Lighting, Weather, Parallaxing, OH MY!

Here’s two new video’s to show of some of the new neat-o-rama updates for Moldering. There’s also a few smaller changes, if you pay attention closely (or read the dialog boxes), that haven’t been in previous videos.

The first video shows off the new volumetric and ambient lighting systems. There’s three in place. I personally favor the first, and I believe we’ll be using that for most things. The others might prove useful in caves, or other areas.

#12 Moldering: Lighting Effects

Some ideas we’re toying with: little glowing lightning bugs that hover and dart around, complete with their own light source and strings of glowing mushrooms that glow brighter as you near them. Again, complete with their own light sources.

The next video shows off many different features including the new predictive camera system that lets the player see ahead of them. This video also shows off the dynamic weather system which adds to the atmosphere of the first world, as well as the parallax scrolling that I’ve been meaning to implement for some time now.

#13 Moldering: Parallaxing, Weather, Camera

Since these videos we’ve added some other features, including fading foreground objects. This way the player can enter caves and the walls in front will fade to let the player see into the cave. You’ll see these updates in upcoming videos.

Feedback is always welcomed!

-James

It took me some time, but I finally finished chopping up the art work into a tile-able format for our level editor.  I ran into a few minor problems along the way, but nothing a little game magic can’t fix (and/or hide from your unknown eyes, mwa haha)! 

I have a very busy next few days with my paying job(s), this will slow things a bit for me, unfortunately.  With my previous 4 day holiday over the past weekend, that was suppose to free up some time for me to spend meshing things together, but life always gets in the way! 

A map showing off our little orange friend running around his new environment will be up as soon as I have a demo level ready!

-Zach

There had been some changes going on lately and one of them is the graphics for our first world.  Our artist works in iteration, so I thought I’d show you the process so far!

(Our little friend seems to be quite active)

-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

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!

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

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.

I reworked the old lighting system and took out the translucent images we were using as light sources. Now, the game calculates the area of the map, subtracts from it where the light sources are, and draws just the outline of the shapes translucently with increasing stroke size. The result is that when the light sources meet there’s a nice mixing of the areas.

Here’s a nice article on strokes in Java that I used as a reference:

Java 2D Trickery: Light and Shadow

-James