Here’s a screenshot of the Dark Forest that we’ve been holding off from publishing. There’s a few things we’ve been keeping secret and now is a good of time as any to release something new.

The Dark Forest is going to have three main layers: the ground level of the forest, the caverns underneath, and the top of the canopy. The Dark Forest is a maze-like area in which the player moves back and forth through the brush and among the layers, solving puzzles in an effort to find their way through once having left the Water Cavern.

-James

..and I mean a little. It appears that Moldering is making these kind of small appearances all over the web. Thanks to John for writing in:

“Hey was watching ‘109 indie games in 10 minutes’ on youtube and your game stood out, love the look of it!

From here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G_jq_otsYM&feature=player_embedded#!”

We didn’t know we were featured in this video until John here pointed this out. Thanks John! However small the publicity is, it’s always great to not only know that we’re being exposed but that people are showing interest; and also that we’re easy enough to find on the web.

Check out all the games in this video. I personally want to play them all; there’s a great indie game movement taking place. However, if you’re looking for Moldering’s brief appearance in the video scroll to about 5:00 in the video.

-James

Hey guys. Just wanted to update real quick and let you know we’ve been doing some cool stuff. We’ve been brainstorming a whole lot and mapped out some of the areas of the game. I don’t want to spoil it to much so I’ll just say that you’ll love it. I’ll be sure to keep you guys updated as we move through the design phase of the project. At this point the engine is done completely. That’s a huge point in any game development and can take a long time to get this far. Some people would argue that this next step is the hardest part of game development; developing the game and game world can be just as hard, if not harder than, coding the engine.

Anyway, just wanted to write a short post to let you know the project isn’t dead (and never will be!).

-James

Today was the last day of classes for the semester and I’ve already begun working on Moldering. When I last left off I was working on sound design. Last time I implemented some code to alter the position of the footstep sounds depending on where the player is (running on the left side of the screen played the sound more in the left speaker, and vice versa). Today I added some code to randomize the pitch of each footstep to avoid the “machine gun” effect. Without the bit of code I just added each footstep sound played exactly the same way each time… it’s easy to imagine how a machine gun firing emits the same sound on each shot. This goes a long way in keeping the player from being annoyed.

On other news Louigi Verona contacted me today and notified me he’s working on some new music for Moldering. That’s good news if you ask me, since he did some really cool atmospherical pieces for Moldering. I’ll have to post some of the new songs when hes done for everyone to listen to.

Like I said in my last post, I’m going to spend a lot of time working on the game design, and stay away from programming. So, I’ll be working a lot on the art, the environments, the gameplay, the world map, and sound and special effects work.

Aside from parallax scrolling, not a whole lot comes to mind that needs to be programmed at this point, other than the game specific events and enemies.

So, with summer comes a whole slew of new Moldering content. Stay tuned!

James

Summer break is coming up in 6 weeks or so, so I’ll be able to get in a lot of time for Moldering. I think this time I’m going to start off in a “design” mindset and step away from the technical side of programming the game. I’ve been messing around with generating sound effects, putting thought into how the levels will be designed, and have been messing with music a bit. It will be good to really get a nice style and feeling rolling for the game. Like I’ve been saying all along, atmosphere and ambiance will play a large role in the experience that I’m aiming to create for the player.

So, rather than looking at the game from a mathematical or technical point of view I’m going to spend some time creating the atmosphere and “mood” that Moldering should generate. I just bought some nice resources for deciding on color schemes and have been messing with programs to generate in-game sound effects. If you want to get your hands on these I can let you know what resources I have been using and how they turn out.

James

So, here’s the cut scene I was talking about. The graphics are mostly placeholders but the video gets to the point. I want to add parallax scrolling to objects in the background (and maybe the foreground too). So, trees in the background will scroll slowly, with the way background scrolling even slower, etc.

The music is original, written by Louigi Verona. At this point we have 40 songs or so to pick and choose from, so it’s pretty fun trying out different songs and getting different moods.

Unfortunately youtube downgraded the video a bit. But, let me know what you guys think!

James

Just a short update. I scripted out the intro cut scene and I am pretty pleased with it, if I do say so myself. The graphics aren’t final, but I’m going to tweak it a bit more and extend it and then maybe I’ll post a video online.

I’d definitely like to get some feedback!

James

A while back I revamped the lighting system and since I recently wrote some code to record gameplay I figured the lighting system was a good candidate for recording and sharing with you guys. Notice how the light sources “bloop” together. Let me know what you think!

-James

I wrote a short algorithm to output recordings of the game once per frame because I thought it would be cool to show you guys what the swimming looks like. I opted against going with the traditional Mario-style swimming where as the player you need to keep tapping a button to swim. I subscribe to the belief that water stages should be fun, unlike a great deal of game designers who apparently believe that water stages should be the most frustrating. :P

So, without further ado, take a look at our little guy swimming!

For those who don’t remember, I had a lot of problems looping, loading, and playing music in Moldering. Alas, I have solved all of these problems! Music can load, fade, unload, and loop now without a hiccup. I was very frustrated with this a long way back, so this is good news for Moldering!

At this point there are no obvious glitches left. I play constantly as I try new features and I remove all the bugs as they appear. While I’m not aware of any, I’m sure there are some written down in the backlogs that aren’t immediately apparent.

In other news I’ve added binary search partitioning to speed up gameplay, finite state machines for AI, and added a bunch to the scripting language.

Things are coming along smoothly. However, the weather is so nice today, so I’m going to go outside and enjoy the day!

-James

(P.S. I also started scripting out the first scenes today.)

I started to rework the scrolling system. I wasn’t happy with having the screen lock on to the player at all times when he’s moving through a large map and I wanted something really smooth and fancy, so I decided to rework it. Little did I know how difficult this would become.

I reworked the camera system 3 times, and spent more than 6 hours on it. I finally settled on something simple, but I’m not completely satisfied with it. I know I’m going to end up reworking it.

Also, I added a few more .ms commands and started working on swimming. It’s late though, so I’m off!

-James

One of the first things I want the player to see when they start up Moldering for the first time is a cut scene. A cut scene after all is a list of scripted commands, so I figured I’d take a modular approach and create my own simple scripting language. This was pretty exciting to do. Now I can define scripted events in external files and load them in on the fly. Here’s an example of what the Moldering Scripting language looks like. Surely it will evolve as it grows to encompass more complicated commands:

#START player
control 0
move_right 30
//comment delineation
jump 70
jump 290
stop 400
#LOAD 400 intro02.ms
#END

Here’s a breakdown of the commands. It should be pretty clear, but leave me a comment if you have any questions:

//comments are delineated with "//"
#START <objectToActOn> (ex: player)
control <timeToWait>
end_control <timeToWait>
move_right <timeToWait>
move_left <timeToWait>
stop <timeToWait>
jump <timeToWait>
#LOAD <timeToWait> <file_name_with_no_spaces>
#END

I’ll be sure to keep the list of commands updated as I go along, so down the line it can be used in conjunction with the level editor by people other than me.

-James