[WIP] Mine to the sky

[Kelvin]

Hmm, that might be a good balance. Any chance of being able to find/craft grenades? I could understand making them rare or hard to craft, but it'd be a nice way to clear away lava in a pinch after it hardens.

[Codestar]

Mechanics for clearing out large areas of blocks are still up in the air at this moment. Trying to target a minimum viable product at the moment, once that is done and I have a chance to actually play with the core game, then I'll add on additional powers and mechanics based around clearing dirt/obstacles.

Another update shot:

This is a screenshot of an entire room layout that has been generated by my level builder. As I stated before, there are a number of base templates that levels are constructed out of. The shape, number of exits, and pattern are all determined randomly and are based off of the map that is generated for the levels. (the previous screenshot showing the randomly generated map). It's using an algorithm similar to the way spelunky builds levels, but with a larger surface area. Since the template layouts are so big, I am able to actually apply a lot of level design principles to them and control how much of a challenge they are.

[Kelvin]

Honestly, I think what you've got so far is an MVP already. Any chance we could try it out sometime soon?

[Codestar]

Probably not any time soon, there's still a lot that needs to be put in, but I'm hoping to keep building interest from people using gif sets of what I'm currently working on and what new features are being put in.

Next thing on the dev agenda is to put in obstacle templates. These are much smaller somewhat randomized templates that fit inside room templates. They contain areas of tiles that give a certain pre-determined challenge to a player. Some may contain platforms, some may contain lava/spikes, etc.

[Codestar]

Alright, well now I finally have my level generator rendering some randomized levels. I've added more templates and now I'm going to get started on scanning my randomized levels and applying some traps, obstacles, enemies, etc., to the generated level files. You'll probably notice some patterns in the screenshot, that is because I've only got 3 templates for far for each path direction. Once I have more templates, I'm going to implement some code to make sure the same template is never used twice in a level. I also am working on implimenting mini templates in my code so I can randomize the cells even further.

Proc-generation is so interesting and I'm having a blast doing it.

[Codestar]

DEVLOG UPDATE:

Currently I'm working on implementing obstacle blocks in my game. An obstacle block is a small portion of the level that can hold randomized obstacle templates. This is one technique that spelunky used for it's level generation to give much more randomized results when it generated levels.

Currently my level generator will also spit out levels that when all it's templates are put together, there are sometimes large chunks of dirt blocks that cluster together, I'm thinking that I'm going to use this as a place that I can put small obstacle templates or put clusters of ores and resources, so that players can come across small troves of resources and challenges to encourage exploration and excavation.

I've also started implementing some basic sound effects into the game as well, and it makes testing the game feel a lot more polished, than just having no sound at all. I'm also on the look out for some musicians to take on the task of making music for the game.

I also applied some things I learned earlier today and did this. Procedurally generated parallax backgrounds! (Yes, those are Yoshi's island tiles in the background.)



It came out better than I expected, now I just need to do some nice auto-tiling on it to make it less ugly. All in all, I think it's going to be a nice solution to the problem of having repeating background tiles.

Things are really starting to shape up on the game and hopefully once I get all of the level randomization factors done, I can start implementing some interesting enemies and have more gameplay gifs to show off.

[Codestar]

...aaaand autotiling on procedurally generated mid-background tiles done!

**Note, these are temporary tiles until I can break away from coding and get back to work on sprites.**

[Kelvin]

Dude, you've gone well past the MVP at this point. Come on, man! Let us play the game! If anything, you could get some feedback on how the controls work, which is the most important part, anyway.

[Codestar]

UPDATE:

So now after a long uphill battle I am able to use obstacle templates in my level generation. These are smaller templates that I can place in level generation templates to present an obstacle to the player as well as change up the terrain a bit. Decorative entities are also being generated now as well, these are small background objects like vines, mushrooms, etc. that change up the landscape a bit. (right now they are blue crystals.)



I also came across this gem of random level generation today while doing some testing.



Also, I might be opening slots for testers in the near future. I still need to flesh out a lot of the design until I have something that will be close enough to the minimum viable product or "playable".

[Codestar]

Began working on resource spawning. Really want to add different harder to break types of dirt blocks to the existing generated levels, but I'm having some trouble with trying to generate a height map from an existing 2D Array.

I'd like to figure out how to do something like this with the dirt blocks, but figuring out how to do it with an array that's already been generated is a big headache. If anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it.


Other than this, I've been doing a lot of optimization work. Restructuring the code I've already been working on to be optimized for Google's V8 Javascript engine is proving to be quite the challenge as well. Especially considering that ImpactJS is beast of an engine to re-write.

The way that inheritance is propagated down the entity chain is a huge resource hog, and I'm looking to split apart some parts of ImpactJS to be more component based like the developers for Cross-Code did. Hopefully it will improve my CPU performance in the long run.

[Codestar]

Thanks to the folks in the TIGSource technical sub forum I was able to implement different types of terrain blocks using a distance transform algorithm. These blocks would be harder to break and require users to have upgraded abilities. These would also have a higher chance of spawning rare minerals, so when the player has the appropriate stats, they can come back and mine them later. Here's an example of a full map with different terrain blocks placed throughout the room.

[Kosheh]

....is that background from the caverns in yoshi's island



oh my god, it's the background from the caverns in yoshi's island

(nice placeholder m8)

[Codestar]

Hehe yep. Hopefully when I'm at a point where I can stop programming and do more pixel art or get a pixel artist on board with the project, then I can make an awesome background like that placeholder.

Fun fact* a lot of the game is being inspired by yoshi's island. I love the mechanics in that game, and hopefully I can transfer that same feel to this game.

[Kami]

I find that the durable grey-ground is difficult to distinguish from the background terrain.

[Codestar]

The tiles are currently in there just for testing. That's why they are pretty much the same tiles recolored. Once I can get back to art, pretty much all of the assets are going to be redone.

New gameplay gif!

Got finished implementing some simple wall jumping/sliding. This ability will allow you to scale large vertical sections of blocks. You can also grab on to ledges if you're close enough to them.