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?

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

Really digging the 2D pixel & 3D blended world. Gives a unique aesthetic look.

Thanks man!!

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?

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

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|

in-game

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



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:


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.

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?? 

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:



Also I released a video where I talk a bit about the Content Editor I've made for the game and show it off:

This is awesome  Do you do your walls essentially the same way, just drawn up a bit and with the flat gradient piece underneath?

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!

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.

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.

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

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:


Also after a bunch of banging my head on a table I have live previews of various things in the editor:




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:



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.





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

Alright let's do this thing, didn't highlight the yellow area.

My guess is the softer edges between the tile types? And that appears in many different places so I'm assuming that's all 20 Also I'm late on this, but I definitely like the pushing collision better than the strict collision

I already fixed the fog yesterday 

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 

Just goes to show you have to playtest your games!

Looking great Nick!

Thanks Ben! :D

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

Here's a video!!

nice
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 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





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.



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

Code:

int[] intArray = new int[0];

in the class definition.



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

Code:

public static class Drop {
public String name;
public float probability = 1;
public int min = 1;
public int max = 1;
public Drop() {}
}

public Drop[] drops = new Drop[0];

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.



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.

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. 

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:


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

Those shadows are co beautiful, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA 

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 

Here's the screenshot I got for screenshotsaturday!

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.



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.



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!



And you get this nice effect when walking under the trees




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:

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.  Basically,



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!!

This game is *brutal* but I also love it. It reminds me of the types of games I played when I was really young, only much much harder.

I really like the art style as well but on my computer it looks like it's being anti-aliased, which takes away from it a bit. The art looks really crisp in your screenshots though so I'm not sure why it's happening.

Anyways, fantastic job sir  keep doing what you do

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!

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

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



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



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!

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!