Zack and I were asked to do an interview about Moldering for a small indie game blog, Grizzly Pixel. The interview provides some insight into Moldering and also us as developers as well. If you want to check out his blog, we’ve given him previously unreleased screenshots showing off the current state of the game and the current abilities. Unfortunately, his post won’t go up until Friday, so for now you can check out the interview in it’s entirety below:
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
New Lighting Systems:
There are three candidates for the lighting system used in Moldering. I’ve designed all three myself using Java2D (which for some reason runs faster on my computer than OpenGL). Certain areas and worlds will be shrouded in darkness, both to add to the atmosphere of the game and to affect the gameplay centered around exploration.
-James
Okay, small update here. Got the blog running again. Our hosting provider did some server upgrades and it took us a short while to realize that we needed to point our DNS (Domain Name Servers) to a new location.
In terms of updates, we’ve been doing some cool aesthetic work to Moldering and we should have a snazzy new video up soon showing off some of those features.
Stay tuned!
-James
I can’t always work on this game full-time, but when I do, I drink espresso.
I’ve been doing a lot of really solid programming the last couple of weeks and it really shows. The project is continuing to come together. With Zach working on the level creation, Bob on storyboarding, and Phillipe working on art, things are looking better than ever at each new interval (God, it’s great to have fellow team-members).
I could get into the technicalities of what I’ve been doing, but I’ll avoid that for the time being. In the last couple of weeks we’ve done some great developing. I’ve added some of the objects for the actual game, really buckled down and cleaned up the level editor (called the World Builder from here-on-in), and added in-game features that give the game a really polished look (e.g. excellent camera motion, parallex scrolling, blurring and other special effects). This game may take another million and two years until it’s release date but when it’s done, it will be done. We won’t be satisfied until Moldering is of commercial quality and hopefully an immersive experience that people simply cannot forget.
Here’s a great quote from Oddball on the TIGSource forum talking about the game Cafe that sums up our development: “progress on hobby projects [ebb] and [flow],” and currently, Moldering is flowing.
We’ll keep you posted when we have some new media to share. Hopefully we can show off some of the new parallexing soon, or maybe a sneak peak at some of the different game modes, or even info about the new “combat” system (and yes, combat is in quotes for a reason :] ).
-James
Hopefully I’ll be getting my hands on the new artwork for our first world, and will be able to pump out some levels and some correlating artwork!
On a more unfortunate note, the small surprise I posted a couple weeks back is in quite a rut, my Photoshop skills need a bit of brushing up before I can show what I’ve in mind. So the release on that is… unsure.
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:
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
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