I've been quietly lurking on the devlog forums for the last two months. Definitely keeping busy with development. I'll start updating my devlog again soon...

Anyways, I was looking at your box2d debug draw. Another optimization you could make is clump up the passthrough platforms (going horizontally). Not as big of a win as the 2x2 tile clusters would give you but still might make a difference since you have lots of them.

I agree that you probably don't want to go above 4x4 clusters. Biggest gains are from 2x2 and 4x4 for sure.

Instantly jealous of your built-in profiler. I should invest the time to make one of those too. It is also really interesting to see your work with box2d not only because it is really cool but also because I too was once working with box2d. I eventually decided against it but it is great to see you getting it working. Keep up the good work! :D

Been following this since you started it. Looking great!

Unfortunately, this is a major change to the engine, so I'm dealing with a lot of annoying bugs.

I recently went through a similar change and had dozens of bugs and continued to have related bugs pop up for awhile. You have my sympathy. Good luck!

Congratulations! Well deserved. :D

Sign me up! Digging the stylized artwork. I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about this project. :D

New font looks good. It does feel a little too close to the top but I am guessing that is required to fit 3 lines of text in there? I think just one more pixel between the text and the border could be nice.

I would suggest posting the entire devlog entry here instead of just a link. I think that would help pull in more of a conversation here if that is what you're after. Good luck!

As I commented on your kickstarter, you have my support. Good luck guys! I think you'll make it. :D

Awhile back I read this blog post talking about programming dynamic lightning bolts. The end result is very sexy looking. Good luck!

http://drilian.com/2009/02/25/lightning-bolts/

Looks like you are making some great progress!

One major difference between our implementations is really just the drawing. I draw the quantity of water by changing the height of the water. You change the color instead. I'm curious about this decision. Care to explain your reasoning?

Here is a really old video of the water simulation. I actually haven't touched it much sense then but I will soon be redoing the water logic itself.

Starting an art livestream at 4PM PST. Our artist will be drawing and animating a monster. Feel free to stop by and say hello.

Cool. Good luck with the CA. I'm sure you've done your research but I thought I would share some links I found useful while I was working on my implementation of it.

http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/an-algorithm-for-compressing-space-and-t/184406478
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134736/an_intro_to_cellular_automation.php
http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/papers/cellular_automata_for_physical_modelling.html

I ended up going with a quadtree with lots of recursion. It works great. I do need to refine/optimize the water logic itself though. If you'd like I can share more details with you.

The last several days I have been working on getting the equipment implemented. It is now at a really good point.

It is very easy to change which equipment slots a character race has. Equipable items have a list of "attributes", which can be changed at anytime. Attributes are defined inside of the python scripts and can be anything as long as they have a few methods such as "onEquip", "onUnequip" and a few more. Each of these methods have full access to the game world; making it possible to create very unique and interesting equipment.

Characters in Crea are made up of several images instead of just one. This is thanks to Spriter. So a character has a head, hair, torso, forearm, and all the other expected body parts and on top of those is equipment. With the equipment it is possible to swap out any of the images on the character with other images.

Right now I'm just using placeholder equipment and UI so it is not much to see at the moment but all of the power is there.

Nothing Equipped


Body Armor Equipped

Finally took some time to play around with mm. Good stuff Ben! A lot of it felt good. Here are some thoughts I had while playing.

• TIG!
• Building blocks underneath you while jumping up makes it possible to fall through them
• No performance issues but I recently upgraded my computer.
• Holding 'Q' is fun!
• The game crashed when I exited. It did manage to save. Don't have more information than that.

Keep up the good work. I'd definitely be interested to hear what features you are planning to add in the near future. :D

The VertexArrays are pretty fast. Right now there are several other places that need optimization more than the tile rendering. Like the water simulation (CA) and lighting.

Yeah, that is the problem I have had with the RenderTextures. They seem to be slow for me, which is why I decided to just go with the VertexArrays instead.

Oh right, so you rebuild the vertex arrays every frame? And then have up to N draw calls per frame for N block types, so I assume you're optimising to not have many different block types on screen at once?

Right. One optimization that I have planned is to add a tile buffer to the VertexArrays around the edge of the screen. Then keep the VertexArrays around as long as the player doesn't move out of the buffer (or if a tile changes that is currently being stored in the VertexArrays).

Another thing I am doing is drawing tile transitions above other tiles. This is done using tile priorities and the VertexArrays. You can see it between the dirt and stone in this image.

Hey mate, you suggested vertex arrays as a fallback for older machines for terrain rendering. Does that mean you batch the arrays for each texture that contains the block sprites? (which I assume are spread over any number of images as Crea is fully moddable?)

Eigenbom, that's right. All of my tiles have a unique id. I have a map<id, VertexArray> which means I have one VertexArray per tile. I add to the VertexArrays (position and texcoords) while going through all of the tiles on the screen. After that I then render each VertexArray. I have a few optimizations in there as well as some other stuff but that is the gist of it. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks SolarLune. I'll try that and definitely do my best to keep them short - for everyone sake.

Today I worked on the lighting system more. It is a pain but I made some progress. Got dynamic lights working but I need to do some fine tuning and optimizing.



Also did a decent amount of content planning and UI planning. Here is the mockup our UI guy is putting together at the moment.

Very recently (this last week) I finally made the jump from spare time indie dev to full time. I am on personal leave from my job for 2 months and if things go well during this time I hopefully will make that permanent. I'm very excited about this. I made the decision before the Kickstarter was successful and with its success things are looking pretty good.

I have been considering doing a daily update or perhaps every other day. This idea is directly taken from Gabriel Verdon's "The Archer" here. I have considered this before but didn't think it was feasible while only working on the game in my spare time. I may do it even if no one says anything, but I'll ask this anyways. Anyone interested in me doing this? If so what type of stuff would you be interested in me talking about?

This looks very cool, But the gameplay seems so much like terraria.

But with the twist of modding!

That's what caught my interest at least . Seems to be python?

Yeah, all content is described inside of python scripts.