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:

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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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Courtesy of Robert Tew:

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