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[tylerfunk]

Two bugs (or features). Gibs-bridge and naked-cave.

Did some cannibals get creative with their leftovers?

[eigenbom]

I guess so ...

[eigenbom]

Update: There are now more interesting features above ground in the forest area, such as hills, bridges, and an occasional chasm. Below ground I've started to add some ruins and bits and pieces.



On the art side, Alex has been working on the creatures again and we now have a basic system in-place that allows us to create variations of colour and features. You may now stumble upon a rare blue laser horse during your adventure.

[gimymblert]

What? Teletubies is evolving !

[jamesprimate]

those alpacas look great

[oahda]

Hey, the green one is that Pokémon.

[eigenbom]

those alpacas look great

Cheers I like them. Although I call them horses because that makes them seem more derpy.

Hey, the green one is that Pokémon.

Probably!

Update: Dungeons are a type of sub-region that appear in different areas: the forest has ruins, the mountain has tombs, the veil has the labyrinth, the volcano has the lair, and so on. This week I fleshed out the structure of some of these.

The ruins will appear mostly in the forest, and consist of a small set of rooms, loosely connected and obviously abandoned. Here's an example of the structure in ascii-form. The entrance has been generated at the lower-right and a treasure room two floors above it. The ruins will be rare, but if you find one there will probably be some interesting items in there.



I'll typically print out an ascii version of it to inspect the global structure, but I also try to play within the level itself to get a feel for it. I also take lots of screenshots and paint over them with concepts, which I'll then fit back into the algorithm. Here's an example of a generated ruins-level that I've overpainted with some ideas.



The tombs will appear in the mesa/mountain level and will be much bigger than the ruins. I imagine they will be a very dangerous place, full of the undead and curses. They'll probably reach a maximum of about this size:



In terms of the dungeon generator, I'm trying to create a set of high-level structures, and then low-level details and connections. For instance, one type of dungeon may actually be two separate dungeons joined together with a horizontal tunnel (as shown below). I think if I have enough variety of these high-level plans then dungeon-exploration should be a lot of fun!



Alex has been working on some of the backgrounds this week, and he'll continue to refine them for the next few weeks. Here's a sneak peak at the new volcano background, which I think looks totally awesome.



And finally .. if you head over to this topic you'll find some Moonman comics and sketches, featuring the amazing work of @salt and friends.

[moomat]

The ASCII level previews are a cool trick (how Dwarf Fortress of you, as well!)

This game is really coming along nicely; just wanted to say it's been great peeping its progress.

[oahda]

woah moonman just turned into meanman

[Noogai03]

woah moonman just turned into meanman

the happy grin continues to convince people he isn't a murderous psychopath

[ryansumo]

Super late to the game on this but this is really shaping up to be a great game!

[eigenbom]

The ASCII level previews are a cool trick (how Dwarf Fortress of you, as well!)

Thanks, yeah I love it, it's so useful. The engine doesn't need to load up half the resources and can just dump the map and then exit -- makes debugging dungeons super fast.

woah moonman just turned into meanman

the happy grin continues to convince people he isn't a murderous psychopath

just to reiterate, moonman isn't good or evil. he just is. him eating someone isn't an act of anger or violence, a person is just a collection of molecules.

Super late to the game on this but this is really shaping up to be a great game!

Hey, welcome

[gimymblert]

is love a collection of molecule?

♥

[DigitalSun]

This looks just amazing!

[eigenbom]

is love a collection of molecule?

♥

my love for you is more than molecular

This looks just amazing!

thanks!

Update: Lots of misc updates and fixes this week. I also fixed two core issues that have been around for a while now:

Threaded-loading bug
Memory allocation
The first you may see sometimes when you change to a new area as a bunch of warnings that appear, saying something like 'resource unavailable'. That's fixed now. The second was much deeper and required 2 solid days of refactoring how memory is allocated in the game. I'll leave the details out, but the new system is much more flexible and I fixed some bugs along the way, too. Hopefully this'll fix some of the random bugs.

To test out the memory system I was having fun spawning hundreds of skeletons. The renderer runs too slow to be fun but it's nice that the game doesn't crash .. it just keeps allocating more memory as needed. Other fixes: Fog Of War is now saved between areas, the controller support is fixed (how long has it been broken?!), and a crash caused by the auto-save should now be fixed (by upgrading the boost library).



The backgrounds are still being worked on for the main areas and sub-areas. Here's a preview of the town area:



In terms of progress, we're running behind schedule. We'll definitely be pushing out another alpha in two weeks with all the changes we've made over the last 4 months, but the closed beta will have to wait until after GDC.


 

[Connor]

lol, hundreds of skeletons. nice. great way to test system memory.
i dont have much to say. ill just leave my post like this. hurray for weird comments

[DrDerekDoctors]

Dammit! All these screenshots and animated GIFs are making it WAY TOO HARD to wait for this game! BOOO! But also NOT BOOO!

[eigenbom]

lol, hundreds of skeletons. nice. great way to test system memory.
i dont have much to say. ill just leave my post like this.

Yep love them skellingtons. Thanks for commenting, it's pretty quiet on my TIGs devlog these days.

Dammit! All these screenshots and animated GIFs are making it WAY TOO HARD to wait for this game! BOOO! But also NOT BOOO!

Ha, one day, when you're like 90 years old, you'll hear that Moonman has reached v1.0.

[Will Escher]

Hey eigenbom, nice cameo in Blitz Breaker.

[eigenbom]

Hey eigenbom, nice cameo in Blitz Breaker.

Hehe, yep

Update: Hey all, the devlogs will be going on hiatus from now, as I'll be in the U.S.A. until the start of April. The next few days I'll be wrapping up the next Alpha build, and will hopefully have that up by the end of next week.

This week has involved lots of miscellaneous things: we've added a new small town area, a new teaser volcano area (that has basically nothing except lava), added in a few more item sets (dungeon, gold, and bone), and made sure that lot's of creatures and things are available for the next alpha. One thing I won't have time for is balancing, so the next build will be looser, with just a bunch of stuff thrown in.

Here are a few of things we've been working on:

Website has been updated with new screenshot, pre-order widget, and team avatars.

I've added pop-up labels to items:



New weapons and background decorations.



Some new backgrounds and areas, like the town:



Oh and there'll be a new character available: Carl. In the final game you'll have to unlock him, but in the alpha he'll be available to play. He starts with a powerful laser gun that has a small number of charges.



And that's it. Thanks for reading and I'll catch you back in the devlogs in April!