My Summer Project

This is so cool. I get so excited when I get to a point where something comes together and little bits start to feel like a game.


*You now take fall damage. What was a fixed value of damage is now a percent damage function based on your fall height.
*Sufficient pools of water break your fall. Shallow water doesn't stop taking damage from a fall, but a deeper pool will.

*You now have breath. The default character has 10 seconds of breath underwater. You only lose breath if your face is under the water.
*If you get out of the water your breath fills back up at 20% per second, fully recharged in five seconds.
*If you run out of breath entirely, you begin to take damage to your health. Regardless of how strong you may or may not be, once you are out of breath you WILL die in 5 seconds (20% per second). This gives enough time to possibly get out while still sufficiently punishing you for running out of air.

*Dying now sends you back to the spawn point.
*You get full health, mana, and breath when you respawn from death.

Values can be tweaked, but I set the defaults nice and low to give reason for other items to increase things like air quantity and such, but didn't want recharge times of higher characters to be penalized for having a higher quantity. Hence, the percent based functions on certain parameters.

More stuff this morning:

*You can now use your mouse to select hotbar focus.
--So now you can scrollwheel, number keys, or mouse click for focus
*Full Left-Click mouse support in inventory
*You can now swap things around your inventory at will.
*Combine stacks, fill up a partially full stack then drop the rest or put it in another location
*You can drop items from your inventory onto the gameworld
*When inventory is open you can manipulate the inventory and hotbar item locations. When inventory is closed you can't manipulate the hotbar item locations. This is to act as a basic lock system so you can't spaz while fighting and accidentally move or toss items from your inventory.

I'm going to add right click partial stack pickup. I haven't decided if right clicking picks up half the stack quantity like Minecraft, or Terarria click / click-hold increment by one. We'll see.

EDIT: Sunday 2011-08-07

*Right click inventory manipulation has been added
*Just right clicking on an item takes one from the item stack and puts it into your pointer/holder.
*Holding the right click over the item continues to add one to the holder if the item is the same as the one you are holding
*So now you can fully manipulate the inventory in the ways you'd expect from a normal game.
*Thinking of adding a box / trash can you can drop the items you don't want, so they can be destroyed.

Big fixes today. I had broken all the collision and movement code trying to go back and make jumping parabolic. Well, I kept throwing away code because nothing worked right. Not really anything anyone else would see, but things just weren't smooth when they had been before.

As always it was something little. All fixed now and my movement code is so much nicer.

*Jumping is parabolic, and is a force that works against the ever present gravity.
*Movement in water is entirely changed. It is now slower and a bit floaty.
*You can jump infinitely in water, which acts like a swimming upwards thrust.

This is easier to show than to explain so I will try and get a video up within the next few days.

I'm also seriously considering ditching the 2x2 pixel art design for a 1x1. Although I like the 2x2 pixel art and think it works well for the game and my limited art skills, I want to differentiate the art even further from Terraria / Minecraft. There is no way people aren't going to point out the similarities, I just don't want to give them too many to point out. ;)

Sounds good!

This would be a sweet mobile game. Especially with multi-player, that would be amazing!

It's currently only in development for Windows, with the possibility of a later xbox port. But I could see the game working well on a large touchscreen phone or tablet. Hmmm... thoughts to consider for later.

I've made some big strides today again.

*I've got a basic enemy system into the game. I have to write the spawner code, and write the AI code but the underlying system is in. I just wrote some basic code for a dumb AI a couple minutes ago to test it out. Right now a little rock monster just follows you around and tries to jump up the rocks to get to you if he can. Attacks and player monster collision aren't in. The collision is easy, I already have most of it, but attacks and player/enemy damage isn't in yet.

*Items are now affected by gravity. It wasn't critical to give them an parabolic curve, so they fall at a set rate.
*Item spawn position when a block is mined now has a randomness to it so they will fall in slightly different spots. This gives the game a more polished feel.

I'm sure there are others. I'm going to run through now and make a video of all the new stuff since last time and get it up. Expect it within the hour if not sooner.

As promised, I threw together a very quick video of me playing around, showing off the various new features. As always, watching directly on youtube in 720P is best.

Link to Video on Youtube

Embed


Thanks for the support guys!

Looking good, it's come a long way since the first viedos!

Thanks. I've poured a lot of time and energy into it. I'll work on getting it looking better once the underlying systems are in place.

Working on getting a basic lighting system going by manipulating sprites, alpha values, and render targets. I'll change it around to be shader based or something more complex later, but I wanted to play around with getting a basic system started.

And that method above wasn't going to work using default blendstates, so I defined my own.

Above, if two lights overlapped each other the entire sprite was being drawn so the light wouldn't even look close to being correct.

Now I draw my texture in reverse brightness and use subtractive blending and the lighting blends in a way you would expect from a simple system like this. I'll get images or videos up once I get more implemented and such.

EDIT: I'm tired, so I leave you with this.

I rewrote my code so I could have colored lights. The problem with the way I have done this here is that you pretty much need a DX10 card as I've had to use the Hi-Def profile vs. the Reach profile. The game runs in DX9, but the functions I'm using for manipulating the color channels differently than the alpha channels weren't exposed by many, if any, DX9 cards. DX10 cards expose these functions by default.

Anywho,

Some work from this morning.

*Torches are an item that can be placed as a block.
*Torches give off orange-yellow light.
*Any block has the ability to give off light, and soon any item.
*Fixed a bug with the water where I was checking if a block was solid and not if it wasn't air or liquid. This was causing the torches to spawn water on spawn.

I'll quickly texture the torches and check adjacency to a solid block so they will stand/hang from the blocks nearest them instead of standing straight up when they aren't placed on the ground.

After that comes day/night cycles with basic overhanging shadows.

Testing the addition of day/night cycle and lighting transitions.

Sped up for testing. The time periods also won't be the same length like what is shown here. Day and night will be longer, with the transition periods a shorter amount of time.



Pulled my back, so I've been laying in bed on my laptop. Not having multiple monitors and lots of workspace is a pain.

EDIT: And some images from earlier going through the process of getting the day time shadow / dark areas added.


Just starting. Anything under the first solid layer was shaded.

Pulling the left and right sides in too, but leaving overhang shadows.

Taking the overhanging shadows out.

Adding some depth dependent shadows, and realizing there were some bugs and anomalies.

Attempting to shade the depth at the dirt wall level, with some horrible bugs.

And getting closer with the depth shadows on blocks, and depth shadows going down a tunnel into the dirt layer. You'll need lights to see anything any deeper.

I've added ladders and bumpers/blowers this morning. The original concept was for the bumpers to be air blowers / fans, but my first implementation turned out to be more like a bumper from Sonic than an air blower. Really cool though.



I thought the bumpers would be an interesting idea to implement, something that I don't believe Minecraft or Terraria have.

I realized what the bumpers could be used for last night as I fell asleep. Tested my thoughts today, giggling while I did so.



The ladder shouldn't be catching your fall. I thought I wanted it to when I thought about easily getting onto ladders when you are jumping onto an existing set, but they can be exploited like so.

Well, actually, what isn't shown in the video is that if you climbed down the ladder and touched the ground you would have died. You can stop that though by jumping again, which once you reach that conversion from negative velocity to positive velocity it resets the fall distance. I want you to be able to catch the ladder in a jump or fall, I just don't want you to be able to exploit them as tools to fall long distances. If I treat them like ground, so you can catch if you only fall a little, but die if you try and catch after a huge fall, that might fix the issue.

Super fun though making bumper elevators, hehe. And it alleviates part of the problem other games have of getting back up to the surface quickly.

The artifacts look like PNG transparencies not set properly. Or at least, that's how it shows up in my game.

Still impressive.

I'm not sure as to which part you are referring, but there are a lot of problems with the transparencies, mostly because they are all 30 second paint.net textures. I haven't taken the time to put polish on anything yet. I've also just set random transparency levels and not taken the time to do the math to calculate what I need based on what I want. In the end I will probably ditch this for a shader approach anyway.

I had a funny feeling earlier when I realized I only have but a few more base features to get in before it's time for content and polish. Most notably attack animations, crafting, etc. Once that process starts it goes from being a game engine / proof of concept to being an actual game.

All right, I know what you're using now. We're using two vastly different ways to do the same thing.

Looks great, though! I KNOW how much work this is, you're doing a great job!

Ya, the way I approached the dark/lighting is probably completely odd, but I wanted to do it based off what I knew how to do without looking at any guides or tutorials. I probably should have, but I wanted to see what kind of results I could get just by what I could do. Before this game project I had never handled anything involving graphics so I'm starting from the bottom, lol.

My approach for the lighting and darkness was to start with a clear render target.

Then I draw all the lights to the clear render target by using a max blend. Because of the way I'm handling it later I can't use additive or else when two lights overlap even just a little they make a pure light. So here when two lights overlap it chooses whichever pixel is the brightest. Because I am using (0, 0, 0, x) for the lights, I use another circular texture the same size, but with (255(x), 255(x), 255(x), 0) that I add the desired color value to, which gives the lights the appearance of casting a bit of color at the edges. I swapped to a bigger light to test the torches range, and instead of remaking the texture I up-scaled the one I had which made for odd blending compared to the older smaller lights.

Then I draw the darkness to a separate render target. I think I could recycle the original render target simply by saving it to a different texture then clearing it, but I haven't tested that yet. Each block gets assigned a darkness level based on the blocks around it. It runs through and reassigns a value to blocks when you mine something out or add a new block to calculate what the shadows should be. This value is based on high noon, and if the time of day needs a darker level it gets the darkness level and adds whatever modifier the time of day calls for.

Now with a texture of the darkness, and one of the lights, I use an odd blending to combine these. I add the color values of the light to the darkness texture, but subtract/reverse subtract the alpha values. What I end up with is the darkness where its needed and the colored circular lights where those are supposed to be, giving off the thinly veiled illusion of light. Then I just draw this over the scene.

The handling the color values differently than the alpha values is the reason as of right now the game needs a DX10 video card. Eventually this will be remedied, otherwise I'm knocking out some 48% of the market or something who only have DX9 cards.

Really I just looked at what I had available and tinkered till I got something that remotely worked. While cool I figured it out on my own, an existing proven approach would probably yield better results. I'm sure if I researched how the different blends worked I could find a way to do it without needing the odd blending.

My cohorts and I are discussing a Diablo or Action RPG style drop / item / stat / exp system.

It's been in our thoughts for a while and I have some references to it already in my code, just haven't gone all in yet. I was trying to figure out how to do crafting, but I think I have an idea.

Tomorrow should be interesting.

I've got the design and pseudocode written for the random drop system. This turned out far more complicated than I thought it was going to be.

It's going to be very similar to Diablo style games. I think this will add a whole lot of variety the other games are lacking. Every time you play you get the same iron sword.

What if you could get the same iron sword with a chance to have random enchantments as well? Perhaps not every iron sword is made equally. Perhaps some have stats that fit you a bit better if you are a caster type player, or if you are a ranged type player. You won't know until you try to make one, or maybe a mob will drop it.

What if you could have a choice to move on to a new world where everything is scaled? Monsters get stronger, item drops have increased stats to slightly compensate. Maybe some monsters drop entirely new things that you couldn't get the first time around, like a unique weapon or piece of armor.

All things I will be working towards adding tomorrow. I had to get the design and pseudo done as trying to figure out these algorithms was starting to make my head hurt, lmfao.

Pretty much this entire last week has gone to waste.

I was spending time working with the artist for the game (my brother). Long story short, he kept avoiding me all week. Wasn't showing up (telecommuting). All I got was excuse after excuse, none of which were of any importance. Doing pixel art was "hurting his eyes" and not the 8 hours of video games he was playing while ditching me. Essentially being an artist on paper doesn't translate into pixel art. I get that, just don't string me along and waste my time.

So I dumped money and parts to get his computer up and running and he pretty much used me for that without any intention of fulfilling his end of the deal and making art for the game. Finally enough was enough. So I'm out a week of my time, money and computer parts, and am no further along with the art than I was.

I've spent some time making the art myself. It isn't going to be the quality I wanted, but maybe if the game makes it big I can hire an artist to help me along. If not, I don't mind doing it myself. Just means my time is divided into every aspect that makes up a game: design, programming, art, sound, etc.

Onward.

Ouch.

BTW, DO NOT MAKE IT SCALED! Oblivion and FFVII both come to mind, and both were everloving PITAs, as well as the fact you never really feel powerful, cause even little jerks can still punt your face to where your tail is.

Have you looked into the myriads of free pixel art out there?

Scaling
My thoughts for scaling were different than what Oblivion and the others. I was thinking that everything would be scaled on the higher difficulties compared to their original in the normal difficulty.

This way the basic creatures at the beginning of the game are challenging the next play through with the same character even with the high level items from the first game. The weapons are then scaled X amount to compensate slightly for the increased difficulty.

Example:

Code:

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Playthrough 1:

Angry Mudpie - 10hp / 2 attack
Wooden Sword - 3 attack

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Code:

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Playthrough 2:

Angry Mudpie - 100hp / 20 attack
Wooden Sword - 21 attack

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This way you get to go through the progression again the second/third time around and still feel challenged each time through, and will have to get new armor / weapons each time through without me having to come up with an entire new set of items / enemies. I've coded my item spawner to allow for additional items that can only be found in the higher difficulties as well.

Art
I have looked into the free pixel art around, but in the end I wanted it to be original for the game. If that means the game takes a bit longer to release, so be it.

I was too frustrated today to program so I worked a bit on the art to calm me down a bit. I don't like to code angry because then things end up broken, or buggered up somehow, and I'll spend the next day trying to figure out what happened or where things went wrong.

Started on the item icons. Still need work, but they are a start and far better than the placeholders I was using, especially with me having zero experience with pixel art.

This should show up as the actual size of the icons in-game.

The picks need work on the shading, as they feel flat and there isn't enough contrast in some of them, like the gold one. Still, I'm happy with my progress. I'm going to have a hard time once I need to animate things, but I'll deal with it when I get there.

http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

I'm using it ingame to alter or create what I need. Works very well.

Thanks. That looks like it could be very helpful for animations and whatnot. I've been using Paint.NET which has worked well for the static pixel art, but felt weak for trying to deal with animation.

Couldn't decide to have my potion vials angled or vertical, so I tried a set of both. I will probably tone down the color of the glass a little as the ones other than green look a little darker than I wanted.

Still can't decide which I will use. I'll have to make the other potions and see which work well together.

I like the angled, anything that seems to be dynamic will have a better chance of catching the eye.

I was thinking the same. The angled should also work better with the quantity text.

I just wasn't sure if the other potion bottle designs were going to work as well tilted, but I suppose there isn't any reason they shouldn't. I've yet to design those.

Worked on some morningstar icons last night / this morning. I can't decide between which version, but probably because I'm not totally content with either. It's harder to get the little spikes in on this one because of how few pixels there are.

And some axes from this morning. Because of the change in angles, there looks like there are a lot of spots that could use AA or something, but I'm happy so far.

I was going for a smaller TF2 Pyro / Fireman axe style.

I probably don't have to say this here but,

All works I have posted, linked, will post or will link, of my work are copyrighted by myself, Richard A. Maranhao III, and are not to be used, copied, or distributed without permission.

Again probably unnecessary but forgot to mention it.

This isn't dead, nor will it die, things have just slowed a bit with classes starting up again.

I've had to spend a majority of my time coding, at the University, on my laptop. Going from three screens to a dinky 720p screen is lame. You can't see the big picture.

I've fixed a few bugs, probably introduced a few more. I've been working on getting a basic weapon/item swing animation in and working. It's in its infancy, but things are starting to come along.

With slowed progress between classes and being in and out of the hospital/doctors while feeling like death, things are starting to look up.

I've been working on the art, but my wrist hates me. Thinking of getting a monoprice drawing tablet once money settles down a bit. Less than half the price of the cheapest Wacom at a retail store and far larger. Everyone who has used one seems to give it great reviews, so that is a plus.

Update:

Quote:

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*You now swing the pickaxe when you mine. I'm not sure I like the way I implemented it, but it is a start. Currently only animates when you hold the mouse button. Need to add a function to force a full animation sequence. So once you initiate the swing, you swing all the way through, and not stop just when you let go of the mouse button.

*Saving now keeps track of the time of day you saved at. Loading an existing save now loads the time of day you were last playing at instead of defaulting the beginning of morning every single time. No more saving and reloading to skip night.

*Torches can no longer be placed in water. Still need to despawn torches that get wet from water running over them.

*Holding a torch, i.e. a torch is the currently focused hotbar item, now lights the area around the player to the same radius and brightness of a placed torch. So instead of clicking madly for a place to put a torch in the dark, holding the torch gives off a light allowing you to see. It is also useful for exploring in the night or underground. I may allow the torch to be an accessory item, allowing you to forgo an accessory to have an always on light source. Maybe.

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I really need to get some extra funds together so I can get a tablet. My wrist kills me when I'm trying to work on the art. For some of these features it is a chicken and the egg type of deal, where I can implement it in code but have no way to test it without the drawing, yet I can't always code it efficiently without seeing and visualizing what it is going to be.

Glad to hear that you're still chipping away at it. I've gotta say I've really been happy with the stuff I've bought at monoprice lately. It's even cheaper than Chinese knock-offs and ships quicker too! Hope things work out for you.

I've been spending some time working on the UI. This image is just where everything is laid out and is in progress. In the thumbnail below the image you can see the UI without the inventory or anything else open. It is similar to before, just larger health/mana/etc bars, the embellishment around the hotbar, and a reduction in hotbar slots.

The left is for the character sheet and equipment.
The lower "inventory" is for chests and vendors.
The box in the upper right is for hovered tooltips. Tentative.
The bottom right is getting set for the base of the crafting system.

I'm working on a system so the two accent colors (the two shades of brown in the image) can be user defined in the options by RGB color codes.

As always, everything is in progress and tentative, but I thought I would share some more of my work.

Working on my crafting menu. One of the tabs may also be used for a skill tree system if I decide to go that route.

I've also solved the problem I was having with my implementation of the weapon attack / weapon collisions. Such a simple fix, I can't believe I hadn't come up with it before. It came to me while cleaning. Things either always come to me when cleaning, or when in the shower (running water . . . odd).

EDIT: There are some artifacts. Looks like the gif creator caused them. Everything is solid sets of colors normally.

Working on some icons for the tabbed interface. Couldn't get an animated gif up right now, but the icons shift their position by a couple pixels when their tab is the highlighted tab. This helps to give some visual movement when switching tabs.

I can't for the life of me figure out what to use for the miscellaneous tab. Things like torches, ladders, etc. I was thinking of doing a potion like bottle for consumables, but the miscellaneous has me stumped. I might just do a grayscale torch.

The final tab will most likely be for the abilities / skill tree. I might make six crafting categories though, and tab the character sheet on the left for that. Haven't quite decided.

So I've decided to keep the crafting entirely separate from the skills. Doesn't make much sense to toss it in a tab with the crafting if I can just put it with the other character stuff.

5/6 Tabs in place. The last is for tools. I just have to make an icon for that. I might change the potion icon so a sideways vial or something. The other icons look beefy while that looks a bit dainty or fragile.

I've got to finish these icons, then layout the crafting within the tabs along with the multiple pages. Then I've got to rework the character sheet for tabs, design the skill menu, create the empty equipment slot icons. I'm sure there is more. Then get it code for it running, which is the easy part for me. Getting everything drawn and designed is the tough part.

What about using a double open-ended wrench for the misc tab? Seeing as it seems like most of the items there will be tools of sorts. Layouts are looking good, it's got a nice retro feel.

I wish I had thought of a wrench before! I went with the torch for the miscellaneous, as it would contain torches, ladders, springs, etc. I made a pickaxe for the tools menu. I could change things, and very well may, but I'm charging forward now.

Had to study for an exam, so didn't get too much done. As you can see though, I was working on the equipment slots. I'm pretty happy with the chest piece. I kinda wanted to make it a silhouette as these are for the empty slots, and I like that piece too damn much to see it get covered up by the very first piece of equipment. Shrug, I may leave it as the slot icon, or swap it out for something more simple.

Ignore the sketched out head. Was trying to get a base shape to design a helmet around.

Thanks for the compliments. I'm not an artist so retro works for me, haha. Just trying to keep it clean.

I've forced myself to get working on the art. Difficult to split time between everything, but I've made some substantial progress today.

The empty equipment slot icons are in. They should be enough to get the point across, plus when you hover over one of them, will tell you what goes there in the tool tip box just in case.

Now I just have to get the tabbed menu for the character information, and the slots for the crafting, and I can finally get this programmed into the game and move on to something else.

Necklace...............Helmet...........Familiar
Belt......................Chest............Gloves
Ring....................Greaves...........Ring
Accessory Stone.....Boots............Accessory Stone