Ah… the life of a game developer. It has it’s ups and it has it’s downs. I toiled away the good part of the day fixing a very minor bug that most people wouldn’t even notice. Instead of being productive and attending to matters in the real world I spent six hours making the player move the same speed when moving up slopes from the left vs from the right.
Regardless, I got it fixed, so, that’s out of the way. But, I need to spend my time better. Yesterday I spent maybe an hour implementing a brand new feature (hooks the player can grab on to), which was extremely rewarding. It can be very gratifying when implementing something cool goes smoothly. It’s why I develop games. However, a few days like today, here and there, are inevitable.
More about the hooks though. If you’ve played Donkey Kong you probably have a good idea of what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t know, I added hooks to the game that the player can jump to and from. They act like grapple points for climbing up to higher areas. They work awesome, and are awesome, and I’m really happy with how they came out. More news to follow.
-James
Moldering is about exploration, and knowing this I’ve been tweaking the controls to get them just right. As a design decision I’ve limited the character’s movement a great deal and increased the overall gravity pulling down on the player. Movement is a lot tighter, quicker, and reactive, and the player has a greater sense of control. However, he’s not as powerful as he used to be.
I originally had the player jumping really high and moving really long distances in the air with ease, but it seemed broken and “floaty”, so I toned him down quite a bit. He doesn’t jump as high or as far now, but rather he seems like he’s one little guy going up against big odds, and I think that’s a good tone for the game.
As a result of these changes I’ve come to the conclusion that having a ledge-climbing ability will be a good way to give him just enough maneuverability. The player won’t be able to jump as far or as high, but will be able to grab onto those ledges that are just within reach and pull himself up onto them, or jump off of them.
With this ability, we’ll be able to design some interesting platforming levels. For example, consider a vertical tunnel with grooves in both walls. The player can grab onto and jump back and forth from these grooves, but the grooves will be small enough that the player won’t have enough space to pull himself up into them. These areas will allow the player to perform successive wall jumps by jumping back and forth from wall to wall. It will be the only way to get up.
I’ve implemented the wall hang. Next, I need to work out how the controls work.
-James
I wasn’t happy with the movement in Moldering, and the keyboard wasn’t cutting it for testing it and tweaking it just right, so, I installed a library for controller input and I added support for gamepads to Moldering. At the moment I’ve only tested it on an XBox 360 controller, but theoretically it should work with any controller. The way I see it, if you’re not using a 360 controller to play your games on your computer, you should be. However, I will do rigorous testing to ensure that any gamepad I can throw at it will work just fine.
Speaking of the movement engine, it’s really starting to feel responsive and immersive. You get a sense that you’re actually controlling our little alien. It took a bit of work, and I had to cut some of his ability to make him less maneuverable (he used to be way too powerful, broken in fact) but it gives a sense that you’re the little guy up against big odds. Entering into a large area with lots of things to climb should give the player a sense of “this looks impossible, but I know I can do it!” That’s the feeling I’m going for, and one of my favorite feelings that exploration-based games can deliver.
So, Bobby and I finally had some time to sit down and work out some ideas for Moldering. We worked our way into the second world—the innards of a living breathing plant—and we got some cool ideas rolling around. Here’s a few examples:
The inside of the plant will be very animated and pulsating with lots of green translucent layers, and there will be lots of metabolic processes going on that will cause trouble for our little alien.
Just some concepts for now, but Moldering will get finished, slowly by surely.
Some Moldering fan art done on a table with sharpies, courtesy of Marci Zebrowski. Marci was the original designer of the main character’s concept art.
Some Moldering fan art, courtesy of Bobby Tew.
Courtesy of Robert Tew:
It’s high time I posted some kind of demo. And since I’m applying for scholarships I figured I’d kill two birds with a single stone and post the game online as a sort of demonstration of my skills, while allowing anyone interested who’s been following the project to get a sneak peak.
The actual game content such as levels, cutscenes, and music is not included, so it’s not even at alpha stage; however, anyone interested in seeing how the game has been progressing will get a chance to try out a tech demo that shows some of the game’s features while showing off how solid the engine is.
CONTROLS:
S Jump
Up Save at Save Tree (the tree you start at)
Backspace Restart if you have died
If you can find them, I left in additional controls used for debugging that aren’t going to be in the final version. However, I figured they might be fun to play with.
Without further ado, please follow the link below to download the first public “pre-alpha” demo:
http://z9.invisionfree.com/Project_Moldering/index.php?showtopic=287
NOTE: Java is needed to run Moldering. Also, it may ask you to install OpenAL which Moldering uses to render all the sounds. After the installation is complete you will need to run the Moldering jar again.
-James
P.S. I linked to the forum page for the project so anyone who wishes to leave comments or data about bugs can sign up and do so. If you just want the link to the download look for the link in the bottom of the forum post.
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 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