The last few days I've been working on rewriting the netcode. Moving from TCP to UDP and cleaning things up while I have my hangs dirty. I am fairly new to network coding so this is definitely a learning experience. One thing I'm doing that I am glad I did was take the time to write some unit tests for the netcode. It has absolutely paid off already.

I'm really excited to get this netcode done because it is the last major feature before we begin our early beta. I still have a lot of content and smaller things to add in but those are known (as opposed to known unknowns or unknown unknowns). That means more screenshots and videos are coming up this month.

looks like a really hd version of terraria

It is already much more than that

Today was my last day of employment - from now on my full time job will be making Chroma.

Congrats on moving to fulltime indie dev. Be sure to go outside every few days! I'm really looking forward to seeing what you can do with Chroma fulltime.

As I have said before, this looks great! I like the Dark Dwarf. Do you have a backstory for them? Such as Dwarves driven mad by greed? (just like Thráin father of Thorin)

We've been working on finishing up the toolbar this last week. I finished making it so that your inventory bags are actually just items that you can grab/drop onto your toolbar. The plan is to make it so that as you progress your toolbar bag slots increase allowing you to have more bags. Much like bottles in Zelda, bags will be a little hard to come by so you can also upgrade your bags via an NPC.

We also added cooldowns. They turned out pretty nice so I thought I'd share that with you. Here is what it looks like (colors are lost some).

It is about time I get this devlog caught up to speed. Over the past five months I have been working full time on Crea. I realized awhile back that a great deal of the features I had implemented needed to be rewritten for either performance or long term support reasons. Such as I moved from using libRocket for my UI to using Awesomium. We also redid our character animations and world generation. Things are starting to come along nicely now though.

We have pushed out 2 versions of our alpha and will be pushing out another major update today or tomorrow. Beta is not too far away...

We made a IndieDB page the other day and I finally put together a new video just now! It is a preview of the day/night cycle. Nothing too special but still pretty to look at.

I put this screenshot up on Screenshot Saturday. This is what Crea is shaping up to look like. Planning to start updating here much more frequently.

I want to start updating my devlog again and I cant think of a better way than to start with a screenshot.

I agree that player's will build up an association over time. I think you've done a great job such limited amount of space and only 4 colors. It is kind of like how the Pokemon designers make sure each Pokemon has a unique silhouette.

I assume you are making this with XNA. Why could it not run on Windows at least? With MonoGame you could port it over to mac and linux. I would highly recommend porting your game especially since Xbox360 is close to its EOL (end of life) and Microsoft is dropping XNA support. If porting is extra time that you don't really have due to funds you could increase your goal and say that some of the funds would go towards the port.

Are you going to have an original soundtrack (original music) for Hartacon Tactics? That is a very nice reward because it is free for you (digitally) and a good incentive for people to bump their pledge to support you more.

Hartacon Tactics is a very beautiful looking game and good PC tactical RPGs are always welcomed so I'm sure on Kickstarter you could reach your goal.

I highly recommend that you move your campaign to Kickstarter. That gets a substantial amount of more traffic. If you cannot host it yourself, then find someone close who can. Besides that, I agree your rewards are weak. I suggest looking at other successful projects. Definitely need to include a copy of the game. A soundtrack is another code reward. Digital rewards are best in my opinion (they are much cheaper) but do what makes sense for your project.

Several months back I ran a kickstarter and learned quite a bit from that. You can read about our experience on this blog post we made. I hope that helps!

[very]

Yeah, I have been very quite here lately. I was planning to come back with a bang. I have been updating my blog at least once a week. I also do a coding livestream almost everyday for a few hours. It is not the most exciting thing but if you're interested then feel free to stop by.

Last time I posted on this I mentioned my tile rendering being too slow. Just yesterday I finally went ahead and optimized it. My debug build went from 7~fps to 45~fps. Huge win! For anyone interested...

I was already splitting my tiles up into chunks (16x16 tiles). So now I store a map of tileID to VertexArray for each chunk. I recalculate a chunk's map if a tile changes. I also have a map of tileId to VertexArray for the entire TileLayer. When a chunk needs to be drawn I add it to this map and track the chunks I've added to it in a set. To render the TileLayer I order the VertexArrays by the tile priority and then draw each one. (VertexArray is from SFML)

It is a little complicated and could likely be cleaned up some but given all of the requirements I'm pleased with it for the most part. It definitely gets the job done!

This looks great! I really enjoy the vibe I got from the video. Keep up the good work DiscoFish. I'm looking forward to what you do with this. :D

Great stuff guys! Good to see you're enjoying yourselves. I love the "working as intended". Visible bugs are the best.

This looks great! I like the simplicity in the graphics. I'd be interested in hearing more about the design behind the game such as are you going to put a focus on farming? It looks like you plan to do some mining as well.

spriter looks nice, but does the free version export to a format that's not just PNG sheets?

say, some form of text, binary, or XML file that I would write a parser for?

They have their SCML format which is a xml style file that you can parse. I recommend reading this document.

Nice!
The art is amazing too!

So you're rebuilding all the vertexArrays?
Is it efficient enough?
I'm making a similar game and I have only one vertexArray. Tiles wrap around when the camera moves and obviously I can use only one tilemap (but that's not really a problem).
The problems I have are the overlaps (I can't really set in which order the tiles are rendered so don't have any tile order )

Thanks!

Right now my tile rendering is too slow. I actually need to optimize it but what I am currently doing is recalculating all of the VertexArrays every frame. Each tile type gets its own VertexArray (since each tile is on its own image). I also add the tile blinding to the appropriate VertexArray. Then at the end I draw each VertexArray according to the tile's priority, which is given along with the rest of the tile data.

When I profiled this I found that the slowest point is appending all of the Vertices. So I need to devise a way to keep the VertexArrays around and update them when tiles change and when the camera moves. The next slowest part is the actual rendering itself, which could be sped up by creating a composite RenderTexture of the tile images at runtime. I have to do this at runtime since mods can add new tiles.

For your composite animations I suggest looking into Spriter. That is what we are using for my game, Crea.

As for the block size, another thing you need to keep in mind is memory and cpu usage. You have to draw all of the tiles on screen. 8x8 tiles means you are drawing 4 times as many tiles as 16x16 and also you have 4 times as many tiles in your world. If you plan to have a large world then that can get quite expensive.

thx dude. yeh i think 'tab' hides all UI elements. You should be able to place blocks using the right mouse button, but only in a small radius from the player (and if the empty space is not hidden behind another block). At least it works on my mac mini 10.7. Thx for trying it! Now you can send me an alpha of crea in return!

Ah, on mac ctrl+click is the right click, which you have assigned to create water. I'm guessing you're using a mouse so you didn't run into that issue. And yeah, tab toggles ui visibility.

I could smuggle you a copy of Crea alpha here in the near future. I'm sure you'll find something to keep yourself occupied in the meantime.

I played this on my mac. Everything was running great! I have a really new macbook pro running 10.8. Only problem I really ran into was the inventory disappeared at some point. I was pressing lots of buttons to see what was available so perhaps I disabled it...

Oh yeah, another thing that maybe you have disabled. I couldn't place down anything - blocks or items.

Good work!

Amazing artwork! I am really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Good luck with your project (and thesis)!