next »

[purenickery]

Hello everyone! This is going to be a pretty significant update that's going to really change how I'm going about this project and how this devlog is going to operate. First thing's first, lets get to what

I've Been Up To
I came up with a neat little idea for how to build things in the world quite a while ago, so I've gotten around to adding it in to the current version of the game. Many things in the game revolve aroung the idea of obtaining a "scroll" that is essentially a blueprint teaching the player how to build or craft a certain item. For smithing, in order to smith a specific helmet, you would need to get the scroll for it from a smith you meet in the town or from a monster drop etc. There will also be scrolls for objects you build, like carts, chests, or castle walls. With these scrolls you will be able to place a frame of the object in the world that will list the required items needed to build that object. A castle wall might need 10 stone and 2 mortar for example. You and all your friends (if on multiplayer) can together add all the required items to the frame, and once they are all there the object will get constructed.

I also finally made a custom launcher and updater for the game so anyone can just launch an exe from their desktop and play the latest version of the game!

I am Changing the Direction of the Game Significantly
Before, I wanted to get a nice, stable demo together with examples of all the features that will hopefully be in the full game. I wanted to get most or all of the core game done so I could show off everything in its nearly-complete form. This project is turning out to be absolutely enormous, however, especially for the amount of time that we were able to put into it.

For some personal and motivational reasons, our artist has had to step back from the project. I am currently the only one working on this game as a sole project and I do not see myself being able to complete the game to what we wanted it to be originally. Ignoring the fact that my art skills are incredibly lack-luster, even if I was great at pixel art it would take me forever to finish this game alone. So, I've done some pretty intense soul-searching about what I really want out of this game and making games in general.

I wanted to do a kickstarter earlier so that I could gauge interest in the project and hopefully make enough money that I could work on the game much more than I currently can now. I am realizing the thing that excites me the most about this project is the idea of gathering around with your friends and playing through a random adventure that can include items, objects, and monsters that you designed yourself and put in with the modding system. I don't really care as much about doing this as a full-time job (and I know the success-rate for that is incredibly low anyways), I want to know that people are having fun playing something that I created and building a community off of that. So, that leads me to

What I am Going to do Now
I do not have an artist, but I do have a pretty great and simple system for adding nearly anything to this game. I am going to release a demo in about a week (it's not going to be incredible but it will be SOMETHING). Anyone who wants to will be able to play the game as it currently is. I'll open up the forums for anyone to suggest anything to add to the game. Anyone can make art for an item, object, or monster and if people like it I will happily add it in to the game. Ideally, I'll get a group of passionate people together all helping to make something incredible that we can all enjoy. I'll get on and play multiplayer games with anyone who wants to and discuss what could go in the game (as long as not too many people are interested, which is what I'm expecting).

If people seem to be interested then I'll keep this up as long as people are. If not, I'll probably go back to just doing game-jams while working a software job. Please let me know what you think about this, if it's stupid just shoot me down now so I don't get too much hope If this is something you would be interested in seeing then let me know! I would love to hear that as well. I'm going to get back to busting a few important bugs before I release the last two years of my life to you guys (it unfortunately doesn't amount to too much, but I learned an incredible amount).

[RujiK]

Dissapointing

I don't know about relying on the internet for art content. Seems like it would be better to either:

1. Learn pixel art and take a long time.
2. Use placeholder art and try and pick up an artist later

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

not to be mean but your art until now looked pretty much like programmer art. so it's not a big loss.

Seeing how far you went into details with the programming part, you'd do wonderful with a more qualified artist and i'm pretty sure a lot of decent artists are looking forward to work with you.

[purenickery]

Hey guys, thanks for the input. I've been thinking about it a lot lately and I've decided to just find another artist. *Hopefully* I'll be able to find a really good artist without too much hassle so we can get this game back on a roll.

Until then I'm going to be working mostly on AI and the story generator since they are parts that don't involve much art. Learning pixel art myself would be a pretty bad idea right now because I would *significantly* delay the project since I'd be starting from absolutely no art experience. So, if any of you out there know or are a great artist looking to help out on a hobby project, just shoot me an email/PM 

[purenickery]

I didn't really like old boxes I was using to show something was selected in the game, so I've decided to think inside the box and give all the objects soft outlines!



The only issue with this is my texture packing algorithm doesn't put any padding pixels between all of the images, and some of the images that get loading into the packer are already packed themselves since it's easier for Cody to edit them that way. I'm going to need some padded pixels between every single image to get this to work, so my texture packer has to get a bit more complicated.

First, I'm going to pad every image that gets sent in to the packer. Since each object can have it's own packed image, I have to get the width and height of each cell, then generate a new image where there is padding between each cell in the original image.



Since these images get padded on the outside as well in this process, when they get packed by my texture packer there's going to be padding between them all as well. Now, I can use a form of gaussian blur to generate some small soft edges around all of the objects in a separate image. Then, I can draw that outline image over the default image when I want it to be outlined. These outlines look so much better than the hard box ones and will even work on animations and moving parts

[oahda]

You might want to keep the old red colour on the outline at least, because the blue is a bit hard to see against the grass. It doesn't look super selected. o:

[purenickery]

It does look a lot more selected The only reason I originally chose blue was that I used red a lot for selecting things and people told me they usually associate red with "bad" or "danger". I'll have to try out a few different colors to see what works best

[oahda]

Maybe plain white could work too.

[Oats]

This game looks hella sweat, I hope you can find an artist <3

Personally I'd love to be part of an online community game, even if all the pixel art was shit, having a sword you drew in your players hand would be great, and if you did it I'd atleast be pretty interested to contribute, unless I was the only one contributing, then I'd get shy and wait for someone else 
Either way I'm waiting eagerly for the beta testing 

[purenickery]

We actually have our old artist back  We took a bit of a break (as you can see, we haven't posted here in a couple months) to work on some other small projects. We've been back on this one for a little bit though, so I have some fun new features to share with everyone 

Although, we are still planning on having great mod support and it would be amazing if we could get a big community going still. I am still much more relaxed about people trying out the game, so hopefully I'll be able to post an early alpha version on here soon for you to try out 

[purenickery]

For a long time, one of the most important things to us in this game has been Mod Support. Since this is a pixel art game with pretty simply structured content, it would be rather silly not to allow players to easily extend the game with their own custom content. We want to have this system completely integrated with the game while maintaining blazing fast loading speeds (well, as fast as java can get). I've been working on some pretty cool features over the last couple days dealing with the mod support so I figured I'd go ahead and share what's been going on!

Here are my basic requirements for the mod support for the game:

• A player can have as many mods loaded at a time as they want, without conflicts
• A mod can add new items, scrolls, and objects to the game, or overwrite existing ones
• A player can add and remove mods to an existing save game
• A mod creator can update their mod, and no existing save games with that mod will become corrupted or get new conflicts

In order to successfully accomplish this I need to trade off some of the conveniences of static object IDs. Each save game will have to store it's own list of IDs for all of the objects, which will increase the size of each save game, but will allow for much more flexibility with modding and updating. The current system for starting a new game with mods is as follows:

• Load in all of the objects in the game
• Load in all of the objects for each mod, overwriting old objects with the same name
• Assign each object a unique short ID (allowing for 65536 objects)
• Save the map of ID-Object pairs to a file in the save directory

I'm also going to need some special functionality for loading in save games:

• Load in all of the objects for the game
• Read which mods are being used in the save file
• Load in all of the objects for each of the mods used in the save game
• Load the map of ID-Objects pairs from the file
• Check if any of the Objects in the map have been removed from the game, if so mark them as removed
• Check if there are any new objects in the game, in which case give them new unique IDs and append them to the map

Another minor down-side to this method is when a player is joining an online server, the server will first have to send the object maps before sending over the world and game data. However, the map tends to be much smaller than the world and game data is anyways, so it doesn't seem to be a huge deal.

There's only been one more lingering issue with allowing this much direct mod support into the game: packing the texture sheets. As I've said in a previous post, I take all of the textures in the game and pack them into one large texture sheet to increase drawing speed. That's not very special though, as almost every pixel art game, or even 2d game in general does this. I want to have it so the mods get packed in with all the game's other textures. Before, I had it so the game packs all the game's textures together, along with the mod's textures, when the game loads. This takes about an extra 6 seconds of loading at the moment, and it's only going to get longer as the game gets bigger.

In order to fix this problem, I've decided to cache all the most popular mod combinations on the user's system. When you start a game with a combination of mods, it will still have to pack all the textures together on the first time it loads, however it will cache all of those packed textures on the file system in a folder. Right now, I'm taking the current version of the game, then appending all of the mods and their versions being used, and then hashing the result to get the folder to store the cache in. This way, if the same combination of mods and versions are being used it can easily find the folder where the cache should be. I know there is a possibility for hash collisions, but the probably is so low that this will happen, and it's just going to be pretty funny if it ever does (and you can fix the problem by deleting the cache folders).



Now, when the game is loading, it can check if there is a cache for all the mods being used and just load the cache in, which only takes a fraction of a second.

[RujiK]

Modding is a lot of work.

Fun fact: When I was younger (16ish) I thought every game by default was 100% moddable but most of the evil game corporations disabled modding so no one would change their game.

[purenickery]

To have solid mod support you really have to keep it in mind from the beginning of development. And I know there are a lot of companies that really try to discourage modding, but they're just shooting themselves in the foot 

[purenickery]

In other, much more exciting, news: houses finally have walls on the sides! It's about damn time...

[purenickery]

Hey, everybody! It's been a while but I've been working on a whole lot of not very exciting back-end engine coding (which I may share here sometime soon). Here's a couple cool things we've been working on however:

A preview for a new biome! (Made by a new artist!)


Added functionality for editing the ground tile with the editor (works in multiplayer too!)

[RujiK]

Dang... That looks awesome. That water is incredible. The cobblestone looks really nice with the tall grass in front of it. Also the desert looks "deserty," but doesn't look empty and boring. Cool beans!

Oh, also for the heck of it I tried implementing that water method you brought up awhile back in game maker. I did it, but it ran at only 80 fps with no other code. Too slow to be used. Here is what it looked like without the fancy shader stuff you got going on:



Waiting for some desert or some sandy beaches!

[purenickery]

Your water looks pretty fabulous too  I ended up using a lot of different tricks to get mine working at a reasonable framerate, and there's a graphics option for it so people with slower computers can turn it off entirely. These are the kind of algorithms I with computers were powerful enough to handle really easily 

I did set up a custom generator for the desert biome too so I should be able to share some of that really soon!

[purenickery]

Decided to give in to peer pressure and give Questica a full 2d map rather than a horizontal strip 

[EJlol]

Now that looks awsome

[RujiK]

Hot dang! How big is the map? Do you know yet? But don't forget a small detailed map is better than a big empty map!

Of course if you have a big detailed map that's even better.