Love the retro feel combined with the maps! 

Do you plan on having a demo anytime soon?

Yes we do! I can't guarantee when they will be but we'll probably release a demo of the combat system for people to try out in a few weeks to a month.

That tree falling looks awsome. Makes me wish to cut down more trees. Maybe also shake the camera a little bit to get even more the *boom*-effect? Also a lot of the effect depends on the soundeffect (which you cannot show in a .gif sadly). Hope you will find a good sound effect for it

Great Idea! I actually added in a pretty nifty camera shake function a little while ago that will fit in perfectly, can't believe I didn't think of that 

Hello everyone! I thought I'd brag about our first official use of the particle system, which just so happens to be sprucing up the falling of trees. It took us a while to decide how to handle cutting down trees. Should we go the tradition route and have trees just spontaneously disappear and have logs appear in the player's inventory? Perhaps we should force the players to be so pacifistic they refuse to harm even trees?

Alas, we have decided to actually visualize the tree falling and hitting the ground once it's cut down, and have it mysteriously break into individual logs upon impact that the player can cart away for construction. The ground impact is where the particles come in. I can now have it burst some dust clouds to float up and some little tree bits to fly around for emphasis.

In traditional minecraftian style, the player simple punches the tree to have it fall over (for now, this will change once Cody gets me some axe swingin' action).



In other news! For selling the game we have decided to go traditional minecraftian style and sell accounts for the game that people can use the update and post on forums. To go with this we are almost done making a website for the game which we will post here once it's ready. We will be allowing people to register for free (that's right!) for the first week or so once the website goes up (you lucky bastards). The forums will be up for people to post on and we'll eventually get around to letting people who've signed up to play demo's and alpha's of the game!

Make it 3d. Then you'll be able to notice them

We were actually considering making the game 3d at first! We decided to stick with 2d though because it's what we're used to and good at. We will definitely make a 3d version later on if we ever get the chance!

The cave looks weird. It just looks like a single flat surface with two different colors. You could be walking in a chasm, or walking on a high path over the dark rocks. I can't tell since the black rocks have no vertical transition.

Yeah I know what you mean and I agree :/ its a pretty tough choice deciding what to do here since the dark rocks aren't supposed to be a higher path, they're just solid rock. It'd be easier to show the distinction if we did it like the cliffs where there was an obvious higher path but we don't want to give that illusion in the caves since then players will want to climb up to the higher level. They are just a first draft however so they'll probably change!

This is a thoroughly beautiful game and I really enjoyed reading the logs so far! The lighting seems like a really great system and not too over the top which is nice. Have you got any generated caves you can show us with the sprites and things? My only feedback is that the menu items look a little flat on the curved page of the book. Maybe you could just flatten the page a little or have a drop shadow as if the text is hovering above the page?

Thanks for the comments and advice! We will try to do something about the book because I know what you're talking about, but we don't want to have to put in a system too complex for it. And here's a picture of the caves! It's just the walls right now but soon they'll be infested with minerals and monsters.

That book reminds me of morrowind. Keep improving that milkshake.

Haha! I'm glad you noticed the loading messages. One day me and my friend got together and came up with a hundred or so funny/snarky loading messages to pop up randomly. We just have this issue where I programmed the game loading pretty well so it loads too fast for you to read the messages very well. Guess I'll just have to make the world generation much more complex so you can actually read them!

I've also just now gotten around to polishing up the main menu! We've almost got ourselves an actually professional game here folks. One of the feelings we're aiming to evoke from this game is that similar to reading a really good adventure book, and in homage to that the main menu is designed similar to a book. Each menu is on a different page and flipping through it will let you change the settings and start/load your games. Similarly we will also have books like this in-game where you can read through some of the lore of the game! (but my lazy butt hasn't gotten around to putting that part in yet)



Also as another update, we've finally gotten to the point where most of the behind-the-scenes stuff is done and we can get on to adding a whole bunch of content to the game itself! It's an exciting time to be following this game now 

I've made sure the game always runs at 60fps with no interruptions! (at least on my rinky-dink little laptop) Occasionally it'll slow down to 40fps or so if the screen if really full of NPCs in a town but I still have optimizing to do on that.

Ingame there will always be a 4x zoom so you can see those beautiful pixels in all their glory

Finally got an official version of equipping done! (after trying to come up with a good way for about a year) We eventually decided it would be pretty cool to just leave the equipped items in the inventory but marking them as equipped so that you have to balance what you keep in your inventory more. We want inventory balancing to be a pretty important part of the game.

Particles are turning out to be much more efficient than I was originally suspecting! Working with my lighting system and my unoptimized shader I can still have around 10,000 particles on the screen while they are also reflecting. I don't see us ever needing this number of particles which is great news for us. Here's a test picture showing how many particles can be on the screen while still running at 60 fps!

I am beginning to realize that in order to accrue a more dedicated fanbase I'm going to have to put out more updates! Thus, I have vowed to make updating the devlog a more regular thing for me over the course of summer (and hopefully beyond).
So, for today, I thought I'd share with y'all the cooking system I whipped up. It pretty accurately describes the kind of crafting system we're going for. It is less of an A+B=C system and more of a hands-on approach.



As you can see, you throw some food in a range and it will slowly cook, first transitioning from a raw to cooked image, and then to black. The closer it is to the cooked image when you take it out of the range the better cooked the food will be! This will also allow us to give different stoves and fires different sizes to allow you to fit more or less food on them. We'll also be able to change how fast each stove will cook the food.

Also, new grass! woo!

I'd love to hear any of your comments or questions as well! We are considering releasing some small demos soon so let us know if any of you are interested in try out the game as well. I'll start posting more about combat once I get it polished up.

Just finished transferring most of the game loading to my brand new file format! Before I was using XML but I started migrating over to a simpler one for players to be able to mod the game a bit easier. Here's how an item is represented in text for example:

Code:

0:{
  name:steel armor
  width:2
  height:1
  description:This looks like a steel piece of chest armor. It should hold up against swords being slashed
  description1:This piece of armor can hold up well against slashing attacks, but doesn't hold up as well against magic or arrows
  descriptionDialog:Oh, this looks like a nice piece of metal chest armor. All I know about it is that it can hold up well against slash attacks
  descriptionDialog1:Wow, some metal chest armor! This holds up well against slashes, but not so much against stabs, magic, or arrows.
  weight:40.0
  price:640
  equip:body
}

If a player wanted to add their own items to the game all they have to do is add their own block like this to the data file and an image for the item and it will automatically work in the game!

At the dawn of my 4th or 5th time reprogramming the animation system I thought I would go ahead and share it with you all. This will surely be my last time reprogramming it right?! Anyways... today we unveil the Questicamatic!

Let's talk a bit about what we want from an animation system. Of course we want character actions to be drawn onto the screen in a smooth and logical way, and since it's a randomly generated adventure game we'll want to give the player the ability to wear different clothes and have different looking body-parts. And, of course, since we're hard-core programmer types, we want this to work as efficiently as possible.

We decided to split the body into three separate parts, the head, arms, and body. Each of these being interchangeable. Now we also have to have the ability to put overlays onto those body parts, for example a helmet would be an overlay of the head, and armor would be an overlay of the body.

Now we can construct animations by piecing together frames from the different body parts, moving/rotating them to fit the animation. This way we can use a select few frames for each body part but get many different movements by simply moving and rotating them!

For example, to add in a brand new sword we only have to make 6 different images of the sword at different angles or with motion blur to have the new sword animate correctly in all the animations!

Examples!!



You can see the body parts in the top right and the animation frames in the bottom left. If you notice, body parts can also be arranged to be in front of or behind other body parts for each individual frame!

Another!



And to all you dedicated fans out there wondering if you can use this editor to add your own weapons, armor, and animations to the game you certainly will be able to! It goes along with our goal of making this game *really* easy to mod.

And lastly, to tingle your senses with another lighting gif, here's a test of flaming arrows in a dense forest!

Rock on dudes  thought I'd share a bit of multiplayer today! I also thought I would post an update NOT at 2 in the morning to maybe reach some more people 

Right now multiplayer works basically in the same way it works with Terraria if you've ever played it. Essentially, one player starts up a server and also plays in it, and friends can then join in the server and play around together. What we have at the moment can be summed up in these two screenshots:

Good day ladies and gentlemen Who wants to hear about our modding/entity system?! I'll go ahead and assume the thunder outside isn't the weather conditions but rather everyone giving a resounding yes.
Our main goal for this system was to allow players to add their own content to the game as easily as possible. With little programming knowledge any player should be able to add their own items and entities to the world to use in their own games and multiplayer games with their friends! Not only will this open a huge door for players who want to craft their own experiences, but it also means we can get all our players to basically make the game for us! We wont have to make any content ourselves!
As fun as that would be we've decided to make the game it's own full experience while allowing people to add their own things.

How this will work is there will be a folder (either in the User folder or AppData or something) where you can store all the mods in their own folders. Inside the mod folder will be descriptions of items, entities, or even new game code (if I can get that working) that will automatically be loaded in to the game for you to play with!

A subfolder will look a bit like this, images for all the added entities along with text files describing how they will work and generate in the world. In order to make the game run faster and lower the number of draw calls I've made a texture packer that will take all these textures and generate one larger texture containing all the entities images (and a separate one with heightmaps!) This might sound inefficient to do every time the game starts but right now it only takes about half a second, and I could also figure out a way to cashe it all for future runs.

The observant among you might notice this packer isn't entirely optimal but I prefer to stay away from NP-hard problems in my video games and it would certainly take much longer to run had I made much more of an optimal algorithm. The text files allow you to set variables for the objects as well as specify which java class it should use. I will try and make an easy way for people to throw in their own class files for extra-easy modding. If not I might just have to go all Minecraft-style and have people inject the class files into the jar.

Next up I'll have to post about our animation system or possibly the combat, which we're working on getting integrated into online multiplayer right now! Feel free to ask any questions at all and prepare your bodies for more updates from now on. Tryin' to not slack off this summer mates  


I also thought I'd share this: https://gifsound.com/?gif=giant.gfycat.com/MatureWarmFiddlercrab.gif&v=S2iQDfVsVDM&s=2685

As have many legends before me, I entered in my first Ludum Dare last weekend! Any of you who want to try it out can do so here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49927

A lot of people have been saying the animation and art are really good which is hilarious because it was my first time doing either of those  I've always been a programmer at heart  anyways hope you enjoy it!! It turned out surprisingly well I think ^_^

Also, since I haven't posted this yet before, if anyone wants to they can follow my game-making progess on twitter with @purenickery, I'm going to try and start using it more, haha 

Thanks for your replies!!

Damn.... I have like no knowledge of graphics programming at all. I wish I could do stuff like this 
But good job! This is very impressive to me 

I actually had *very* little knowledge of graphics programming before this project and hardly knew what a shader was. If you're interested in learning I can lead you to a few websites that really helped me out! Graphics programming really feels like being a modern-day wizard once you get it down 

Since animated GIFs seem to be all the rage these days I've cooked one up for you guys (or rather decided to post one I captured a while ago). Beware as the quality is pretty low, but you can check it out here: http://gfycat.com/JoyousRewardingKillerwhale
I posted it on gyfcat to save on making it load up here, let me know if that's the way to go with these things!
I promise I'll post another full in-depth update within the next couple days on one of the game's cool features, so hold on to your seats!

[¡Actualizar dos!----------------------]

Us orange bros gotta stick together         Anyways on to...

¡Actualizar dos!
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After putting a few of the more unique Project Q features into a hat and randomly pulling one out, today I will be discussing the lighting system! At least I think the lighting system we have set up is pretty unique, I don't know of any other isometric style games with a similar system.

So lets take a look at the end product to see what my end goal was. (It's still not perfect, I'll be doing some more tweeking)

Things to notice about this: -The objects in the world react to the light as if they were standing up in 3D. The tops of the trees are dark since the light is on the ground, and the tip of a blade of grass will get brighter than the base. -Yeah that's about it really

This means that for every pixel I draw not only do I have to know it's x and y coordinates but ALSO a mysterious z cooradinate! I knew that normal maps would send a separate texture to the GPU giving information about the angle of each pixel when drawing an image so maybe I could use something similar to serve this purpose. For an object that is just meant to be a vertical plane I can easily generate a pixel image of increasing color value to represent the height of each pixel. The shader can then calculate the pixel's distance from the light using the x and y coordinates from the screen and the z coordinate from the height map image. For the especially curious here's how it would look:



(and don't worry graphics programmers out there! The heightmap it uses in the game itself is 1 pixel wide to save space) This system allows me to draw any image up to 256 pixels tall. All the shader cares about is the R channel of the heightmap (this will come into play later), and the R channel of a pixel can hold 256 different values.

"But wait!!" I can hear you all screaming into your computer screens, "what if an object's base is off the ground, like a creature jumping or a magic flying tree?!?!?" Well never fear! I have a custom mesh sending all the textures in the sprite batch that has an extra attribute sent to the vertex shader containing the base z height of the texture. So all I have to do is add the z height from the height-map and the base z value!

Speedy topic change 

I started using the cave generator in my last post to start generating cliffs on the main surface of the game, a-la:



But darn it all this ruins everything! EVERYTHING!!! the cliffs aren't flat vertical surfaces, how am I going to get the light working correctly with them? Well, since the shader checks the height-map for each pixel it draws, I could make a custom height-map for each peice of the cliff that contains each z height for each pixel in the cliff! All I have to do is draw a z height on every pixel of the cliff images, that shouldn't take a very long time at all... 
Nah don't worry I already did it, finished it today FINALLY GAAAAAHHH!!!!



It's so beautiful 

So remember when I said the shader only cares about the R channel of the heightmap? I made a few various colors with decreasing R values, but pretty random G and B values so I could tell the different bands apart when drawing them on. Drawing on tons of shades of very very dark grey would have been HELL! I'm thinking of things I could use the other channels for but got nothing right now, they're just wasted.

Knowing the z value of each pixel is turning out to be incredibly useful as well. For example, if I have a cloud shadow going across the ground, I can use the z of each pixel to check where it is relative to the floor, so the shadow will slide across tall trees like they would in real life!



Last of all, just for funsies  , here's what the game looks like just drawing all the height-maps instead of the textures, looks pretty cool.

What is your favorite colour Nick? Tongue Haha but in all seriousness this sounds great can't wait to see more screenshots of the game!

Well it's quite a long story actually, my mind tends to share allegiance between two separate colors! They both get really jealous of each other but as long as I keep them mostly separate it works out fine. Orange came to me early in life; it never let me down all those classes in Kindergarten when all the other markers just weren't doing the job. It stood out. It was a bright shining beacon of the hope and promise that a boy of that age needs so desperately. Green came to me later in life, and I'm not sure exactly why. It could be perhaps that I began to just colors based on their individual merit and not based simply on how shiny their markers were, and while orange stood out to me in that context, green in it's many shades and forms stood out to me more when encountered in other natural organic forms. That mistress orange, however, I will never forget. She came to me in a time when I needed her most, and memories of that sweet, beautiful orange marker will never leave me.

As for the screenshots I will certainly be posting more! I tend to be quite a perfectionist when sharing screenshots so the screenshots have to be really good for me to post them. I'm thinking about setting aside a block of time today just to take a whole bunch of screenshots and seeing what sticks. And thanks for your reply MereMonkey!!

Update 1!
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I thought I would share a bit about how the world was generated and what part of it I'm working on currently. This will ideally give out some of the game's juicy details and ideas.

The main world in the game is generated in a mostly horizontal slice (think Castle Crashers), this accomplishes two main goals: it gives the player a better sense of direction in the world and makes it WAY easier to generate!

Here's an image showing a slice of something the game might generate, including rivers, different floor types, trees, and patches of flowers. However have no fear! The world it generates is much more detailed than this image shows, I use various types of noise to add variation to the grass heights and density (as you might be able to see in the screenshot above) as well as many more improvements to come.

Also no real Adventure Game/Sort-of Rogue-Like would be complete without caves and dungeons! Succumbing to this relentless pier-pressure I've been messing around with various algorithms for generating these caves and dungeons.
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After generating a couple hundred way-too-small images of the caves it generated I was able to go through and pick out a few that looked pretty nice! (It's actually pretty consistent right now )

Also opened up the possibility for giant boss fight caves in the future.
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Dungeons! Again, some way-too-small images but they should do the job for those sprightly young eyes of yours. Unbeknownst to you, but knownst to me, the dungeons floors are generating in a way so that stairs can lead sensibly to each successive level, the single red pixels in each of the images represents a staircase.

All I have to do now is berate Cody ceaselessly until he gives me art to fill these dungeons and caves with but for now all I have are code-generated images of the layouts. The caves have to be filled with all kinds of whacky and ridiculous monsters and the dungeon corridors are begging for unseen and dastardly traps!

If anyone has any questions about the game or how it's generated or what my favorite color is feel free to ask and I will do my very best to answer. Next up, I'm considering posting about the super neat lighting system, the incredibly neat online multiplayer, or the unbelievably neat modding support! If anyone has any preferences on what they'd like to hear about I'd love to hear about their preference!

-Nick