I guess so ...

Two bugs (or features). Gibs-bridge and naked-cave.

Update:

Started to clean up the forest area. The goal is to add more interesting features, update the animals, and make the existing things clearer. One feature is that the entrance to the stone cove now generates light and small particles and is generally unobscured. The lunar buds that hint at where it is are also more clearer spread out.



Many of these improvements require more complete analysis and investigation tools. In this debug output I show the rough sizes of the caves that are generated -- which then influences what I put in them, and how they fit in the larger scheme.

Thanks Kleibs!

Update: Just a little update, I'm a bit crook so it's been a slow week. Work on effects continued: frozen (slowed) mobs now makes icy particles, healing mobs make green floaty particles, etc.



Alex and I have been discussing some big adjustments to the gui -- one particularly interesting concept is to move the individual inventories so they sit above the Mobs/Items. So, for example, opening a chest would pop its inventory open above it. We'd need to prototype and playtest, but the early mockups are promising.

Great concepts.

Maybe I'd change the name to avoid any association/cross-over with that Midora debacle. But that's me.

Why does his belly look so.... jiggly? He looks like he's underwater or something but he isnt??

Oh that's a bug atm. I've got a heat-distort effect but right now it's applied to any light-emitting source.

Whoop! So glad I backed this. Looking forward to playing it immensely.

Thx and thx!

Thanks! :D

Update: To kick this post off I'm happy to announce that Moonman has received an arts grant from Film Victoria. This funding will cover the remaining costs of releasing the game in 6 months. Alex will now continue as part-time artist and help with the majority of remaining sprite and background work.

As per the schedule I posted last week, this week I designed and coded the new status effect system. The game now has the following effects: Illuminate, Heal, Ignite, Freeze, Poison, Knockback, Resist Damage. And placeholders for many more including: Curse, Stun, Cure, Modify Speed, and so on. Effects can be applied in many different ways -- for instance, getting hit by a poison sword may temporarily poison you, quaffing a potion may give you an instant heal effect, or jumping into lava may activate the ignite effect.

Although the game already had things like light-casting torches, healing mushrooms, and things that caught on fire, I've now centralised all the effects by re-writing some large chunks of code. From a component point-of-view, there is now an Effectable component that stores status effects. Mobs, Items, and World Objects are now all effectable.

Some things are inherently immune to status effects, an iron chest can't be poisoned for instance. Other resistances come from natural resistances of Mobs (e.g., a Stonodon may resist Cold effects), or from the Resist status effects (e.g., wearing Gloom Armour gives you 100% poison resistance, at a cost).

I also designed the item durability system, but have not yet started coding it. Item durability will be fairly straightforward. The key difference to a game like Minecraft is that when an item breaks it won't disappear, but instead will just be in the [broken] state. Broken items are basically useless, with a few exceptions. Early level enemies will typically drop broken or weak items.

Now for some screens ..







and ..

errrorrr

Update: Hello 2016! I'm back.

I'm back to work, starting to prod and poke in the code again, trying to remember how to program. I've only had two weeks off, but it feels like an eternity. We've got a massive year ahead of us, so we've got to get started!

We'll be releasing the final private build in the first week of March. We plan to make this available to all the ($20+) backers. The first public release would then be a couple of months after that.

Here's a peek at our current schedule:


This week I've started implementing item effects. If you poke someone with the ice spear, they will contract the temporary 'cold' effect and slow down. We'll be expanding this to a range of different effects, some of which can be resisted with certain shields and armours. Some characters and creatures have passive effects .. for instance Moonman will have a passive Regen effect, allowing him to heal slowly over time.

In terms of art, here are some of Alex's WIPs for the medium and heavy armours. We hope to have them all finished and working for the public release, but we'll also have a whole bunch of clothes and armours for the next private build.



G.P. has wrapped up work for now while I try to catch up with all the other tasks. One of the last pieces he worked on was a gorgeous forest background concept.



I hope you all had a great holiday break and are well rested. Thanks for reading and see you next week!

Love the minimalism and vector style

What happened to his face?! Hes just a smile now!! Where did his eyes go?!?!
MOOONMAN NOOOOOOOooooo. your eyes.

That's not Moonman, there's more than one playable character ...

Happy holidays everyone, see you all in 2016.

@jimym - It will now forever be in your mind.

Shouldn't he go in front of the platforms when climbing the ladder?

I know either way is OK, just that going in front of the platforms seems more traditional..

He goes in front of non-collidable blocks, but those are collidable (they just have an extra sticky-outy bit). Would be too much work to fix that one case, but thanks for the observation

My bi-monthly comment to remind you that you're building art and that this game keeps getting more badass...

Haha, thankyou! See you in a few months.

Update: Hey! This is the last devlog for two weeks, while I take a little time off over xmas. It looks like the mesa build won't be out until mid-January, mainly because we've been doing major overhauls of the human movement, clothing, and animation system. It's going to be a fun build to test though, so I hope to see some of you alpha-testers around then.

This week we've finalised most of the animations and now have around 15 different sets of clothing. Melee now incorporates blocking, which happens automatically if you are not swinging your weapon. We've fixed and refined a lot of small things, for example: when running up a slope you no longer launch into the air at the end; jumping up onto a block is easier (as I've attached little invisible platforms to the edges); and, the hit-boxes for melee now depend on the size of armour and shield you have (for superior combat feelies).



In terms of the new armour sets, we now have full animations for two light armour templates and one heavy armour template. These have been built in a flexible way to support a lot of variety when colour mapping, and we'll get at least 10 sets from each template. Overall, there will be about 12 different templates, and so maybe 100 different sets.

Here are two of the light armour sets and some colour mappings:



I've also implemented some updates to the crossbow system. It now feels better to use and the sprites are different. I decided to change the crossbows into "bows on guns", so I could draw the bow side-on.



I hope you all have a great holiday break. I'll be taking a week off between xmas and new year, but then I'll be back and sprinting to get the mesa build out! The first few months of next year will be super busy and we'll finally start to see huge amounts of content being dropped into the game. We'll need all alpha-testers on deck to help tweak enemy difficulty, AI behaviour, block strength, crafting recipes, level structure, and so on.

See you soon.

Nice leg metamorphosis while walking!

Oop, don't look at those

Thanks Eneko!

Moonman & Friends?

It's definitely on the list!

Update:  I've cleaned up and started updating the animation system. This includes:

an eating animation,
a little bounce when landing,
a slight pause when you're in the air,
a delay and slight anim when turning,
a better ladder climbing animation (and the shield now goes on your back),
the hotbar goes inactive when you attack, and
quite a few tweaks to improve the movement and control.

This coming week we'll be fine-tuning these more, implementing a proper shield blocking system, and dropping in some more armours.

Looking good, all the best with development

I'm still in love with moonman

He's still the main character He just has more friends now.

So much work has gone into the game, you are really trying to Reach for the Moon.

(I'm sorry...  )

Ooh, another good title

Thx Yaw

Update:

We've changed focus to the new humanoid animations and system. This week we managed to get the pipeline set up and the first test animations into the game.

The set-up for the humanoid animations is similar to the creature animations: we use Aseprite for the animation work and then process that with some tools. The humanoids present a bigger challenge because they are decomposed into lots of parts (arms, legs, torso, and head), each with their own animations and anchor points. We use layers for the different parts with animation tags for their modes. Pivots and anchors are represented as single pixels on layers with custom names. A script I wrote then takes all this info and converts it into something the game can use.



In terms of game design, we decided to create 9 armour templates: 3 light ones, 3 medium ones, and 3 heavy ones. Each template will then have colour mapped variations. For instance the heavy metallic armour might be mapped to iron armour, gold armour, and dungeon armour. The colour maps also apply to the base models: the only difference between a human, moonman, and goblin is the colour map and head sprite.





Here's some in-game screenshots of one of the new armour templates. The basic animations now work for this heavy armour set, and over the next month or two we'll continue working on the other sets and animations.



A cave goblin has also appeared. This guy will likely appear as a playable character.



The new focus on the animation system means that the mesa build will take a while longer, but it'll have all new animations and sprites, so it'll be worth the wait. :Some other work done this week:

• Updates to base weapon sprites (see below)
• Knights in Mesa are now serialised/persisted
• King appears in Mesa:Castle
• Moonstone spawned in Mesa:Castle
• Internal: Colour map supports up to 16 colours
• Internal: Event queue is now double buffered

Woah, that looks super pretty.
But don't you have to draw a lot of different animations for every single item now, because weapons can obviously have different animations you would have to animate every single armour piece?

Yep. There's going to be about 9 armour templates (3 light, 3 med, 3 heavy). And each will need about 10 or so sets of animations (run, attack w light weapon, attack w heavy weapon, climb ladder, etc). So it's a lot of animation, but still is only a few weeks of work. Luckily I have a great animator for that.

And we'll be doing it in stages, so maybe half of the armour templates will be in the early access build.