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

Some quick Updates:

Here’s a quick preview of some new enemies I added to the Moldering world. I’ve used the stock graphics and drew some basic sprites just to get things up and running.

On other news I’ve had some success and some problems with Ogg. I’ve gotten tracks to successfully loop and stop when finished without crashing the system or looping the last second or so. However, there’s a small lag when the track is first loaded and when it starts over.

I wonder, does this have to do with Ogg streaming, is it OpenAL, or something entirely different?

We’re using Ogg because it’s royalty free and provides fine compression. Using J-Ogg, I’ve managed to get streams to play, but I ran into a problem. The game hangs when the song is finished (either that or it continually loops the last buffer)… so I’ve got to do some debugging before I can move on.

Anyway, Ogg streaming is great. We can have a large library of music without worrying about running out of memory. As each song is played only a small amount of memory is read in at a time directly from the disk, rather than loading multiple 1-3mb songs into ram or on the heap. Now we can have that huge soundtrack we always dreamed of!

-James

Menu Music:

Written by Team Leader James Daniello (bet you didn’t know he was a musician too!), this track is one of several candidates for the Main Menu music when you first load the game.

Keep tuned for more music, videos, photos and info about Moldering!

This track, titled “Caves” was written for Moldering by Louigi Verona. He’s been doing a lot of good work for and is one of three steady musicians for the game. A big feature of the game will be its atmosphere so the music has to help convey that.

This track does an excellent job, Louigi was spot on when titled it “Caves”.

-James