Small video I made showing off the Dark Forest, with a transition into the Underwater Cave area.

Any discrepancies in the video are due to the recorder, not the game itself.

-Zach

Our page on 8-bit funding has just gone live. For those who don’t know it’s a community for donating money to indie game projects that seem promising. The developers get money to fund their projects, and the contributors can get some kick-ass rewards. Hopefully you think our project is promising and would like to contribute any amount. Please do (we can tell you we love you).

Click now:

http://www.8bitfunding.com/project_details.php?p_id=85

I haven’t been posting lately because I’ve been working on parts of the game that haven’t officially been released to the public. Leaving parts of the game secret, I believe, will add to a more authentic experience for the player. I always enjoy exciting knew surprises when playing games and I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for anyone. So, don’t let a lack of updates bum you out. You’ll just have to keep waiting for information on parts of the game that aren’t so secret.

Also, I’ll let you in on one secret. I’m working on a collaboration with a friend, a small game that will be packed chock full o’ 8-bitted goodness with an amazing retro style soundtrack. After we have enough content to show I’ll post a link of something or someplace to see more.

-James

So, my main animator is great, he does these really cool animations for moldering in gif format. However, Moldering doesn’t know how to dissect gifs. I guess I could write code in Moldering to do it, however, I wrote a different program instead. This little program will cut gifs into strip animations. it will also cut out any extra space that isn’t necessary, as well as optimize and index the gif.

Using the program is extremely simple. Double click the jar file, select which gif file to cut up, and then select where to output the file. It supports many output formats including gif, png, bmp, and tiff.

I borrowed some code that was open source from the web, so in the same spirit, I provided the source code here. I definitely didn’t want to download all of those “shareware” gif optimizing programs, see which ones actually did what I wanted, and install them on my computer unsure of what I was really getting. This program is small, fast, and clean—no spyware/bloatware or any other kinds of “ware” except pure, clean, and free (as in free beer) software. Enjoy!

-James

DOWNLOADS:

  Program:

    http://projectmoldering.com/downloads/giftostrip.zip

  Source:

    http://projectmoldering.com/downloads/giftostrip/Main.txt

    Note: Source is included in the program zip along with the proper folders.

So, lately I’ve delved into developing the actual game content of Moldering. This has been really exciting. The first stages of development were spent solely developing the engine and all of the tools necessary to make the game (which took a couple of years with school and all). A while back, however, Bobby Tew and I started drawing out story boards for the game and we wrote a good chunk of it down on (digital) paper. While developing the game from scratch (something I did as a learning project) I’ve had a lot of great ideas, received some great ideas from others, and scrapped some ideas that wouldn’t fit in the final vision. The game has gone through a great deal of iterations since day one.

Some time a few months ago, however, the engine and all of our tools (like the level editor) were finalized enough to begin making the actual game content. Once we got past that point I’ve been developing sounds and music, tweaking all of the gameplay, and designing, as well as coding, the actual levels and objects required for them. It’s great to see that the game has come this far—there’s really no going back.

Specifically, over the last couple of weeks I’ve spent time finalizing the first “area” of the game as well as re-coding bits of code that weren’t perfect. For example, while I was going to bed one night I thought up a really great way to code level transitions for the player and objects that are permitted to move from map to map. I made a mental note of it and began coding the very next day. It’s great to get the game content in, but it’s also exciting on a personal level to know that I can code things better than when I first started this game. The game is extremely solid because of all the time I put in, and the benefits of having a solid engine to build on have been immense… now it’s time for the good stuff! :)

-James

I’ve been doing some level design lately. It’s great to finally start producing actual game content that will be used in the final product. I’ve been working on this game on and off since 2007 after taking just one semester of programming and it has really come a long way. I must admit though, for as strong as my programming skills are my level design skills need to be leveled up.

I find it hard to design levels for a long period of time. Keeping my perspective fresh is the hardest part it seems, but I figure that will come with practice. The best I can do now is work on design here and there and step away from it often. It’s almost a relief when I realize I need to code something for a level since coding is something I can do well, even for extended periods of time.

Either way, be prepared for some new Moldering videos or pictures (or at least details) in the near future.

-James

P.S. Happy Holidays from the Moldering team!

I was playing Borderlands all day the other day now that school is out of session and I discovered a neat glitch. The glitch allows players to skip rounds of enemies in the Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot DLC (a round-based tournament-style game mode). It got me thinking about how the inner workings of the game must operate; I figured out what checks their code must be doing simply by playing the game, and then the cogs started turning in my head. As a result some neat ideas for Moldering started popping in my head. One of these ideas was how to create a simplified system for “global objects.”

A global object in Moldering refers to any object which is independent of the map it is on. This means that any one of these objects designated a “global object” can move off the screen and into other maps. Not only that, but they won’t “reset” when a map is reloaded. So, for example, I can push a global box 7 maps over and it will stay there. Previously, whenever a map was reloaded it would re-instantiate each object stored in the map file corresponding to that map and as a result the map objects could not save their state through this (only a limited number of maps are in memory at any given time to save resources).

In order to designate an object as global, I also wrote the code and interfaces necessary to specify which objects are global and which are not in the Moldering Level Editor. Now, all that is left is to work out a few bugs with moving objects between maps of differing sizes.

-James

The maps in moldering are stored as plain text files. This has its pros and cons. For one, it’s easy during development to make simple changes without the level editor. However, anyone can edit text files. So, rather than letting any Tom, Dick, and Harry edit the maps at their whim, I implemented some VERY basic map encryption.

Basically I serialized a class that stores all the maps after changing the maps to their hex representation. If anyone was planning to “break the code”, they’d figure it out anyway, but this will still prevent most people from cheating. By removing the temptation by one layer I think I improved the integrity of both the game’s maps, and completing the game; someone who says they beat the game likely did not alter the maps.

Besides, I do plan to release the level editor after some time, and with it the tools to pack and unpack maps. So, people will be able to edit the game and pack their own maps eventually. However, the officially released map packs will be that much more unalterable, and people won’t easily cheat or accidentally break the game.

Hello everyone, its been a while since a posted on here… A long time actually. I was floating around the city the other day, and found some inspiration for some moldering art :) Hopefully I’ll get some time to work on it sometime soon!

-Zach

So, I didn’t want to do anything too involved today, but I still wanted to do something, so I took the time to totally redesign the Moldering Forum. I thought the site was very “1990’s,” so I went for something more clean.

It looks a lot better but I would still love some input. Do you guys have any suggestions/thoughts?

http://www.projectmoldering.com/forum

No new screenshots this time, but rather a short update to let you know what we’ve been working on.

At this point we haven’t publicly announced all the features of Moldering. However, as much as I’m going to say about one of the features is that I’ve been working on a separate movement engine for a small sub-section of the game. I haven’t gotten this movement just right so I’ve been working on a few other things to pass the time. Included are:

• Full-screen support
• Scrolling images (to simulate parallax scrolling where we want images to loop)
• Tweaking the particle engine
• and, fixing odds and ends here and there

I’d show some screen shots but it would give away too much, and besides, who really gets excited about “programmers art?” :P

-James

Been keeping up on Moldering? Wanting to try some of the new features? Well now you can!

Click the link below to check out the latest build. All the new features I’ve been talking about (as well as the new movement tweaks) are in there. Let us know what you think.

Also, I’d be flattered if you flattr’d us. I just set up an account and would love to know that it works (and to have all your monies!)

Thanks!

http://z9.invisionfree.com/Project_Moldering/index.php?showtopic=289

-James