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[vitalash]

You can now craft a violin. In the blue enchanted forest, you'll find mahogany branches and sticks. Grab two of those, drop them together, and you'll have a violin. Without me to guide every player, Riff will be happy to teach that process...


The first-ever "NPC" in this game is named Riff, and she loves playing violin so much that she's preparing music lessons for players.
She also will play music whenever someone isn't having a conversation with her.
For now, she's still getting ready for all of that, and keeps to herself:


In the dialogue system I'll program, she'll have these expression images


The idea is that there will be a painting tutor, a violin tutor, and a bunch of nice vibe-y NPCs that set the atmosphere of the game and help the headspace of the game be positive.

Steam page is here; marked as "Coming August 30th"
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3147260/World_of_Squares/


I made the website work today. However the download is redacted until the game is ready
https://worldofsquares.org/


The game is this many lines of code so far (it's been about 2 months of work)

[vitalash]

This song is very pretty
https://youtu.be/42O0EZkeQ_c?t=35

So it should be one of the songs Riff plays! Unfortunately I haven't practiced this song so all I could record for the game *so far* isn't very good (I'll want to improve it, but this was just to get the development going)
In this video you'll see the dialog system is coming together too!
https://i.imgur.com/QZNYEoY.mp4

Violins can now play many scales instead of just D major. I call this "tuning" even though it's different:
https://i.imgur.com/he1ly9o.mp4

My dialog system is programmed like this:


A simple parser makes "events" by parsing the messages. This can change text speed and color. Each NPC will have a different voice; I played around with FLEX in FL Studio to get a bunch of samples. I worked on this for about 13 hours today; now I need to rest so I can work on it more!

[vitalash]

I recorded La Campanella's intro for Riff to play in the world: https://i.imgur.com/JwS01rv.mp4

Watch her play it (sped up because she's obviously better than me) https://i.imgur.com/HHNj8q5.mp4

The dialog system is fun. Some options move you forward in dialog, others execute a new dialog branch, and others execute a "Server handler" which works like this


I have to get to sleep as soon as possible so I can work on it more and make it pre-alpha release ready.

There'll be a painting tutor just as Riff is a violin tutor. She'll teach you songs and stuff too. There'll also just be nice NPCs to talk to throughout the world. Good night.

[vitalash]

Meet Paw and Gorb, the two latest NPCs.

https://i.imgur.com/0eghApV.mp4


https://i.imgur.com/rSchxjp.mp4


I also made Riff give you a tutorial! I'll have to flesh out tutorials more later, but this is fun for now.

[vitalash]

You can hang glide now!



Here's a fun meme about hang-gliding.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8XTilaM6rEE

Fireflies are pretty!


You can attack them to gather them. Eventually I'll want you to be able to craft a glowing firefly jar you wear on your head.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them;
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.


Deep in a cave upstream of the fishing area by the town, you'll find a suspicious untradeable gold ring! It turns you or your pet invisible:

[vitalash]

Cubetown is a real thing now!


Cozy blankets to sleep in!


A communal painting for anyone to use in Cubetown!

[vitalash]

I emailed RAD and they said they do not currently sell licenses for indie developers, so instead of Telemetry, I made a simple multi-threaded profiler for my client and server MMO today
It feels nice though it's not "stuff that makes the game interesting"
The api is these functions and about 113 LOC. The client-side UI code for it is 264 LOC. 

Code:

profile_generic
profile_begin
profile_end
profile_block
profile_marker
profile_frame_boundary
profile_section // Like blocks, but strictly flat regions.
profile_alloc_serial_export
profile_free_from_import
profile_alloc_serial_import
// The exporter/importer functions let me send profiling data from the server to admin clients

[vitalash]

Horses are so cool

You move faster on a horse than on foot.

Watch with sound for that satisfying CLOP
HERE: https://i.imgur.com/439BDt4.mp4

Flying Wyrm boss. It drops a tail you can wear, and a wihstle!! which lets you summon a flying mount. These are rare items. It also drops a hang glider. The tail is tradeable, so you can give duplicates to your friends or whoever.




There's a 2% chance of a Wyrm Whistle dropping. It is a summonable mount.



I tried programming a wearable tail for the player at the end of the day but I'm tired so I deleted the code for it. I'm going to do a proper job tomorrow and make sure that it feels thick and has weight as you drag it behind you.

[vitalash]

A big thick floppy wearable wyrm tail.


I also worked around a Jai bug with structs not being able to be bigger than 2 gigabytes so now my server does a 6 gigabyte allocation for its 4000 players and 16000 entities and 660,000 max paintings. The language is in closed beta; this is to be expected.

I messed around with scan codes and VK codes for a few hours. It didn't do anything today (maybe it would on different nation keyboards). Maybe tomorrow or maybe after the pre-alpha release I'll switch to raw input for scan code input so I can have the violin work even with Microsoft PowerToys rebindings (my caps lock is rebound to control).

This was a slow day today; I took it easy.

[vitalash]

I made it so you can auto step dwon


I explored my game's architecture, and ended up not making a big change because it was kind of a waste of time when I could be making the game more interesting instead. The current capacity of the architecture is enough to do a lot, and I need to push that with my design.

I made a trailer



This was in the checklist for steam before I could mark my game build for review, which is important because of the August 30th release date. It's now under review.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3147260
Coming out August 30th

Strange mood I will rest and meditate.

[vitalash]

Getting near alpha pre-release;the steam page now has the trailer and the game build is under review
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3147260/World_of_Squares/

There's now a laser dungeon with some basic movement puzzles.

By the way, the way the big tail follows the player in the following gifs I like a lot.

The red laser fragment is a movement puzzle


The green laser fragment is a checkboard lava course


The blue laser fragment is unfinished


The laser dungeon is at the base of the mountain by the road, in the cave opening by the bottom left of this image

[vitalash]

I added the WOM-BOX today. You wear it on your head, then you can type messages to people near you.


VIDEOS WITH AUDIO!
https://i.imgur.com/mKHWz6M.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/AExjC5Y.mp4

[vitalash]

I worked less today; about 7 hours on fixing a bug in this 30 year old reverse engineered TTS code. Done for now with that.   Onto making the game more interesting tomorrow.

I recorded a funny video

[vitalash]

A new experience.
A deserted island.



(Spoiler: If you do the coconut ritual, you are taken to an alternate dimension.)

[vitalash]

Forgot to post last night! I fixed a bug that prevented the steam build review from going through; an issue with a free list


I started adding membership to the game content. More to do; such as showing which items are member items when you don't have membership,

and opening the membership menu upon closing this dialog.

[vitalash]

I fixed a performance issue, did other bug-fixing, added an admin-only control for membership for close-friends and playtesters to be compensated. Fun fact: In Old School RuneScape, a "lifetime" membership is only about 10 years. It runs out in a life time. I believe this happened to player Woox, and it also happened to this redditor: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/7v74t5/my_lifetime_membership_ran_out_today/
"Mod Sween was able fixed the issue by giving the account 10949 days of membership!" which is only about 30 years!
Check out this hilarious comment:







There's a new membership icon because I don't like the connotation of dollar signs. You see it in the menu icon and over non-free-to-play items when you are not a member.
There's also a new icon for the menu so you don't have to know the shortcut [Escape], which you may have seen in the above gif.

I didn't work as hard today.

[vitalash]

As an admin I can now spawn announcements for all players


And schedule server shutdowns


I can also ban people now.

Here's a funny hidden setting I added (in the F3 menu); it's one that makes the camera super snappy. It's not the default. It feels so good to turn off, honestly. But maybe you get used to it.


For an idea of how big the game is, here are all the items right now:


Pre-alpha comes out in 8 days

[vitalash]

I sped up the server today.

Here are some funny things from today.
A VIDEO of the most cloppiest horse clopping that clops (4000 horses): https://i.imgur.com/0i3hgL9.mp4
Loading the out of date client chunk cache after increasing it from 8 tile chunks to 16 chunks.


DOZENS of player clones!


watch them fireball themselves and melt


Now, with approximately 3000 goblins, a frame with a tick is just a little over 8 milliseconds.


My profiler was really nice to use today. I also upgraded it so blocks are rendered as a stack instead of transparent red regions.


Chunks are now 16 tiles large instead of 8 tiles. This affects the server spatial partitions and the client renderer. About half of the time was spent grabbing chunks from memory (300 cycles in chunk_get, 300 cycles placing a reference of that entity into that chunk) so I reduced the number of chunks.

I now cache information about which entities are loading which chunks, per type and generically.


More speed up work to do tomorrow. There's still lots of low hanging fruit. For example, I can cache which regions of the map are "hopelessly in the sky" on world load time, so an entity's movement tick is not as long.

[vitalash]

New fog pattern; it's square and posterized.


Server and client are faster

I cache information that I was spending a lot more effort to access before. Chunks are now 32x32x32 instead of 16x16x16 to make this cache storage/freeing faster as it loops the number of chunks you're loading. Accessing entities spatially within a chunk is accelerated as well so that I can have such big chunks with many entities in them.



Funny looking gif from today. Wyrm worm.


I playtested the game with a nice person today, and gave them a year of membership. In just 10ish minutes of playtesting I found about 6 things to change or fix. Then, it took about 30 minutes to change all of those things.

I spent almost the whole day on profiling and performance. Game releases soon!

[vitalash]

There is a blade that gives you short invulnerability when you do damage.

I'm planning on making another blade that is the opposite of this one, that causes area of effect damage orthogonally (that can damage even you!). A dark/light magic type thing.
https://i.imgur.com/ksScegs.mp4

You can now pet foxes for a chance at fox ears. You can even get more for your friends too.


Phawx is a resident in Cubetown. I wrote their dialog and did their art today. They can give just a bit of information on becoming a fox morph yourself. You'll soon find out they love being pet.



Making fox ears a cool function of the game rather than a cosmetic shop item is the result of making this a paid membership game. I can afford to make things fun and integrated. We'll see how well this pans out long term
...It could be that once people speak with their wallets, they would prefer it to be free to play with cosmetics. I'd definitely prefer to make it this way though, it's the least user hostile. That reminds me, like this, stash slots will be an earnable ingame thing!! 

I'm considering letting people write their own indulgent characters to move into the Cubetown residential places during development. I think it'd be a fun idea. If you're interested, send me a message!

I did code simplification and bug fixing today. The pre-alpha releases soon.