My Summer Project

That's cool! How about something like a level from Mario Bros, that'd be amazing! :banana: You go, Nightrain!

When I get through finishing all of the overworld, then I'll focus on the farmable dungeons, which ought to be more like a Super Mario or Castlevania level. More dungeon crawl, less digging.

EDIT: Was doing some work on some tiles. Came up with a brick tile I didn't dislike. Was testing out some color combinations to see how they looked. I'm not sure about the red-brown and red-white. I was just playing around. I may keep the red-brown, but lose the brown grout for black like the rest of them.

Each color is 3x3 tiles. The actual bricks will have the black borders. The wall tiles will run like that though, but with a darker set of colors.

I kinda like the red-white.

It looks a bit better there than how I first had it. I pushed the white towards red a bit. I'm just not sure about those two as everything else in the game has a black border. I can always add it in and see how it looks.

Fixed the bug in the crafting; crafting now works as expected. I forgot to update a set of variables, so it was doing some odd math which would cause you to not be able to place the items into your inventory. All fixed.

Added a few more placeholder recipes. This way you can create the items even though I don't have all the items that will eventually be necessary in yet.

Progress might slow this weekend. College homework to do and I am working on the Mame cabinet, and will be making a worklog of that this weekend. :up:

I got a hold of Magnus "SoulEye" Palsson, the music artist of VVVVVV, and he said "Maybe [I can help him out]. I've got a lot on my plate right now, and I have to turn down certain projects."

So, if he does accept, this should be nice.

I can't believe you went and asked someone like him to help. I thank you very much for going the extra mile. I don't even know what to say. I'm just going to sit here and process this a bit. :eek:

I mean, I'm happy with my work and progress. I know some of you guys have enjoyed watching the progress even if it doesn't turn into anything big. I never thought anyone really believed in me / it enough to go out of their way to do something like that. Just, wow! Confidence booster for sure.

Yeah, we're forum buddies.

He said no guarantees, but if it does happen, that'd be really awesome for sure.

He's on Skype, so if you want to look it up, go ahead.

That would be very cool. Thank you very much. Even if nothing comes of it, just the act of doing that has given me a whole lot of confidence.

That made me use my free time this weekend, that wasn't spent on my mod, replaying VVVVVV again. Such a fun game. And his music is once again stuck in my head.

I love the guy. (not.... <_< >_> Not that kind of way.....)

Hey, did you know that the Predestined Fate is the first thing that plays when MT2 is installed? Not the complete song, that is; it originally was created to make sure your system was prepared for music making.

I'd say your game looks very 16-bit era.

Still semi-pixelated, 2d, platformer.

I was thinking of trying 4x4 pixels for the art. I really liked 2x2 but then some things looked exactly like Terraria simply because of the pixel count. 4x4 looks a lot more pixel-y. Almost like a 2d 3D Dot Game Heroes.

I'd only have to change the textures to make the change, and it wouldn't have to be permanent. Maybe I'll just try it. Can't hurt I suppose. I liked what I was seeing when I was just scribbling around, but it could look very different in game.

Spent most of the day working on the walking animation. Better than before but still needs some work. The head needs to shift a pixel or two in the direction of the walk. Still need to make the animations for jumping, falling, climbing, etc. The speed the animation plays at might need to be changed a bit, but it looks far better than what was there before.

Was bored and my back hurts so I was just playing around in Sketchbook Pro. Single size brush, no zooming or anything. Just sketching. I'm no artist so I figured the practice would be good. Proportions are way off the pixel art, but I didn't care too much. I'll go back and zoom in and clean up the lines and whatnot another time. Just wanted to distract myself a little bit.

Put that on a poster!

It may be worth a ton later on!

Let's dev this a little more, then talk to him.

And let's not pester him.

Give him some time to think about it.

Yes. I haven't spoken to him yet, figured I'd wait until I had more of an idea for the ambiance of each section, get bosses drawn up at least in concept, etc.

I've been sketching out some concept art for monsters and such in my free time. That way I have a concept to draw from when I start making the pixel art.

I also wrote out the design flow for chopping down trees as a unit instead of block by block. Now, when I get a chance, it will be easy to implement in code.

Apparently I should really reconsider trying a post on kickstarter. There are "games" on there that are random people just explaining their concept of a game and already hitting 10k$+ donations.

I graduate at the end of this semester. The plan was to get a job and keep working on this on the side. Based on some other opinions, I might want to think about putting a post up when this is early alpha to cover me for 6 months - 1 year development time and work on this full time. If it were to be successful, who knows what job opportunities open up after that.

I suppose it couldn't hurt to try. If I didn't make the goal then just continue chugging along as I am. Shrug, I don't know. Something to ponder anyway.

Hey, maybe when you do the KickStarter thing, you could put up "This is the required goal; we reach a certain higher bar, that money goes to SoulEye" :P

I'm thinking if I do try for a kickstart, I won't do it until after I get to the point I make my post on Minecraft / Terraria's Other Games forum. If feedback is strong, I will go for it. Otherwise, I won't.

On another note:

BUGFIX: If you swung a weapon, say pickaxe, but swapped to a different item mid-swing that didn't have a swing animation, the next time you swapped back to the pickaxe it would pick up the swing where it left off. This often led to unintentional block damage. Fixed.

BUGFIX: This one is tied to the above. If you swung a weapon, say pickaxe, but swapped to a different item mid-swing that did have a swing animation, the animation would continue playing but would swap to the new weapon. So you would swing a pickaxe, swap to a sword, and it would be as if the pickaxe changed to the sword mid-swing. Fixed.

ADDITION: Tile damage has been in for a bit but any tile you hit would take damage if was able to do so. If you missed and hit the wrong tile it would take damage and stay damaged until you either destroyed it, quit/save+quit/reload. This was especially frustrating with the above bugs, as you could accidentally damage your home. Now, tile damage resets on the last tile hit if the new tile hit is a different mine-able tile. Essentially, only one tile stays damaged at a time. Whack a new tile, the old tile gets restored.

These fixes, and the last addition, surprisingly give way to chopping down trees as a single tree, and not individual blocks. The damage a tree needs to take before it is felled will be a function based on the hardiness of the wood (how many hitpoints each block has) in relation to the height of the tree. Surpass the damage needed, the tree de-spawns, and the game will spawn a number of wood relative to the tree's height.

Went and renewed ram3-software.com and purchased dreamstateminer.com. Who knows if that will be the final name, but I figured it best to grab it now just in case.

Comcast keeps jacking up the price of television. I think I am going to go in and drop TV. We hardly use it. If I can swap to business class internet with similar / same speeds + netflix streaming for less than what I pay now, then I will do that. Then I can at least start getting a pair of basic websites going. All the free hosting I tried before was horrible. Then, if this gets big I will look into a webhost.

I dropped the TV and switching to business class internet would be cheaper than what I had bundled before, but they are trying to bull me with all these mandatory added fees. Saying I have to rent a modem with them, and that I'd have to pay a $300 installation charge. I don't see why these are necessary and he couldn't give me an answer aside from "policy". It doesn't take a $300 setup and a mandatory modem rental to swap my external ip from dynamic to static.

EDIT: My IP hasn't changed once in five years.

EDIT2: The installation fee is cheaper if I go for a longer contract. I don't see myself moving to a location without Comcast any time soon so I just went for that. It ultimately ends up cheaper than what I was paying, and gets me what I need.

Found a decent set of royalty free sounds. Paid what I could. If this gets big and I end up using a bunch of these sounds I'll probably go back and donate more.

Started programming some sound in. Going to dump all my sound handling to a new class I can simply call, but I've got the basics in for a few things. It now plays a sound when you swing your pickaxe and land that hit on a block.

Ideally, I want to make my own sounds, but this will give a good start, and I can get them programmed in now, and just swap them out later if need be.

Had a blast today. After I finished my college project I started working on the game.

ADDED: Recipe to convert stone blocks into cobblestone.
ADDED: Recipe to convert wood into ladders.

ADDED: A whole bunch of sounds. They can be swapped out later with a file swap. Jump/Double Jump. Long fall damage. Death. Menu movement. Menu Select / Back. Tab click. Item Tab click. Hitting a tile. All the sounds get triggered at the proper time. A whole ton more to add, but it is definitely a start. I hadn't realized how silent the game was until I started adding these sounds.

I spent twenty minutes exploring my world, digging, laying torches, going through natural caverns. I really should keep chugging along with the code, but the world is calling me back. There isn't anything in it but dirt, coal, stone, caverns, water, and trees, but I keep finding caverns and it makes me want to keep searching. Can't wait until I make some more blocks and put them into the world. Drawing them up is the hard part.

Enough with the text, moar with the pictures!

Reworked the stone, coal. Added copper. Added the base for the ice zone section, as seen above. Still need to make the items for the blocks, and its just a palette shift of the dirt, but I wanted to start on getting the code for these things in.

You now slide on the ice until you hit something, or turn yourself around. I've left conditionals here so I can have it so you slide on the ice unless you have special boots or an accessory on.

What I affectionately call the four corners. I'll go back and give some randomness to the wall algorithm so it isn't just a set of straight lines.

The purple is the base for plaguestone. Texture will change later, but I'm going to keep chugging to get the base for the zones in.

I'd hit break play that.

Chests are almost finished.

The chest block and chest item are in. Placing a chest removes one from your inventory and creates a new inventory for the chest in memory. Destroying a chest spawns a chest item. Chests save and load with the rest of the map, the contents properly stored.

All that is left is to load the correct chest into memory when you right click on the chest, draw its contents to the correct locations, and modify the existing inventory mouse handler to allow for clicking and moving items in the chest.

Should be done with it and have it fully implemented sometime tomorrow.

Chests are in, and complete.

Contents of a chest. I was just clicking and moving things around, separating stacks and such.

I know this is just me lacking confidence in my abilities, but I feel nervous about these chests. I think it is because they came together so easily. I expected it to be difficult, but it was pretty simple. I guess when the playtesters get their hands on it we will know how well I did. Everything seems to work great though. Inventory stuff is just nerve-racking; as I've seen the wrath of gamers when something disappears from their inventory, lol.

ADDED: Grass now grows on the topmost surface of dirt above the base level every morning at the break of dawn.
ADDED: Grass will not grow in the icelands or below the surface. A special item will be added that will allow this.

Not being able to read the quantity of items was driving me mad, so I went off to fix it.

Still have to do that for the chest items, and the crafting items, but that will only take a few minutes.

ADDED: The game tries to add a few trees every morning at the break of dawn.
BUGFIX: Trees should no longer spawn overlapping an existing tree.

Trees no longer are destroyed block by block. They have a scaled pool of hitpoints based on the trees height and the hardiness of the wood. Whack anywhere on that tree enough times and it will explode into a shower of blocks.

Before I started chopping.

Just after the tree exploded and blocks started to fall to earth.

When I draw them up, trees will have different leaves based upon the height of the tree and the region the tree lives.

Much like the TIMBER! mod, but built-in!

NNIICCEE!!!!

Terraria does it a similar way as well. It is just so much more user friendly than having to break down each block individually. It also works anywhere on the tree, even if you move up or down to a different part of the tree and don't always hit the same block.

Added the cleaned up quantity text to the rest of the necessary sections. I'm windowed so the screenshot doesn't grab the mouse pointer, but it is at the floating set of 14 stones there. I'm debating on drawing something behind the held blocks to make them pop out from what they are hovering over a bit more. Some blocks blend in and it is a bit hard to see what you are holding.

Just put a little shadow around it.

I was thinking something along those lines.

Doors are now in the game and work as expected. If you place the door to the left of the player, the closed door is on the left side of its block. Click to the right and its outward face is right.

Closed. The door is solid, and you can not walk through it.

Open. The door is no longer a solid, and you can pass through as usual.

You don't break the door down by hitting it directly, but by digging out the block above or below it. This way, hits don't cause the door damage. You can only place the door if there is a solid block above and below it, and if either of those blocks get removed, the door despawns into an item.

EDIT: On a less critical note, trees can now have various types of foliage based on the trees height and location, and even a random factor. Just have to make all the different textures.

Also, a whole bunch of item icons / spawned icons were reworked and improved. New recipes added.

EDIT2: I've been told the open door is confusing as it also looks like it is a closed door. What I might try is lowering the opacity so it becomes partially see through. I can't remove the texture completely as if the door is open there is no way to tell a door exists at that location. I think making it a bit see through when open will do the trick.

We are getting close to the point I will feel comfortable releasing the early exploration alpha.

I need to populate six more zones, get the base ores in, the recipes for upgraded items in, and make the basic animation for the upgraded weapons / tools. I'm going to redo all the animations for those to get ready for adding player / monster combat, but that can come after.

So, basically, I need to create a bunch of tile textures and add them, and then you guys can have at exploration / bug testing. Don't expect much more than Minecraft Indev type stuff. The action part of action / adventure will come later, along with performance improvements, polish, etc.

If its not too big I can try to help with some testing.