (http://gfycat.com/WellgroomedLividAndalusianhorse)

A few more tweaks later and you get the gif at the top of the post! There's still a bit to do with this but I'm very excited about how well it's turning out so far.


Next time! We eat more code!

With tweaking you mean you will remove those straight lines waving in from the left? The effect really looks awsome ;D. Cannot wait for the demo :handmoneyR:

I gotta say THIS http://gfycat.com/ConcernedAgileHyracotherium#?format=gif looks incredible but your last gif really ruins it!

In your final gif I can barely see the waves at all. I thought you were just emitting particles. Maybe it's TOO transparent? Or maybe the waves don't stand out strong enough?

So again, the water looks great a few steps back but I think you over-tweaked it.

Also how the heck are you reading out the array? Do you use a fragment shader? Thats gotta be like million array reads a step! How is that not lagging?

Yeah that is part of it! I do know exactly what's causing that and it should be too hard too fix (essentially when the new tiles to the left get loaded in they start off "higher" than the rest of the water, causing a wave to move right)


I do agree it loses a bit of the effect in that last gif, but I also think the water in http://gfycat.com/ConcernedAgileHyracotherium#?format=gif (http://gfycat.com/ConcernedAgileHyracotherium#?format=gif) looks a little flat and too turbulent for just a small river. My personal favorite look is in http://gfycat.com/EvergreenDelightfulDromaeosaur (http://gfycat.com/EvergreenDelightfulDromaeosaur). I'm going to try and find a way to go for that look while also letting you see the reflections and fish underneath the water.

And as for the arrays, it is possible to do it with a fragment shader, however I decided not to go that route as I'm already using the graphics card for a lot of the game and it would be very difficult to have it only run on certain tiles of the game and have those tiles connect to eachother. However, in order for the effect to look like that the water itself only has to run at about 10 fps, so I can run the array calculations on a background thread that updates at 10fps while the rest of the game runs fine!

That one looks good too! I like that water also.

One other question, according to the code you posted, shouldn't your ripples be in the shapes of diamonds? How are you getting circles?

I'll just link you to the page where I learned about how the algorithm works, it explains it pretty well  :)
http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_water.htm (http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_water.htm)

Also! Here's a few screenshots I've taken lately that should show how the game is going to look with a multiplayer party playing around. I'm very pleased with how they turned out

(http://i61.tinypic.com/rbksh3.jpg)
(http://i62.tinypic.com/9ivhgy.png)

Awesome post regarding the water! That effect is super cool! It's nice hearing about other people's games, but it's even cooler to hear about how they accomplish certain things... Cause sometime's I'll be like... HOW DID YOU DOOO THAT?!  :mockangry:

Thanks for the link! That explains a lot. I'm still not entirely sure why the water makes a circle though... I'll have to try implementing it to fully understand.

Also that new water screenshot looks awesome! Only improvement I can see would be to do something with the shorelines. There not bad, but the rest of the water is of a much higher level.

Also that evening picture is really nice. That one dude in red kinda looks like Frodo.

We actually just finished fixing those shorelines yesterday :) and it's great you noticed the similarities! That character is based on Bilbo from The Hobbit  :eyebrows:

Very excited for this!

It's gorgeous. :)

(http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.12062126.7744/fc,550x550,white.jpg)

Also here ye here ye! Questica will be at Fort Collins Comic Con coming this September. If anyone happens to be in the Colorado area you can stop by and try the game out if you're that desperate! Also we should be releasing a demo to you all around that time since, you know, we'll have to make one for the Comic Con.

'Twas a month before the Con, and all through the basement
Nick's fingers were stirring, rewriting procedural placement
It had to be ready in time for the Con
Our first public showing just had to be bomb

We needed monsters and items and content galore
Questica had to be more than anyone could ever ask for
I had 31 days to get it all ready
In the midst of college, a job, and a relationship steady

Now, what, tonight, did I do you might ask?
Adding in vicious monsters is my current large task
I now introduce you to The Grabble, our first sentient creature
Disguised as a rock, you won't notice him either

(http://zippy.gfycat.com/VioletCookedFrillneckedlizard.gif)

Until he rushes at you, that is, of course
A quick reaction time will be your only recourse
You must hit him before he hits you
You're heart must be pure, and you're aim must be true

On his back he will flip, legs in the air
One more down swing will kill him right there
Use the shell as a helmet or his legs as a snack
Just at least put the remnants somewhere in your pack

30 more days to develop we have left
Of sleep and rest we will sure be bereft
Please check back when you're able, we will post updates here
A full game experience we will have, never fear

Scariest enemy I've ever seen. it rocks.

Today has filled me with sorrow
The work I got done was not thorough
  I went out to play
  And got carried away
So now I'll have more work for tomorrow

I have not written in a while
  so this one may be lengthy
I've worked on lots of different things
  so updates here are plenty

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/forge.png)

The first thing I did recently
  was make the forge work perfectly
To melt your metals from below
  just put them in there fervently

Just mix and match to make alloys
  and grab the bar, you see
Then take it to the near anvil
  and choose what it will be

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CMenbcFUYAAPK0l.png)

Of all the scrolls that you have found
  pick just one to make
Hammer away down on that bar
  to make a pointy stake

And now we want the world to fill
  with creatures big and small
Some things for you to fight and kill,
  collect their meaty haul

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/animals.png)

Either that or capture them
  and keep them as your pet
They'll help you transport all your stuff
  you'll need to find a vet

Or p'raps you'll take the fishers route
  and grab that lengthy rod
toss the lure in the water
  to catch some juicy cod

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/fish.png)

Just one more animal we have
  for now, that is, at least
Majestic birds fly through the sky
  fleeing from large beasts

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/birds.png)

To shoot one down using your bow
  Just aim real high and true
You use the meat for nourishment
  or blood thrown in your brew

Much more we'll do these coming weeks
  we have a lot that's planned
Alas I must go back to school
  that sacred, awful land

The poems are getting a bit irksome...  :whome: I may be wrong, but I believe most programmers prefer clarity and conciseness. Poems have a lot of unnecessary fluff.

But whatever, your devlog.


I like the cow, wolf, and the elk. At first I thought that gray thing was a giant hedgehog or something. Pretty sure it's a feral dog now. Is that dude standing in a wall?

That one is supposed to be a boar. I make the walls disappear so you can see the inside of the building but I'll put back the side walls soon to make it clearer.

Most of the time lately I write these devlogs at around 4-5 in the morning after working all night so I feel kinda tired and slap-happy so poems seem like a good idea. They'll stop

Suuuuuure is quiet round here...   :blink:

Yeah, this last month has been absolutely crazy. I'm going to start getting back to consistent updates now that we have a firm plan for where to go! For now though I'll give a quick D-L for what we've been up to over the past month.

• School! College has started back up and it is slowly sucking my life away. It's wonderful
• Multiplayer! I've been refactoring multiplayer to make it smoother and faster. Using snapshots to send movement and state data I can interpolate between snapshots to make the multiplayer only slightly delayed and really smooth.
• Crafting! We've been figuring out exactly how to get crafting to work and implementing it into the game. We're trying to make it more complicated than a simple A+B=C situation that most games have going on.
• Ludum Dare! We participated in Ludum Dare for the second time. After pulling an all-nighter and generally hating our mere existence for 72 hours we ended up doing better than the first time! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49927 (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49927)
• Comic Con! We showed off the game for the first time publicly at Fort Collins Comic Con. After a huge debacle about space and where our booth was going to be we finally got some prime real-estate right next to the entrance of the con! It's also the first time after 5 years of working together that me and Cody met in person. We got some really valuable feedback and overall it was a great experience.

Here's the banner we had printed out for the con
(http://i.imgur.com/PbAgcS1.jpg)
And here's a picture of our sexy little faces at the Con!
(http://i.imgur.com/pLWrCwu.jpg)

Lately I've spent a lot of time working on a website for the game. Getting back in to web development after such a long time is really refreshing (and kind of frustrating with how much I've forgotten). There's going to be our own forum for people to post comments and suggestions as well as news updates for the game.

Anyone who signs up can choose to get important email updates about the game (not super often, just important stuff). Also it'll let us know who's interested in taking part in a private beta which we will hopefully get set up in the next few months. Get excited!

As much as I loved the days back when all the characters looked exactly the same, there comes a day when we all must move on towards brighter futures. This brighter future specifically entails all kinds of hair styling products our characters have taken up using. Along with this some of them have taken it upon themselves to stop shaving, it's pretty trendy these days.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/faces.png)

They've also been working diligently on inventing a substance to dye their hair all colors of the rainbow but they're not quite there yet. They'll probably do it tomorrow after they finish studying to those gosh-darn midterms.

After that me and Cody just have to do some research and figure out what a girl looks like, we've only heard stories.

On a separate note I finally got around to adding a light up in the air that only the water reacts to. This gives the effect of water reflecting a bit of sunlight into the camera and I think it looks really nice.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/sunlight.png)

On another separate note stapled to my large bulletin board: The website is coming along splendidly! Today I have been working feverishly on getting PayPal properly integrated (a much harder task than I was expecting). We're going to have a period soon where any of you who are interested can get an account on the website (and therefore for the game) for free for about a week! Those people will be able to post on the forums and take part in a semi-private beta. After that we'll probably charge a small amount for people to play the game.

In a post soon I'll describe exactly what we're going for with the game and its multiplayer capabilities. Stay tuned!

Big Heading!

---

I've decided to take up using big headings in order to draw more attention to my posts. It's sure to execute flawlessly.

Anyways, let's talk about multiplayer. A lot of games these days have multiplayer. You know the drill, find someone with a server, join their server, play around a bit, log off, and wonder to yourself if this process could be any better. Could you ever get more enjoyment out of your online multiplayer games? Well I'm to tell you there's a better way! How, you ask? You wait an nondescript amount of time for Questica to come out! Just hold on to your seat and stare at the computer screen for a while until you get in to the private beta!



Eye-Catching Title

---

So what's different about multiplayer in Questica? My personal goal for it is to capture that feeling you get from sitting around a table with your friends making up characters and adventures for them to go on while the one douchebag at the end up the table decides all your fate using only their brain and a few dice.

So basically there will be two main multiplayer modes: random adventure and dungeon master!

In random adventure you all join up on a server and all play a randomly generated adventure where you work together and tackle obstacles.
In dungeon master mode, whoever is running the server gets omniscient knowledge and omnipotent power over the world and everything in it. They can craft a story for the players to work through and build a world for them to explore (using the random generation tools to help out). They can spawn raids and create NPC characters with personalities, add their own items and weapons to the game specific to their story, and control the weather patterns. Now that one friend who's always the DM can be even more of a douchebag all the time!

But that's also what I think is great about this, nearly no limitations will give people the power to be as creative as they want being able to build exactly the adventure they want or to run into fun random occurrences no one will be able to expect.

The Pudding

---

As we all know, the proof is in the pudding, so here's some nice tasty pudding for you all. I even used whole milk!
I've been changing how the movement gets transferred over multiplayer recently to allow for much smoother appearing movement with as little latency as possible. Since this game isn't *super* action oriented, a few tenths of a second shouldn't be an enormous deal (but please tell me if I'm wrong).
Here's a gif of one dude walking around another dude so you can see how much lag there is over the internet:
(http://giant.gfycat.com/WealthyReliableJaguar.gif)

Now for the world editing and server management. This part isn't super complete yet, there's still a long way to go, but the basics are in. The person running the server can open a menu on the right side of the screen to place entities, edit entities, build houses, etc. All of the entities loaded into that panel are all the ones in that entity folder (from a few updates back), including all the entities added through mods. Anything added by the person running the server will automatically be added for all the people playing the game!
(http://giant.gfycat.com/PaltryGoodBream.gif)

And once again, feel free to ask any questions or post any comments. We would love to hear what any of you have to say!

Can you add a preview window to the right menu so we can see the difference between 'cabinet', 'cabinet', 'cabinet', 'cabinet', 'cabinet', and 'cabinet' before actually placing it? Like when you hover over the name, you see the image?

I can indeed! It's actually near the top of my to-do list. I too have trouble distinguishing between 'cabinet', 'cabinet', 'cabinet', 'cabinet', 'cabinet', and 'cabinet' when making houses  :)

That would be great ;D

Edit:
And while you are at it, sort the list and give each object an unique name (either by giving it a better name, or by adding a number behind it). ;)

I got inspired and decided to go ahead and add in a basic version of it!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/side_menu.png)

All of the items are currently sorted by their in-game ID, but I can add in a filter to sort them alphabetically as well. And eventually everything will have a unique name there's just been a lot of copy-pasting in my past ;)

That's a lot of hair! Shaggy to the max.

One of Cody's goals with the art is making it look believable, which entails super scraggly hairstyles for common town-folk, since in medieval times that's what their hair would probably look like  :shrug2: There's plenty of other hairstyles for players to choose from though!

Still working on that multiplayer functionality. I've gotten combat working pretty well with multiple people however the latency isn't exactly where I'd like it quite yet. Anyways, gif time!

(http://zippy.gfycat.com/TatteredSneakyCardinal.gif)

The movement data has to get transferred to the server and then back out to all the players in a way that it can smoothly interpolate so getting that to a perfect place is going to be pretty difficult.

Another thing we have to announce is our

Website!

---

You can visit http://www.questica.net (http://www.questica.net) to check it out  :)
It's still relatively early, but the basics are all there.

Until next time ladies and gents  :gentleman:

You can poke people?!?!?!? Aww yiss, I love harmlessly annoying other people. Pokee master.

Haha, it was mostly for me to test how the hit reactions work  :P But we are definitely going to leave in shoving people around so you can move them if they're in your way (or if you just want to annoy them)

Finally, this has been on my to-do list since around 3,000 BC, I've rewritten town generation! Before, there were blandly laid out towns with little variation or excitement to be found inside. This would work for a simulation of modern American suburbia but alas I've spent far too much time there.

I implemented an algorithm for towns where it randomly places houses on the grid along a somewhat normal curve, causing more houses to be clustered in the center with a few on the outskirts. A wandering path is then generated between the houses with paths to each house being generated aftwards. Here's a few gifs of the process!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/towngen.gif)


(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/towngen2.gif)

Now I just have to generate random people for each house with random jobs and personalities. Hopefully we can get all those different stats to shine through in how they talk and act as well :)

Here's a little image of what they look like with all the houses actually placed!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/townscreen.png)

The .gif looks cool. But aren't you worried that there will be to many houses? Most RPG's have ~10 houses at most. Beyond this it's quite hard for people to remember all the houses. What if I find found an interesting NPC inside the house with a quest to kill rats or something? After I have killed the rats, there is no way I will find that house again...


Here are some examples how other RPGS solve it.

An example game (Golden Sun):
http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/GBA/index.htm#GoldenSun

Bilibin, Tolbi and Kalay are good examples for big cities. While giving a city vibe, they still only have ~8 houses.

Another example (Pokemon):
http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/GBA/Pokemon-FireRed&LeafGreenVersions-CeladonCity.png

This city actually does have lots of houses. However notice many houses look the same and lack a door with a path towards it. If you count the real buildings there are only a few houses left.

Does your town building math stuff also have the ability for square-ish shaped towns? Not all towns are so lengthy in one direction. Also towns built on intersections seems pretty normal.

Thanks for those references! And now that I think about it I know exactly what you're talking about. Those gifs show cities that are much bigger than what we were planning on having but I think we might need to go even smaller now  :)
I know Cody wanted the cities to feel really crowded and busy with many NPCs walking around, so maybe we can also try and figure out a way to distinguish important NPCs or ones you've interacted with differently from the rest of them.
I do think it would be pretty cool to see a bustling town full of NPCs all trading with eachother.


Right now we're trying to keep the whole game mostly horizontal. That way the player always has a direction to go and wont get lost in the world. Also having a horizontal world makes things like towns, rivers, and cities easier to generate. More of a castle-crashers style  :) also it feels right for the game playing around in it

This looks like a really awesome project, keep up the good work!

In most games this is done by reusing the non important NPCs all over the game, while the special ones have their own unique look. By reusing the NPC's you can create a crowded and busy city, while still show the difference between important and not so important NPC's. Another clue is that most important NPCs actually never move. They don't walk around town, they don't even walk in their own house, instead they always stand still and wait until the heroes approach them. In Golden Sun they gave even another 2 clues. Important NPCs had a face picture, while unimportant NPCs had not. And after you had talked to them they kept looking at you, until you left the map (this always freaked me out though).

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Thank you!! :D


This is absolutely something to think about and it's been on my mind for the past few days. The feel we're going for in this game is "finding you own adventure" and "being the character you want to be". To me at least, part of this is not telling the player who should be important to them or where they are supposed to go, but rather giving them to tools to meet people they would find interesting and guiding them towards places that would grow their character. I think we'll be able to find a way to create semi-large cities, putting a pretty good number of NPCs in them, and guiding the players to who they would want to interact with.

Maybe you want to get better at smithing so you could find the town's blacksmith and talk to him about how to get better. Or maybe you want to find an adventurer to learn more about the world; you could find someone wearing foreign tattered clothes and talk to them about where they're from. Once you talk to someone we'll put in an easier way to find them again, being alerted to where they are in a town if you want to talk to them again.

I think this is similar to how it works in real life -- you meet people that interest you and you can find them and interact with them even though the world, and even schools, are really huge places. Obviously we'll be testing it out (and feel free to join us in that process ;)) and figuring out which system works the best.

Maybe it won't work out to just throw players in a giant adventure sandbox but it'll be easy to change if that's the case. Thanks for bringing this all up, it's forced me to start thinking about it more  ;D

I thought I would give a quick update on how things have been going lately. Mostly there have been quite a few little changes but nothing major really to share. We've found a great musician to add to the team, so finally the game will have a soundscape to go along with it. If you want a preview of what the game is going to end up sounding like here's a small preview of music for the main menu:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55403585/Main%20Menu%20A%201.2%20256kbps.mp3

Along with that music for the main menu, I've also been redesigning the main menu since I really didn't like the old one too much. Here's a preview of what the new one looks like!

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSH1xeDUAAA5jDg.png)

I've also been editing the world generator further to allow farms to generate in the little towns. Later they'll be generating random little vegetables for you to either grow or steal from people (might make them a bit angry though).

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTAtXIwXIAAua7q.png)

Our artist has been designing some monsters for the game as well. One of the core ideas we want to go for is that the game both progressively gets more difficult as well as more weird and bizarre. Here's a look at some test monsters for the game!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/monsters.jpg)

Hey, this project looks great guys! I love the new monsters. I can't wait to see what crazy environments those guys live in.

Me either! Cody always comes up with some pretty awesome creatures and environments and we haven't officially decided where all these will be coming from. Thanks for the comment!  ;D

As the brand spankin' new title suggests, me and the pals have been having some talks lately and Kickstarter is starting to seem more and more like a good idea. And hey, might as well jump on that band-wagon while it's still going at full-horsepower  :eyebrows: We wouldn't launch it for another few months while we prepared a kickass campaign and finally got a demo ready for the game. We're just realizing we're pretty sick of working at grocery stores and would much rather work on the game full time.

I know a lot of you out there have run successful Kickstarter campaigns in the past so do you all have any suggestions or warnings before we get our hopes up too high? We'll happily take any advice or criticisms you beautiful people have  :beg:

In other news, I've got a wolf-buddy now  :-*

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/wolfy.gif)

No kickstarter experience but as a person on the internet I am an expert in everything so here is my advice.

I really like your game (This is probably my most visited devlog) but currently I wouldn't back it due to lack of content. I know you plan on waiting a few months but I think you need LOADS more content before Joe Schmo will dish out some cash. Show me some enemies, some bosses, some npc interactions, different terrain types, some farming, building, destruction or whatever you have planned. Any cool feature you plan on adding later should make a brief appearance in your trailer.

Also really stress your positives. Like I've seen a lot of trailers that just say "A procedurally generated world" but don't really show it. SHOW me how cool your generation is and all the crazy stuff it can make.

And the last tip that I see the most, don't fill the screen with nothing to look at but a few words of text. I hate it when the screen goes black and all the trailer says is "Explore" or "Survive" or something boring. Just put the text up with some gameplay in the background! Don't give me nothing to look at!

General advice from a nobody.

At least the most important gameplay mechanics needs to be flashed out. I like this game because of the procedural world. But I have not seen any combat related mechanics. How does the fighting work, do I need to button bash, or is it more tactical than that? Is there any magic, and if so, how is it going to be used? Until now I have not seen any epic quests. That's why its called Questica, right? Will there be one big main quest or several small quests. In fact I have not seen any talking NPC yet. How will I be able to judge whether you are able to write strong/funny NPC's? I don't know whether this game uses save points, inn's or something else. I Also have not even seen any building I could go inside yet. So many questions are unanswered yet. This game feels far from complete making the risk that I won't like the game in the end (or that the game won't be finished) to big.

Don't get me wrong, I do like the game so far, and I understand it takes (lots of) time to develop the game. But if you want to have my money, you are going to need to show me a lot more of the game first.

In short, I agree with RujiK.

Thanks a lot for the responses guys! I definitely value your input as you two are some of the few who actively reply to this blog. You guys rock!

As such, I'm absolutely going to hold off actually releasing a kickstarter until we have more of the actual game to show. As I've probably mentioned before, I've been working a lot on the "guts" of the game, and this is a mighty beast of a game, as in it's visited McDonalds a few too many times and it's just got a really giant gut hanging out there. But, I've just recently gotten to the point where I've decided there's enough modding, multiplayer, and generation framework to start adding in actual content.

Me and another programmer buddy are fleshing out the combat at the moment so hopefully we'll have something interesting to show on that front really soon. I've also been getting various things like farming, smithing, and mining working and looking nice.

I also just recently bought a new (read: used but better than my laptop) desktop for me to develop on and test multiplayer etc. After a few agonizing hours trying to figure out why in God's holy land Java was refusing to work (pro-tip: DO NOT put special characters in your Windows user profile name) I finally got it all set up. That combined with getting combat better and thinking about possibly doing a kickstarter have gotten me back to the point where I'm *really excited* to be working on games again.

In short, there should be some actual content for me to be showing off really soon  ;D

(and I'm not sure if I'll be able to write super strong/funny NPCs since the plan is to have them all be procedurally generated, but I will do my best!)

Hello everyone! This is going to be a pretty significant update that's going to really change how I'm going about this project and how this devlog is going to operate. First thing's first, lets get to what

I've Been Up To

---

I came up with a neat little idea for how to build things in the world quite a while ago, so I've gotten around to adding it in to the current version of the game. Many things in the game revolve aroung the idea of obtaining a "scroll" that is essentially a blueprint teaching the player how to build or craft a certain item. For smithing, in order to smith a specific helmet, you would need to get the scroll for it from a smith you meet in the town or from a monster drop etc. There will also be scrolls for objects you build, like carts, chests, or castle walls. With these scrolls you will be able to place a frame of the object in the world that will list the required items needed to build that object. A castle wall might need 10 stone and 2 mortar for example. You and all your friends (if on multiplayer) can together add all the required items to the frame, and once they are all there the object will get constructed.

I also finally made a custom launcher and updater for the game so anyone can just launch an exe from their desktop and play the latest version of the game!

I am Changing the Direction of the Game Significantly

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Before, I wanted to get a nice, stable demo together with examples of all the features that will hopefully be in the full game. I wanted to get most or all of the core game done so I could show off everything in its nearly-complete form. This project is turning out to be absolutely enormous, however, especially for the amount of time that we were able to put into it.

For some personal and motivational reasons, our artist has had to step back from the project. I am currently the only one working on this game as a sole project and I do not see myself being able to complete the game to what we wanted it to be originally. Ignoring the fact that my art skills are incredibly lack-luster, even if I was great at pixel art it would take me forever to finish this game alone. So, I've done some pretty intense soul-searching about what I really want out of this game and making games in general.

I wanted to do a kickstarter earlier so that I could gauge interest in the project and hopefully make enough money that I could work on the game much more than I currently can now. I am realizing the thing that excites me the most about this project is the idea of gathering around with your friends and playing through a random adventure that can include items, objects, and monsters that you designed yourself and put in with the modding system. I don't really care as much about doing this as a full-time job (and I know the success-rate for that is incredibly low anyways), I want to know that people are having fun playing something that I created and building a community off of that. So, that leads me to

What I am Going to do Now

---

I do not have an artist, but I do have a pretty great and simple system for adding nearly anything to this game. I am going to release a demo in about a week (it's not going to be incredible but it will be SOMETHING). Anyone who wants to will be able to play the game as it currently is. I'll open up the forums for anyone to suggest anything to add to the game. Anyone can make art for an item, object, or monster and if people like it I will happily add it in to the game. Ideally, I'll get a group of passionate people together all helping to make something incredible that we can all enjoy. I'll get on and play multiplayer games with anyone who wants to and discuss what could go in the game (as long as not too many people are interested, which is what I'm expecting).

If people seem to be interested then I'll keep this up as long as people are. If not, I'll probably go back to just doing game-jams while working a software job. Please let me know what you think about this, if it's stupid just shoot me down now so I don't get too much hope :P If this is something you would be interested in seeing then let me know! I would love to hear that as well. I'm going to get back to busting a few important bugs before I release the last two years of my life to you guys (it unfortunately doesn't amount to too much, but I learned an incredible amount).

Dissapointing :(

I don't know about relying on the internet for art content. Seems like it would be better to either:

1. Learn pixel art and take a long time.
2. Use placeholder art and try and pick up an artist later

not to be mean but your art until now looked pretty much like programmer art. so it's not a big loss.

Seeing how far you went into details with the programming part, you'd do wonderful with a more qualified artist and i'm pretty sure a lot of decent artists are looking forward to work with you.

Hey guys, thanks for the input. I've been thinking about it a lot lately and I've decided to just find another artist. *Hopefully* I'll be able to find a really good artist without too much hassle so we can get this game back on a roll.

Until then I'm going to be working mostly on AI and the story generator since they are parts that don't involve much art. Learning pixel art myself would be a pretty bad idea right now because I would *significantly* delay the project since I'd be starting from absolutely no art experience. So, if any of you out there know or are a great artist looking to help out on a hobby project, just shoot me an email/PM  :eyebrows:

I didn't really like old boxes I was using to show something was selected in the game, so I've decided to think inside the box and give all the objects soft outlines!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/outline_change.png)

The only issue with this is my texture packing algorithm doesn't put any padding pixels between all of the images, and some of the images that get loading into the packer are already packed themselves since it's easier for Cody to edit them that way. I'm going to need some padded pixels between every single image to get this to work, so my texture packer has to get a bit more complicated.

First, I'm going to pad every image that gets sent in to the packer. Since each object can have it's own packed image, I have to get the width and height of each cell, then generate a new image where there is padding between each cell in the original image.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/outline_padding.png)

Since these images get padded on the outside as well in this process, when they get packed by my texture packer there's going to be padding between them all as well. Now, I can use a form of gaussian blur to generate some small soft edges around all of the objects in a separate image. Then, I can draw that outline image over the default image when I want it to be outlined. These outlines look so much better than the hard box ones and will even work on animations and moving parts

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/outline_door.gif)

You might want to keep the old red colour on the outline at least, because the blue is a bit hard to see against the grass. It doesn't look super selected. o:

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/outline_tree.png)

It does look a lot more selected :) The only reason I originally chose blue was that I used red a lot for selecting things and people told me they usually associate red with "bad" or "danger". I'll have to try out a few different colors to see what works best

Maybe plain white could work too.

This game looks hella sweat, I hope you can find an artist <3

Personally I'd love to be part of an online community game, even if all the pixel art was shit, having a sword you drew in your players hand would be great, and if you did it I'd atleast be pretty interested to contribute, unless I was the only one contributing, then I'd get shy and wait for someone else  :whome:
Either way I'm waiting eagerly for the beta testing  ;)

We actually have our old artist back  :) We took a bit of a break (as you can see, we haven't posted here in a couple months) to work on some other small projects. We've been back on this one for a little bit though, so I have some fun new features to share with everyone  :handthumbsupL:

Although, we are still planning on having great mod support and it would be amazing if we could get a big community going still. I am still much more relaxed about people trying out the game, so hopefully I'll be able to post an early alpha version on here soon for you to try out  :toastL:

For a long time, one of the most important things to us in this game has been Mod Support. Since this is a pixel art game with pretty simply structured content, it would be rather silly not to allow players to easily extend the game with their own custom content. We want to have this system completely integrated with the game while maintaining blazing fast loading speeds (well, as fast as java can get). I've been working on some pretty cool features over the last couple days dealing with the mod support so I figured I'd go ahead and share what's been going on!

Here are my basic requirements for the mod support for the game:

• A player can have as many mods loaded at a time as they want, without conflicts
• A mod can add new items, scrolls, and objects to the game, or overwrite existing ones
• A player can add and remove mods to an existing save game
• A mod creator can update their mod, and no existing save games with that mod will become corrupted or get new conflicts

In order to successfully accomplish this I need to trade off some of the conveniences of static object IDs. Each save game will have to store it's own list of IDs for all of the objects, which will increase the size of each save game, but will allow for much more flexibility with modding and updating. The current system for starting a new game with mods is as follows:

• Load in all of the objects in the game
• Load in all of the objects for each mod, overwriting old objects with the same name
• Assign each object a unique short ID (allowing for 65536 objects)
• Save the map of ID-Object pairs to a file in the save directory

I'm also going to need some special functionality for loading in save games:

• Load in all of the objects for the game
• Read which mods are being used in the save file
• Load in all of the objects for each of the mods used in the save game
• Load the map of ID-Objects pairs from the file
• Check if any of the Objects in the map have been removed from the game, if so mark them as removed
• Check if there are any new objects in the game, in which case give them new unique IDs and append them to the map

Another minor down-side to this method is when a player is joining an online server, the server will first have to send the object maps before sending over the world and game data. However, the map tends to be much smaller than the world and game data is anyways, so it doesn't seem to be a huge deal.

There's only been one more lingering issue with allowing this much direct mod support into the game: packing the texture sheets. As I've said in a previous post, I take all of the textures in the game and pack them into one large texture sheet to increase drawing speed. That's not very special though, as almost every pixel art game, or even 2d game in general does this. I want to have it so the mods get packed in with all the game's other textures. Before, I had it so the game packs all the game's textures together, along with the mod's textures, when the game loads. This takes about an extra 6 seconds of loading at the moment, and it's only going to get longer as the game gets bigger.

In order to fix this problem, I've decided to cache all the most popular mod combinations on the user's system. When you start a game with a combination of mods, it will still have to pack all the textures together on the first time it loads, however it will cache all of those packed textures on the file system in a folder. Right now, I'm taking the current version of the game, then appending all of the mods and their versions being used, and then hashing the result to get the folder to store the cache in. This way, if the same combination of mods and versions are being used it can easily find the folder where the cache should be. I know there is a possibility for hash collisions, but the probably is so low that this will happen, and it's just going to be pretty funny if it ever does (and you can fix the problem by deleting the cache folders).

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/cache.png)

Now, when the game is loading, it can check if there is a cache for all the mods being used and just load the cache in, which only takes a fraction of a second.

Modding is a lot of work.

Fun fact: When I was younger (16ish) I thought every game by default was 100% moddable but most of the evil game corporations disabled modding so no one would change their game.

To have solid mod support you really have to keep it in mind from the beginning of development. And I know there are a lot of companies that really try to discourage modding, but they're just shooting themselves in the foot  ;)

In other, much more exciting, news: houses finally have walls on the sides! It's about damn time...

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/walls.png)

Hey, everybody! It's been a while but I've been working on a whole lot of not very exciting back-end engine coding (which I may share here sometime soon). Here's a couple cool things we've been working on however:

A preview for a new biome! (Made by a new artist!)
(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/desert.png)

Added functionality for editing the ground tile with the editor (works in multiplayer too!)
(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/groundEditor.gif)

Dang... That looks awesome. That water is incredible. The cobblestone looks really nice with the tall grass in front of it. Also the desert looks "deserty," but doesn't look empty and boring. Cool beans!

Oh, also for the heck of it I tried implementing that water method you brought up awhile back in game maker. I did it, but it ran at only 80 fps with no other code. Too slow to be used. Here is what it looked like without the fancy shader stuff you got going on:
(http://i1038.photobucket.com/albums/a466/TheRujiK/watersms_zpsbp7k5jck.gif)


Waiting for some desert or some sandy beaches!

Your water looks pretty fabulous too  :) I ended up using a lot of different tricks to get mine working at a reasonable framerate, and there's a graphics option for it so people with slower computers can turn it off entirely. These are the kind of algorithms I with computers were powerful enough to handle really easily  :P

I did set up a custom generator for the desert biome too so I should be able to share some of that really soon!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/bigworld.png)

Decided to give in to peer pressure and give Questica a full 2d map rather than a horizontal strip  ;D

Now that looks awsome :-*

Hot dang! How big is the map? Do you know yet? But don't forget a small detailed map is better than a big empty map!

Of course if you have a big detailed map that's even better.

Glad you guys like it!  :)

I can make the maps however big I want to, and I'll probably settle on an official size after testing it out for a while. I still need to rewrite town generation to handle the full map (which is the part I am most concerned about doing right).

Right now a full map is about a mile long and takes ~10 minutes to walk all the way across.

I've also gotten cave systems to start generating underneath the island!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/test1.png)

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/test1c.png)

I've had to do a lot of refactoring of the base code in order to handle the larger maps effectively. I've always had the map split into individual chunks of tiles, but the system needed a huge overhaul. The big changes were:

-The entire map cannot be loaded into memory all at once, it is too large. I need to save groups of chunks to a file that can be loaded at run-time. I decided on groups of 8x8 chunks to minimize the number of files created and memory used in-game.
-Chunks very close to the player must be added to the sorting buffer asynchronously so there is no jitter in the framerate
-Chunks further away from the player should have all the entities update
-Zooming around the map in editor-mode should be quick and without lag

Here's a visualization of the chunk loading and unloading as the player moves around

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/chunkLoader.gif)

Next, I also implemented the asynchronous adding of objects to the sort buffer (so I don't have to sort all the objects being drawn every single frame). Chunks coming in to view will be added to the sort and chunks going out of view will be removed from it

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/coastObjectLoader.gif)

Since then, I've been working on making this all work in multiplayer, which is also proving to be a pretty monstrous task. Once I get that working I'm going to do a much larger post about how the entire networking system is set up!

Added more functionality to the world editor. Finally adding houses is a pretty easy process!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/houseBuilding.gif)

Started moving the town generation over to the big maps. There's a lot of variation and features I have to add this still but I really like how it's coming so far! :)

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CidvDRqUoAAbdGA.jpg:large)

Is that the ole midpoint displacement/diamond square algorithm? That weird straight line of islands on the left looks like it!

I never tried generating roads. The only odd thing is how they kinda go to nowhere. I assume most towns will be connected at some point?

Close :) I'm using Brownian noise at the moment that is offset by distance to the center and some radial noise. I'm probably going to switch from Brownian noise soon to avoid those straight lines. And yes, it starts out generating two big roads through the towns that will eventually connect to other towns!  :)


In other news, today I implemented something I've been putting off for YEARS and holy Jesus I could not be happier that I finally put it in. It was easier than I was expecting and looks so stinkin' good in the game.  :handshakeL: :wtf: :handshakeR: Basically,

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/shadows.gif)

Dynamic 2d shadows! I'll post something on the devlog soon about how I accomplished it. I'm so stoked about how it turned out!!

Alright pals let's go over how to do these shadows.

In my post about the lighting, I went over the process to give each pixel a 3d coordinate so I'm not going to go over that part again here. Now, I can create a separate frame-buffer to store all the shadow data and reference that on each pixel to find out if it's in shadow.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/shadows/mapping.png)

Based on the time of day, each pixel will look down at the shadow map based on the z height of the pixel. As you can see in the image, the line on the left comes from an area on the tree in shadow, but the line on the right comes from an area on the tree in the light, but they both map to an area on the shadow-map. When I draw the shadow-map, the G channel is used for the darkness of the shadow, and the R channel is used for the height of the pixel that casts the shadow. When each pixel checks the shadow-map to see if it is in shadow, if the pixel drawn on the shadow-map was cast by a pixel with a lower z value, then it isn't actually in shadow.

This will guarantee not only that high objects are not in shadow when flying over trees, it also puts half of each tree in shadow based on where the light is coming from.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/shadows/overlays.png)

In this image, you can see the two lines are coming from different sides of the tree, but the line on the right maps to the shadow cast by the other tree. Since the height of the other tree is higher than the pixel, it gets put in the shadow of the tree to the right. In order to make sure all the shadows align correctly and that higher shadows are drawn on top of lower shadows, we just have to draw the shadows from left to right instead of top to bottom.

All together a scene looks like this now!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/shadows/shadow_scene.png)

And you get this nice effect when walking under the trees

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/shadows/walking.gif)


I also have a few other wonderful updates for things we've been working on. Namely, the world editor! Here's a few previews of what's possible now:

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/shadows/house.png)

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/shadows/grassHeight.gif)

Those shadows are co beautiful, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA  :handshakeR::crazy::handshakeL:

The amount of effort you injected into this dynamic shadows system is impressive. Applause! It's giving a nice distinctive look to your game ;-)

Thanks guys! :) There's still a few more things I have to do, like I want the shadows to move across the ground during the day so I'll have to make some special shadows for when the sun is directly above. Summer break just started so I'll be getting as much done as I can with this game while I have the time  ;)

Wow. That's a lot of work but it really looks nice.

I think most 2d games (Like mine) just draw shadows onto the ground and skip all the hard stuff.

Wow! What a cool project. Really like the visuals, you've done such a good job with lighting and making things look accurate yet stylistic. Definitely going to stick around.  :handthumbsupR:

Thanks! :) Ever since I learned how to use shaders I've been getting a little carried away with myself...


Just a quick and dirty update for today, we have something much more cool and exciting coming tomorrow
to show you all!

First, I've changed the entire tile rendering system. Types of tile are ordered by depth and drawn one
on top of the other from deepest to highest. Each type of tile has images for each type of edge so it
can be smoothly drawn. Before, the deepest tile type would be drawn entirely, and each one above it
would only draw the tile in the corner of the tile that had that type. Now, tile draw edges such that
it covers every edge except for the tiles deeper than it. To illustrate the changes I have this gif:
(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/6-8-16/newtiles.gif)

A few other fun features I've added are beaches that generate by the ocean and foggy areas that work
with the shadows!

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/6-8-16/beaches.png)

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/6-8-16/fog.png)

Looking great Nick! :)

Woah. That fog is really cool. Show me a gif of it!

nice :handthumbsupL:
ambiance makes all the difference

Loving the novel lighting approach you took! I really enjoyed working on the lighting in my project and always great to see how others do it.

Thanks Ben! :D


Here's a video!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwF_eA9PLgc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwF_eA9PLgc)


Thanks guys :) I end up spending most of my time working on the graphics and ambience stuff so I'm glad it's turning out to be worth it



(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/contenteditor/editor.png)

Over the past couple days I've been working on this new content editor to replace my old one (and therefore, the 2 I made before that as well xD). However, each time I rewrite this stuff it always gets much much better!

This editor is built entirely from class reflection of the data objects being edited, which is something I've wanted to do for quite a while. I always found it really tedious to add a new control to the editor and link it to the data when I can just have a generator do it all for me! The code is relatively straight-forward using Java Reflection, so I won't go into the code (unless some people really want me to). I'll just go over some of the features I'm especially proud of.

Specifically, arrays. You can directly manipulate arrays of data in the objects, whether they are primitives or objects.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/contenteditor/intArrays.gif)

You click the plus button to add an element and the minus button to remove an element. This array will automatically generate if there is an
in the class definition.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/contenteditor/objectArrays.gif)

This gets generated if you have something like this in the code:

The editor will also change the Class of a specific object if you want it to be of a different subclass. Just clicking on one in the tree on the left will copy all of the data over to a more specific subclass with more fields. I am also planning on implementing a component system like in Unity.

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/contenteditor/changingClass.gif)

The preview at the top of the frame will automatically update with the new collision info, and eventually with the shadow and light info once I put that in

All of this will, of course, be available to people who want to make mods of the game. I will integrate features specifically for making and packaging mods when the game gets to that point.

That is a really impressive interface. I absolutely loath making gui's/dialogue boxes/whatever.

the fog looks really cool, the only problem I can see with it is the particles suddenly appearing , it's very noticeable and makes the affect feel unnatural. Would it be viable to blend the textures from transparency as they appear?

Ah, what Oats said! I was thinking that too, but by the time I was done reading about the interface I completely forgot to comment about the fog.

I already fixed the fog yesterday  :handthumbsupL: ;D :handthumbsupR:

I'll post a new video if anyone wants to see it, it does look much better! Pretty much every who saw it commented on the particles suddenly appearing and I for some reason never thought to fix that before  :durr:

Just goes to show you have to playtest your games!

Alright, it's been quite a while since I updated the devlog, so I'm just going to do a quick run-down of what's been going on over the past few months.

First bit of exciting news is our artist, Cody, moved in to the apartment with me so we can work on the game together, which is a great help.

I have been working on a new and improved editor for the game and mods that should be super accessible and easy to use (I have already posted about this but it's gone through many improvements). I added some new data types to help with particle editing, such as:
(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/8-24-16/floattimelines2.gif)

Also after a bunch of banging my head on a table I have live previews of various things in the editor:
(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/8-24-16/particlepreview.gif)



Many of the things I've worked on this year have been things I really should have done from the beginning. But I was a much less experienced programmer back then. Now I know better for the future! One of the things I should have done from the beginning is 16x16 tiles, which I implemented the other day. It makes the game look much more varied and alive:
(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/8-24-16/smalltiles.gif)


Last piece of news I will share today (I've been working on a lot of other things of course, but I will share those in separate posts) is the new inventory system. We already modified it so items could be different sizes, but I recently implemented a feature where items don't have to take up all their slot spaces, and item images can overflow over the slot spaces they occupy. Hopefully it will make the inventory look more full and allow for better management of items.
(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/8-24-16/sloteditting.gif)

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/8-24-16/newinventory.gif)


And, like always, all of these tools will be available to modders!

This looks lovely! I appreciate the thought for modding, that can really help your game growing in the future. The inventory micromanagement looks very neat with the non-rectangular layouts. And the environment looks very nice with all the motion, makes it feel very alive, good job!

What language/framework/engine are you developing this with?

Good luck!

Item hoarders will love and loathe that inventory system. Obsessively rearrange stuff for hours of fun!

Also that particle creator is dang impressive! That's a lot of variables.

Thank you :) I am using Java with LibGDX mainly, with a few other libraries to help with code plugins. I want to make things as easy as possible for modders because I know it's one of the best ways to grow a community and make a dope-ass game.


I'm trying to think of ways to simplify the editor a bit while still keeping the same amount of functionality, but alas this is a hard problem :)

Hacked together a feature where I can edit my game's shaders in real-time, for really speedy iteration times.

Here is the result of a bunch of messing around:

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/morenewwater.png)

Also I released a video where I talk a bit about the Content Editor I've made for the game and show it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBhEecSI8Bc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBhEecSI8Bc)

Was messing around with my rendering code today and ended up doing *THIS* to my game! Do you guys like it?? Should I keep it??  ;D

(http://www.questica.net/Images/DevLogs/full3d.gif)

 :o  :screamy:

It's been a little while since I've posted, but I've been hard at work on the new 3d stuff (We decided to just go ahead and make the game 3d! xD)

So let's get right to it:

By default, all object rotate to face the camera wherever it may be, acting as billboards essentially. However, this doesn't work for a lot of objects in the game, such as walls that need to appear flat, so I made a new resource loader that can load in different formats of boxes. Here is what the main castle wall image looks like and how it looks in the game:

resource file| (http://questica.net/Images/DevLogs/10-26-16/box.png)

in-game (http://questica.net/Images/DevLogs/10-26-16/ingamebox.png)

There is also an improved entity visualization system in the editor to better visualize 3d objects!

(http://questica.net/Images/DevLogs/10-26-16/entityPreview.gif)

you might have already noticed I implemented a new shadow system that works just like the big boys do it, now things like this are possible:

(http://questica.net/Images/DevLogs/10-26-16/3dworld.gif)

(http://questica.net/Images/DevLogs/10-26-16/prettyscreenshot.png)

And last big update is I got reflections working in the new 3d environment. Only things left to get working again are mouse-picking, UI elements, and lighting.

(http://questica.net/Images/DevLogs/10-26-16/reflections.png)

Wow, that was a pretty spontaneous change in direction, are you going to change the gameplay with the graphics? Such magical things like map height and jumping?

So is this gonna be a true 3d game or what?

Are the characters going to stay pixel-y or are they going to be some voxel polygon hybrid thing?

Absolutely! Climbing castle walls, big cliffs, whatever we can think of  :wtf:


Thanks man!!


The characters and world will definitely stay pixel-y (however with mods people will easily be able to make full-res games). The game will remain mostly 2d, but you can rotate the camera to get a different angle of the world