Added some zooming in and out.

I wanted to boycot imgur and use another image uploader, but it looks like it went offline, great. So back to imgur. I'll fix the previous posts someday, maybe.



Today I started working on a new planet, maybe the one that you will first encounter. Now you might notice I'm working on a bunch of things at the same time. My idea is to work on all of these features at the same time and hoping they will eventually fit together. It's easier to develop things when they have a practical use.

I just drew a weird tree and house, and bam, alien planet? It might not look great, but in the future when creating more planets, I'll create bunch of random trees and houses and be like oh hey this kind of tree/house fits way better with these aliens. So that can all still be switched around.

The only problem I have is the inside of the houses. It's not easy to come up with "alien furniture". Chairs and tables simply make sense for us, why having something else. So I'm not sure what I'm going to fill the rooms up with yet.
Thanks for all the comments by the way, I really appreciate them! I realized it started to look like I was ignoring them, so let's reply to some:

This game looks... super cool !!

The dungeon environments are starting to come along really nicely as well. I think if you added little non-violent creatures (like those cool flies! were they moving procedurally?) you could liven it up a little. or even just more details along the floors and walls like more vines or long grass, with maybe some soft animation.

Thank you! Yes I agree the dungeons need more details. And I'm going to try to add floaty particles to make it look more lively.

Well if you are asking for ideas.. In the dungeon I would like to see more custom buildings.  You had the water mill on the surface for instance, if you had the odd thing like that down in the dungeon it would give the player something to explore for in addition to finding enemies and loot.  Now that I mention it, I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more stuff in the dungeon.  It doesn't need to be crowded but the odd custom component provides yet another reason to explore.  

Just suggestions, I don't want to interfere too much with your creative process because I think you have things covered.

I really want to try to keep this dungeon organic, meaning no human (or alien :p) structures or anything. But I like the idea of making it more explorable.

Could you maybe have multiple radial menus, like Secret of Mana, switching between them for various item types? Obviously, if you want just one universal menu, that won't work. But if you're open to splitting the menus, then it could be worth exploring. If you can make it work, I really like the look of that in game.

If you could somehow make the radial inventory work that would be great.  It looks fantastic and it is nice to not obscure everything.

I gotta say that I also really like the radial menu, and I think I might have an idea on how to make it work. I just need to check how good it works when having actual items.

Still working on the quest system. It's a real pain in the ass to make as I have to make it very flexible, organized but also easy to use, and I haven't figured out how to make it like that. So I put it on hold and started working on the inventory.

The inventory isn't easy either. I haven't really decided how many and what kind of items you can get in the game, but it's hard to make items without an inventory. It's a chicken and egg kind of thing.

I first thought of a radial inventory, but I don't that that's not gonna work out. After too many items the circles have the shrink, and I do believe that many item slots are needed.



So a rectangular inventory after all. I tried using boxes but that looks really ugly.



Instead I decided to use dots.



Only problem now is that I'm not sure if I have space to show to amount of the item's stack (x10).

I'm working on quests and conversation functionality. Have the character say something else the second time you talk to them, and make their dialog change based on whether or not you have an item for his quest.

And this is all tedious and boring stuff to make, and can't show any visible progress yet. So instead let's toss around some ideas and concepts.

I have this file called idea list.txt, and whenever I think of something it goes in there. No matter how tiny, if I can some day make use of the idea, I add it. So let's go through that list.

• Drawing star constellations
• Forests
  • You can't land here because it's too crowded with trees
  • You can only see what's behind the trees if you're walking in the forest
• Planets that you can't land on yet because..
  • They're too hot/cold, you need to come back when that's not a problem for you
• Guy that jumps out of grass or bush and you need to chase. Or he is a bush/grass and the bush runs away
• Planets where you have to be stealth. Hide behind bushes/trees.
• Long cave where you fall in and you end up at the other side of the planet. Spikes on the sides so that you don't fall straight down but have to manouver through the hole.
• Boss that when you enter the boss room climbs out of the room/dungeon onto the planet and you have to fight it on the planet's surface.
• Boss that poops out smaller versions of himself.
• Freeze gun freezes water, you can pick up the water, a few second laters it melts. Freeze water, pick it up, put in something, it melts, you got water in the thing.
• Be able to buy planet and take care of it. Sort of mini-harvest moon.
• A snail that leaves a poison trail behind
• A comet crashes onto a planet (A big one, like Boooom!)
• Keep stats. How many times you've died. How many monster's you've killed. I'd say the more stats the better.
• You can customize your gun or backpack or something else by moving stuff on a plane around. Or maybe something else. Like you can prioritize certain components or you can set the order in which things happen.
• A super strong monster that you can randomly encounter in space. It's too strong to fight it so you have to fly away as fast as you can. Maybe it's a bounty hunter looking for you. Something like SA-X
• Things in space that give you a little speed boost when flying.
• Give different gravity to different planets. Based on size?
• Wormholes that you can use to quickly travel through the galaxy.
• Create a planet with a pipe that creates sheep.

Those are some of the ideas. Some are very cliche, others are kinda weird, and some I really like. There are a few more ideas I left out because of spoilers or because they're too silly.

Next I want to look at some art.
I have a file called doodlething.png, where I doodle new concepts. Let's take a look.


Sometimes I let my friends design some creatures. I like the one that I marked with a heart, definitely going to use that somehow. And one design was the inspiration of a new creature (marked with the arrow).


A tree that's actually a bird.


If I ever need a reason for the player to be taller, I can put him in these mecha legs.


Designing a new creature is fun, but I don't really know where to stop. I keep getting ideas on how to adapt the current idea.

Again, there's more. Just nothing really noteworthy.

So that's some of the ideas I have. But it'll be a while before I can use most of them. If you have an idea yourself I would always love to read/see them.

The dungeon so far



I think it needs more obstacles. Things that stop you in your path.

But for now I'm going to put the dungeon aside (again) and start working on the space part again. There's still lots to be done like GUI, inventory, collectables, before I can finish the dungeon.

Continued working on Apnid (Not sure if I'll stick with that name). Now he throws his eyes to where you stand and has a better walking animation.



I'm probably going to use it as a miniboss.

Made some changes to Dripol (Yup that's his name).


Added another monster


Still needs some changes. I thought it would be a cool miniboss maybe. Also still needs a name.

Made a new creature.


I toyed around with room-transitions as well, but nothing final yet. I need to have something that takes less than half a second, since some rooms are very small.

Using a fixed rectangle size I'm remaking the dungeon. While making the dungeon I noticed the rectangle was too small, and actually increased it with 2 tiles.



It feels really empty, not sure yet how to fill it up. I should probably make some alien-bats. And I should start working on that room transition.

Pretty much finished cleaning up. It feels good to have a big project like and not have one big pile of garbage code.

Like I said a few posts ago, I wanted to make my rooms out of equal sized squares. Today I was toying around with that concept.

This is probably the size I'm going for


This is 1 tile smaller


Of course, the rooms don't need to be perfectly rectangular.


Metroid fusion's room width (and maybe height as well) is the size of the Game Boy's screen.


And that makes sense. The thing is, if I were to do that, I'd either have to zoom in really far, or I'd have very big rooms. It also makes sense to decrease the height so that it shapes the game's screen. So I might do that.

I showed a Dutch IRC channel my windmill, and someone pointed out the windmill rotated in the wrong way. So I fixed that.

Before


After

I added some statistics for me to check out.



I know, that's a lot of drawcalls. But I will reduce it. Someday, somehow.

Other than that some invisible progress. The cleanup-list is almost complete and with that done I can start adding new stuff.

Finally got non-rectangular rooms working. I end up using objects.





I give parts that need to be merged a tag, though I should definitely find a better system for this, like using Tiled's polyline.

When working on this I realized I should make rooms out of squares. Like in Metroid Fusion.



It gives a much cleaner look.

Not really much progress today. Did a few more things to the textbox, and it's not completely finished yet but I've put it on hold for now.

Instead I wanted to make the way I can make rooms more advanced. Currently I can only make rectangular rooms, but I thought it would be nice to have more advanced shapes. But I'm kind of stuck on how I'm going to tackle this.



The upper image is what I have currently. The bottom image is something that I would like to have. My idea was to use my old idea. Use corners to make up the room, except now make rectangles out of the corners and everything inside those rectangles is part of that room. Making the rectangles out of the corners is the tricky part.

I could also just place the rectangles myself in Tiled, though I feel like this would make level design annoying.



Or maybe I'm overthinking this and is there a way better solution to all this.

Bonus gif:

Today I spend some more time working on the textbox.

Here's a showcase of all the effects I got so far:



Not sure if I'm even going to use all of these. It's the result of me playing around with it.

Some more features are big text, small text, and being able to execute code. The last one is going to be super useful for cutscenes.

For some reason I was never able to play the game properly on my laptop with Windows. About every 0.5 seconds it would stutter. I was always afraid that I did something wrong or that I underestimated the power of LÖVE, and that I'd have to make some heavy changes to make it work properly on more devices.

But a few days ago I did some debugging to check what caused the stuttering. Turns out it was the library I used to hotswap my files. Guess it didn't like checking 100 files on any changes. But I'm very happy I got that fixed.

I started working on textbox effects.



It's been a while since I had so much fun adding a feature for this game.

The way this works is that every character with an effect is its own object. To make sure the text is in the correct position, it contains the string that the text has so far. So the character "e" for example is actually the string "This is simply an e". With LÖVES colored text feature I'm able to make the whole string besides the last "e" invisble.

I already used <tags> for commands, and now I can use them for effects as well.

<circle>This is <group><italic>simply</italic></group> an </circle><wave><bold>example</bold></wave><circle> text.</circle><NL><group><fade>Nothing</fade></group> to be <group><shake>afraid</shake></group> of!

Every character object has a timer property which the effects are based on. Grouped characters are sharing the same time, meaning they are moving the same, like simply and afraid in the image above.

I did some research and found a list of commands that Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door uses for their textboxes. And this isn't really about my game anymore but I read how they have all these tags for grammer. The <AN> tag for when it's not sure what the next word is, and it places "a" or "an" accordingly. I thought that was a fun little trivia fact.

Onto next year!

Congrats

Thanks guys!

Finally fixed the code of rooms loading/unloading.

First I checked for each tile if it was inside the room I'm unloading, but that didn't work since some tiles overlap with 2 rooms.



But now I simply link every tile with the room it is in and remove every tile of that room.

[** Happy 1 year anniversary to this project **]

** Happy 1 year anniversary to this project **



So exactly one year ago I made a folder called Space and started working on this game. It's the first time I've worked on a game for longer than a year.

Let's take a look at some data.
116 text files (Excluding libraries)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lua                            116           2403            717           8136
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Images: 133 .png files

TODO: 53 tasks (8/61 done, 13%)

Commits: 56 (I suck at committing frequently)

So 1 year working on this thing and still no demo huh? It turns out I'm the George R.R. Martin of gamedevelopment in terms of speed. But Owlboy took 9 years to make so no hurry, right?

Here are some of the goals for this year:

• Finish the first dungeon.
• Write out the story or at least have some idea of what the main plot is going to be.
• Try to devlog more frequent.
• Have a working demo.

But first, I'm going to do a big code cleanup. Right now I'm catching myself doing a lot of hacky stuff, and if I keep doing that sooner or later everything will fall apart.

Onto another year!

Added water and lava!

Soo.. it's been a while since my last update (again), but I'm back (again).

I've continued working on the dungeon.


A tentacle that is actually a monster. You need to kill the monster to kill the tentacle. I also added walls you can climb on.


I wanted to add hidden rooms, but using a "broken" tile made it very obvious. I ended up with a fly in the room. If there's a fly it means that there is a connected hidden room somewhere.

I'm also gonna try to make the 'miniboss' above to be more of an event instead of a random monster sitting there. Having the door closed behind you type of thing.

Hopefully the next update won't take another 2 months.