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New indie pixel art game

I started working on a new passion project, a creature collector very Pokémon-esque. My attention has been working on it for a while which is why I haven't posted much, more details soon.

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VERY Not dead!

Hey Y'all! Not dead, just padding out the posts more... We've done a lot since the last one.

So we're back from hiatus obviously... And we've been doing a lot of art since then, but unfortunately most of the work has been coding/system dev related. Which isn't that exciting show off.

In the image above you can see a dirt tileset with lighting disabled, and in the following...

... You can see a basalt one!

Note: the dirt tileset has many alternate appearances to prevent obvious repetition, which is a completely new system in its own right! Different variants can also be weighted differently, for example... Variants with gray pebbles are about 1/8th as common as the other tilesets.

The dirt in the example scenario also has some slopes I put there manually, but all tile types will have multiple shapes... Exactly like Terraria.

Besides all that, we've actually completely finished our first-pass on collision! This includes raycasts and point collision, check out this raycast hitting a slope!

Very cool!

Anyway, It's difficult to predict what happens next... But I would like to look into entities, characters and animation next. That seems like the next logical step... But we've already done some world generation work, so that may even be first.

Anyway, gotta go, super busy... Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

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"How the hell does an introverted nerd like you have a girlfriend?" The girlfriend in her room alone recharging her social battery several hours into a pokemon emerald shiny hunt, pondering if she should RNG manipulate or not:

I can’t believe “fake gamer girl” was an actual concept guys thought existed literally the most unfuckable guys who have ever lived were convinced girls were faking being interested in loser nerd hobbies to impress them

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Saw your post in the starbound tag and im excited! I love block builders of all kinds, and Starbound was my favorite. I wish you the best of luck with this endeavor, and if you need an alpha or beta tester, hit me up. digging deep into early games and seeing what makes them tick is something i can do for hours on end.

Thank you for asking!

It's definitely very early for QA work, I'm pretty good with bugtesting but player feedback for game design elements, such as if mechanics are fun/interesting... Or the kind of content you'd like to see are extremely valued! Especially from people with enthusiasm for the genre.

Long story short though, I'd only be looking for playtesting after we have a proper gameplay loop in... Probably. Which is definitely some time away... But hey, nothing wrong with saying your piece early. Thank you again!

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Ambient lighting rework!

Just spent a few days significantly optimizing ambient light sources, and creating some spotlight scripts. I think ambient lighting is basically finished! It looks way better now...

Before it was easy to argue that the game looked better without lighting, now the game definitely looks better with it enabled.

Lighting itself still requires some additions. The current system doesn't account for direct lights, like flashlights for example. But the ambient portion is definitely done...

Next I'm going to clean up the debug menu a bit, then I'm going to finally implement optimized collision checks. This will open up a huge array of things we can do. Player collision, projectiles, and direct lights!

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Tileset connections!

Behold! A tileset!

Okay it doesn't look like much now... But we've just finished the first pass for a simple tile-connection system. Tiles now naturally match up with and connect to each other. Notably, while tiles are traditionally 8x8 pixels, they can actually extend slightly beyond this range for improved visual clarity.

There's still a ways to go, different tiles will have different ways they connect to each other at varying complexities. We've finished the simplest example, but even this doesn't look too bad...

Take a look!

🎵 Inscryption OST - The Temple of beasts

Actually it's pretty subtle... Maybe bathroom tile is a bad example. Whoops.

As you may notice, the game actually has three layers of depth. Foreground, Background, and midground.

While foreground is as developed as the other layers, it will likely be used sparingly in world generation... And mainly exists to give builders more freedom. Now your 2D houses can feel properly enclosed.

As a final note: Lighting is completely disabled in the above example. I'm not happy with how the shader turned out so it's gone for now, Until it's rewritten.

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EDIT: Forgot to mention. Paper sketches are drawn by my brother. The sprites and animation are by me (based on the sketches). Everything was made explicitly to contribute to planetarium. Used with permission, etc etc.

Demi-hiatus! Also art!

I'm visiting my partner overseas for a month, so updates will be very slow... However, I am still training my skills! They're a talented artist and will get to show me the ropes in person, so the project will still grow :)

Here is a dump of various sprites and sketches related to our next step, character design! Feedback is appreciated as I am still new to this! Okay bye!!! Off to America!!!! Read alt text for more info!!! I love you!!! No I don't!!!

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Demi-hiatus! Also art!

I'm visiting my partner overseas for a month, so updates will be very slow... However, I am still training my skills! They're a talented artist and will get to show me the ropes in person, so the project will still grow :)

Here is a dump of various sprites and sketches related to our next step, character design! Feedback is appreciated as I am still new to this! Okay bye!!! Off to America!!!! Read alt text for more info!!! I love you!!! No I don't!!!

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This

it catches me off guard sometimes when I remember people sexualize cutesy anime girls because those are just creatures to me, I feel the same way about them as I do towards like. a hamster

they're just so stylized to the point I just register them as like a cute little animal

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There is absolutely nothing suspicious about this video.

[Technical] Chunk LOADING is finished!!

ALT TEXT: All around the game world is various multi-colored tiles, grouped in circles. In the top left is a map, showing the camera's position, as well as several blue squares close to it. As the camera moves... More blue squares appear around it, and further away ones disappear. Blue squares represent chunks that are currently loaded. Chunks significantly out of loading distance are unloaded... While chunks within loading distance are pulled from disk and brought into the active game world.

Not perfect, but the hard part is done!

🎵 Picayune Dreams Vol 2 - Stage 4 - Quasar Variant

There's obviously some pretty bad stutters... This is caused by loading multiple chunks all at the same time. One or two chunks per frame has little impact on FPS, but if 5 or more chunks enter load distance on the same frame (very common) they are all loaded at once, causing terrible lag spikes!

Thankfully, this is very fixable. In the future, chunks will be added to a queue... each loaded individually one at a time.

Honestly making this entire system went extremely well... too well. Surely there's a horrific memory leak lying in wait for us to discover many months from now... I hope not!

Anyway, I plan to vigorously scrub everything we've written looking for further issues, just in case.

Thanks for sticking with us! I promise there'll be more artsy things to show off sooner or later...

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[Technical] Chunk LOADING is finished!!

ALT TEXT: All around the game world is various multi-colored tiles, grouped in circles. In the top left is a map, showing the camera's position, as well as several blue squares close to it. As the camera moves... More blue squares appear around it, and further away ones disappear. Blue squares represent chunks that are currently loaded. Chunks significantly out of loading distance are unloaded... While chunks within loading distance are pulled from disk and brought into the active game world.

Not perfect, but the hard part is done!

🎵 Picayune Dreams Vol 2 - Stage 4 - Quasar Variant

There's obviously some pretty bad stutters... This is caused by loading multiple chunks all at the same time. One or two chunks per frame has little impact on FPS, but if 5 or more chunks enter load distance on the same frame (very common) they are all loaded at once, causing terrible lag spikes!

Thankfully, this is very fixable. In the future, chunks will be added to a queue... each loaded individually one at a time.

Honestly making this entire system went extremely well... too well. Surely there's a horrific memory leak lying in wait for us to discover many months from now... I hope not!

Anyway, I plan to vigorously scrub everything we've written looking for further issues, just in case.

Thanks for sticking with us! I promise there'll be more artsy things to show off sooner or later...

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[Technical] Chunk saving is done!!

ALT TEXT: 3 display windows are open. The first is the game window, which includes many randomly colored tiles in sphere-like groups. These are all the same kind of tile, each with unique NBT data to give them a random colour. The second window is a text file, containing unusual characters, this is because it contains some highly compressed data in the form of binary. The third window is also a text file and includes various human-readable text and numbers that are neatly formatted, notably a tag "SpecCol" and a random value is included. This is that aforementioned 'Unique NBT data' and it is difficult to compress, which is why it is written in plain text instead of binary.

Wooh!!! Holyyy shit!

Once again nothing flashy here, so feel free to skip this one... This is mostly me tooting my own horn and getting excited about how well this turned out haha

So apparently compressing and saving world data is a lot easier than expected, and decently optimized. I even tested including what is basically "NBT data" in quite a few chunks, and they saved correctly as well.

I think the system could use a few tweaks, but after that I have so much faith in it I doubt we'll be changing it ever again.

Saving is so efficient in fact that world changes can almost immediately be written to disk as soon as they are made, without stutters. In short, that means losing progress to a crash is almost impossible.

Well... Not quite... I imagine if you used an unreasonably large nuke or something the game would take slightly longer to save those changes. But is the player really going to have that power?

Granted, we don't load this data yet, nor do chunks actually unload when they've saved yet. But those problems are so small in comparison that I'm not worried. Optimizing an entire planet's worth of content when not in use has been such a daunting task, and it's finally done...

For additional context, A chunk averages about 300 bytes. Though this can be significantly smaller and occasionally larger, depending on it's complexitu. A Megabyte (MB) is 1,048,576 byes. That's 3000+ chunks PER Megabyte.

Chunks are 16x16 tiles and can have 3 layers. The test above assumes they have tiles on all 3 layers with slightly unfavorable complexity.

Feeling good lol

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Our first background parallax... A cloud ocean!!

With all the coding-related posts, I figured we were overdue for something aesthetic.

... Next up is character design and controls!

🎵 Sonic Rush Adventure Ost - Blizzard Peaks Act 1 & 2 mix

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Cool cute game go look :)))

Very excited for this!!!

Magic Trickery! 🐇🐇🐇🐇 An animation sketch of Mrs. Jones and Quizzo attacking. It's a two-parter -- they turn for the attacks menu first!

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These are 'controller objects!'

These objects each manage a different essential system in the background of the game... The player will never see these objects directly, so they don't need sprites at all!

But... it's always a fun warm up exercise to make them look pretty anyway. It makes the workspace far more pleasant to look at~

Can you guess what each one does?

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We're making a Starbound/Terraria inspired space sandbox game!

We're making a 2D sandbox game similar to Starbound! Or uh, terraria in space.

#nodev contains shitposting

#planetarium contains dev progress

Specifics under the cut

Who are you?

Aspen - Project Lead, Programmer, Pixel artist, Sound Designer.

Hey! I'm Aspen, I've been programming and making games for many many years in basically every engine there is... But never felt the drive to finish one, until now! I consider myself very experienced in the engine we're using (Gamemaker Studio 2.5) and have confidence we'll be able to make this game a reality. I also run the Tumblr account, so assume it's me behind the wheel as a default. Thank you for checking the game out!

Alec - Concept artist, Character Designer

H a l l o I'm Alec, I like writing and drawing and painting and designing shiiiiiiiit. I adore world building and have frequent bursts of creative possession in which I conceive and birth the greatest ideas and concepts in a mere moment. Otherwise, I can be a total dumbass and completely useless. I'm good at colours 👌 I have been a 85% a home-brew DM for about 2 years now and that is the greatest proof of my ADHD-given God powers of creativity. Slay.

What a cool guy!

Design pillars

Immersion. Above all else, I would like roleplay (casual or serious) to be natural and well supported. I would like players to find engaging with the world, and it's characters to be very personal.

Innovation. Tropes such as "You spawn in a green forest and can walk left or right" will be actively avoided. Biomes will have generation that presents more unique movement opportunities. Such as geysers in rock pools launching players high up, or giant twisting vines that hold up chunks of land to hop between.

More quality less quantity. Planets will be significantly more content-dense than Starbound, and perhaps controversially travel between them will be more difficult/expensive as well. This would encourage players to take advantage of all the resources presented on each planet, instead of hopping from one to the next. This would also encourage us throughout development to give each planet as much love as possible. Each planet should feel like a 'miniature terraria world'. Though actually achieving that is easier said than done.

Meaningful content. Procedurally generating creatures from 100 different pre-set monster parts could technically produce limitless alien creatures for players to encounter. But in both No Man's Sky and Starbound. I find this novelty to wear off quick, these creatures are not manually, meaningfully crafted and beyond an unusual appearance and some shallow gameplay changes... They do not create much of a memorable experience for the player. In my opinion, anyway. I would rather hand-craft every creature and make them all significantly unique and interesting. That's not to say procedurally generated creatures won't ever have a place in the game, but they certainly wont be as prevalent as others games.

Okay well... What's finished?

Fundamental lighting shaders akin to Starbound.

Some world generation brushes and basic commands.

A text mark-up language (heavily optimised), and game chat.

Extensive custom debugging tools

Hard and soft-loading of chunks to save on as much memory and CPU usage as possible.

Complete unloading, and compression of chunks on top of the previously mentioned system. As well as a live-saving system.

Setting, Story baseline, and conceptualization of the first 3 playable species. Each species will have a different starting planet, and immediately different playthrough.

Designs and cultures of several additional unplayable races.

Character proportion tests, sprites and sketches.

First-pass on collision functions.

Weighted Tile variance and tile connections.

CONCERNS

Multiplayer. While I have made an online multiplayer game before and it's definitely doable for this game, it would require some practice in a one-off test game to be fully confident. It would also take a LOT of time.

Modding. As far as I know gamemaker games are notoriously difficult for players to modify. Something like Unity is far easier even without mod support. Gamemaker on the other hand is difficult even if I want to design systems in favor of modders. This is kind of a problem for later, I have faith there'll be something we can do to make it work... But a cursory look says it won't be easy. I would be extremely disappointed if there was nothing we could do.

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Text Optimisations!

Nothing exciting! Just writing a to-do list... Pretty boring, feel free to skip!

Text is currently drawn character-by-character, each frame. So multiple paragraphs of text can be surprisingly expensive... We can fix this in a couple ways.

Only draw text that is confirmed visible on screen.

If all of the text in an instance is stationary... We can basically take a screenshot of how it looks completely drawn, and use that instead of typing out each character one at a time again.

Let's talk about point 2 using more technical language.

We'll check if a block of text is unmoving (no shaking or wiggley text), if it is... Then we create a surface and draw all the text to that once. All the text belonging to this block, that is.

Then, we keep the surface in a variable and whenever the text attempts to draw it just uses the surface image instead.

Some people might try saving the surface as a sprite. I don't think that's a bad idea. But as far as I understand, sprites use up more memory than a surface alone.

The downsides to using surfaces are that they are 'volatile'. Which means under certain circumstances they can be suddenly erased. But I consider this a good thing... One of these cases is when you alt+tab away to a different window. The surface will automatically clear and free up some memory, if you're not looking at the game window there wont be text. Simple enough!

At worst, there'll be a minor lag-spike when alt+tabbing back to the game window. Orrrrr... We have a terrible memory leak. That's definitely possible but only if I mess up.

Staying vigilant, then!