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[tom-martin]

Our new project is Tavern. A blend of survival, building and business simulation.  The player must harvest the resources to build and then successfully maintain an inn on a busy thoroughfare between two towns.

Screenshots:





The game is built in Javascript with three.js to handle the WebGL stuff. It's a combination of hand drawn 2d sprites and 3d assets generated in code as the player builds things.  I'm the programmer and both Caragh and I are producing the pixel art.

[Mr Speaker]

Looks really nice! What's the process for building things? Is that house in the picture built from scratch, or a pre-made asset?

[tom-martin]

Hi Mr Speaker. Thanks!   

I'm working on a video of some building gameplay now so will try and post it up here soon. 

The house in the picture I built in game from scratch.  You can place wall pieces, floor pieces and roof pieces one by one a la minecraft/terraria etc although the pieces are less voxelly/blocky I suppose. It's hard to explain, hopefully the video will make it clearer.

[tom-martin]

As promised here's a gameplay video.



(is there a way to embed youtube here?)

Obviously a lot of things are still missing/unpolished.  A lot of animations are missing or placeholder.  The building experience still needs work. 

But this should give an idea of the way you go about building stuff in the game.  The controls are currently either keyboard or controller (I've tested with 360 and PS3).  I'd like to add mouse *and* keyboard.  For example wsad to move and then the mouse to choose where to place things.  I'd also like to extend the control scheme on controller to be dual stick, left to move, right to point where to place.

The video is quite long so here are some GIFs demonstrating the key points.

Cutting down trees and placing floor boards down:


Building walls and using scaffold to reach and build the roof:


Placing lights.  This also demonstrates how the walls fade away when they're obscuring the player:

[TamaraRyan]

I like this idea. Do you have to deal with bar fights every now and then?

[tom-martin]

Great idea Tamara! I've certainly been thinking of adding subplots that the player has to deal with caused by the shenanigans of certain guests. A bar fight would be fun!

[TamaraRyan]

Thanks! I admit I've been thinking about a Tavern based game for a bit, but I'm not a coder. So I'm glad somebody else is doing it.

[tom-martin]

I added a dialogue pane. It's very much inspired by A Link to the Past, Harvest Moon etc,



There's no dialogue system yet, that's the next step  .  It's just place holder text you can see there now.

[Cranktrain]

From the looks of things I don't think he does have any rooms.

Looks neat!

[tom-martin]

Thanks DizzyDoo! It looks like Tavern and The Eldritch Zookeeper have a few concepts in common.

I recorded a video of some Tavern development and put it on youtube here:





The code in this episode is pretty simple and I have a terrible habit of mumbling, but hopefully someone might find it useful or interesting.

[tom-martin]

I've been refactoring the npc code.  I'm trying to move towards an entity/component/system style rather than the object oriented free for all I currently have.

Best way I can find to test the pathfinding code is to get them to creepily follow you:

[Mr Speaker]

This is looking great! I notice that the ground plane is flat... is that going to be always true?

Also (and this is just personal preference for sure!), but I the resource-collection animation is too distracting for something that will happen A LOT. I think it would be better if it started rising, but fade out pretty quickly.

Anyway, very impressive so far!

[tom-martin]

Thanks Mr Speaker.

We did originally have more varied terrain but I took it out because it complicated the building process and the collision code quite a lot. I may put it back but it will need careful thought.

Good point on the resource collection, I had the same concern when I added it but soon got used to it. I'll certainly try other things.

[tom-martin]

Progress has been real slow recently I don't have any updates to the game to show off but I have been working on some tooling.

I've been building a tool to help me quickly build 3d content for the game. It's based on the need/desire to keep all the objects in the game somewhat aligned to a 3d grid which is at the same resolution as the pixels in all of the textures and sprites.  I probably could have spent time figuring out a pipeline for this using something like Blender but with a similar amount of effort I figured I could build something myself.  Here's a quick clip of me building a bed, or at least the frame of one using it:



The nice thing about building your own tool is that it doesn't need to be super well built or designed.  The user experience is terrible! Everything is done with an ever increasing combination of keyboard shortcuts and sometimes the camera spins out and goes crazy.  I have to edit the code to change what texture is being mapped and I don't currently have a way to control where the UVs end up.  However I am finding I can be quite productive with it.  Before this I was entering the location of all the verts straight into the code!