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[Vovosunt]

I learned Programming quite a while ago and tried making games quite a few times, but kinda never finished any. Time to fix that

These are some screens from my latest project:



I plan on making it into a game, but I'll have to remake everything  
Hope you guy will help me along the way  

Current Plan (21NOV12):
Version 0.1:
  Get an Endless Auto loading 2D tile engine working; (Almost done )
  Make some tiles!;
  Integrate box2d physics or make own physics engine
  World dynamics (water, fire, dynamic trees?);
  Skeletal Animation + Editor?

And just a few requests of feedback :

• I'm thinking about making the blocks bigger (16x16 instead of 8x8). Currently the character ist around 6 blocks high ~48pixels. Having more blocks means more fun, but I feel that I can't get the details I want into them (into every tile). And placing so many of them is a bother.
• I also want to use skeletal system for my characters instead of pixel animations. That way I can seriously cut down on the sprite drawing as well as enable some awesome dynamics and maybe even some cool monster generation.

Do you think these are good ideas?

[lauris71]

• I'm thinking about making the blocks bigger (16x16 instead of 8x8). Currently the character ist around 6 blocks high ~48pixels. Having more blocks means more fun, but I feel that I can't get the details I want into them (into every tile). And placing so many of them is a bother.
• I also want to use skeletal system for my characters instead of pixel animations. That way I can seriously cut down on the sprite drawing as well as enable some awesome dynamics and maybe even some cook monster generation.

Do you think these are good ideas?

Bigger blocks are also more intuitive as you can better estimate where your character will fit and where not. So I think it is OK, especially if it simplifies your development.

By skeletal animation do you mean simple composite sprite system (i.e. sprite is built of torso, legs, hands, head, weapon...) or drawing full-featured 2D vector figures?
I think either way is OK, although you have to design your characters keeping animation system in mind.

[Vovosunt]

Bigger blocks are also more intuitive as you can better estimate where your character will fit and where not. So I think it is OK, especially if it simplifies your development.

It's still quite a dilemma for me, because more blocks = smoother environment + more awesome creations and less blocks = easier + faster + better graphics(?). And I'll be kind of jealous if other games will have smaller blocks in them (like in Starbound)
Initially I intended for a per-pixel environment, but it seems it's quite hard to generate, render and save an endless pixel world.

By skeletal animation do you mean simple composite sprite system (i.e. sprite is built of torso, legs, hands, head, weapon...) or drawing full-featured 2D vector figures?
I think either way is OK, although you have to design your characters keeping animation system in mind.

Yeah, basically using only hard-bones (aka only one bone per vertex). Not Vector images.
Thanks for the Feedback   

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

I'll follow this :D

[Vovosunt]

I'll follow this :D

Much appreciated 

So a little Game Status Update:
Progress is not going that well, but stuff is moving... sorta.
Old ideas are being rethought and errors are being removed but I'm still hitting quite a few programming quircks.
Just a few hours ago I realized that using SFML renderTextures for me is useless and that I should just use vertexArrays instead. Made me really facepalm, since I have to redo most of the rendering stuff that I've done till now 
On a good note thought, I moved to c++11 and it's awesome!

So I hope, I'll be able to get some new visuals soon....ish

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

I understand the feeling.

I've been drawing textures in Immediate Mode in OpenGL- which means:

Eventually I'll have to use vertex arrays instead to sate the performance issues, and it's a pain because I just finished with programming all rendering operations.

Still following this!

[zalzane]

using opengl immediate mode is a crime

[jmcmorris]

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.

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

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?

[jmcmorris]

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.

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

Wow!

I was trying to create something like this before because i didnt think that anything quite like this existed!

This is a wonderful program! You should use it Vovosunt!

[Vovosunt]

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

This is a wonderful program! You should use it Vovosunt!

I've thought about using an already made product for animating, but I'm still not sure what I want for my animations. Moreover the requierments that I have set for myself are already more than Spriter can offer. And actually I want to code it myself. I've made a functional skeleton system during one of my experiments before(without animations thought) and it was quite fun

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.

Yeah, I've thought about that too. I've set my mind on 16x16 blocks and a 64 pixel high character. Mostly due to the fact that 8x8 blocks are not art friendly 
(Initially I wanted the game to be "per-pixel",  but I just couldn't find a way to execute that  )

Thanks for your comments! 

[Vovosunt]

Soo, over the last two weeks I've been tinkering on the terrain/map rendering code.
Getting a feeling that I'm doing things wrong, trying to optimize everything before it even becomes an issue >_<
I've come up with several rendering schemes: one with an array of tiles that is updated and wrapped around the visible part of the map, another where the chunks of the maps are generated as separate pieces and then rendered and a third one where I tried to combine the two.
Basically the issue is that I need some tiles to be drawn over the other so the tiles have to be drawn in the correct order.
Currently I'm using the second method. It takes at most around 6 ms to generate one 16x16 chunk with 2 layers of tiles and then the rendering takes up to 0.6 - 0.7 ms per chunk, which is quite a lot, since rendering all the chunks for 800x600 screen will take up to 10 ms or so.
Well, I guess optimising will come later, cause I'm tired of this, wanna get to the fun stuff sooner XD
Anyway here's a screen  (Note: the tiles are placeholder and the the view is 2 times bigger)



Okay boring stuff away, I've been thinking about other part of the game a lot too! :D
There's gonna be lots of complex generated locations (cities, pyramids, dungeons, villages), dynamic events and a random dynamically driven story (well not exactly a story, but every choice you make will affect the entire progress). Monsters, Weapons and some items will be semi-randomly-generated: Every monster will vary in the stats, logic, skills and so on even among the same of it's kind; Weapons and some items are going to be modular and will have attachment slots too (for enchantments, seals, augmentations and so on); "Furniture" (basically workbench, table, furnace and so on; stuff you place that's not blocks) will have upgrades. The player will have skills and spells. Skills are stuff like double jumps, wall jump, kick, strike, slash and so on will be activated with a button combination (like in fighting games) and spells will be, well, spells 
You'll be able to immediately make some stuff, while other will require recipes that you learn from NPCs or find in the world.
And that's not all the ideas I have prepared
Moreover, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to implement most of them too

Okay on the last note some undecided stuff: I'm still not sure if I want to use box2d for physics or not, since it seems to be fairly efficient. I might implement physically based animations too, if I use it. Design-wise I'm still not sure how to mix magic and technology in the game. It feels like I'm trying to mix the past with the future >~<

And oh yeah, I forgot to mention that originally the game was going to be called This World Is Random, TWIR for short, but I'm not sure I like the name anymore