c.ntr.st .s .v.r.th.ng

In addition to sparser posts here and more frequent ones on my Twitter you can follow my progress on Exploro on TIGsource as well!

Line of sight & cosmetics

The only noteworthy feature I’ve been working on lately – while I cringe at even the thought of making meaningful progress with the AI – is line of sight. I have all these snapshots in my head about how it felt to explore caves and dungeons in NetHack.

Feelings of dread and excitement at the same time, wondering what will pop up when I turn a corner. A rare item? The bloody mess of corpses some high level monster left passing through the area, allowing me to safely (but carefully) rummage the remains for loot? The monster itself, forcing me to flee immediately?

This was my first time using raycasting (aww) and it was all way simpler than I thought it would be, but I still spent a solid weekend afternoon and a night to get it to feel right. Actually, to be exact it’s not raycasting, it’s collider casting, which is conceptually the same except instead of checking intersections of an infinitely narrow line, you’re virtually dragging a collider with a specified size along the line and seeing what it hits. This proved to work really well with my existing tile grid setup, I just had to add (trigger only) box colliders to the flat tiles.

The results are surprisingly good. I initially thought I was excited about implementing this because of the visual aspect (the usual fast rewards that I’m hooked on), but I was pleasantly surprised about how immense of an impact it has on the feeling of exploration. Instead of easily being able to run around from biome to biome fairly fast, sometimes you’re forced into narrow forest paths you can only get out of using your axe.

Also, as it turns out the visuals reminded me not only of NetHack (success!) but funnily enough, of Minesweeper; namely the feeling you get when you click an empty tile and you see a large open field expand from it. So satisfying.

Apart from this feature, most of the changes I’ve made since the summer are pretty minor: some palette and sprite tweaks (still experimenting), and a lot of under the hood stuff like porting the hacky C# rolling horizon to a shader (as simple as that is in concept, it was my first time with shaders so it was quite a challenge).

Laying the groundwork for NPCs

I’ve been sloooowly hacking at my jumbled spaghetti of a codebase to get NPCs in. Right now all I have is a base class for entities – objects extended from the same class as every tile (they can be destroyed with enough hits from the right tools), but they are not tied to the map grid.

As you can see in the video, I can now add tiny snakes that will turn into a bloody mess after two firm whacks from the sword. They also get pushed away from the player by the physics system.

Because of my lack of programming training, the chaotic structure of the codebase is increasingly more often biting me in the ass as I try to extend it. I had to go through a lot of frustration to get these passive NPCs in but I should have the basics down now to progress. A huge refactoring is long overdue but right now I’m more concerned with easing my hunger for quick results, so I’m just trying to hack in everything I can think of in small increments, while picking up clues on how to structure it better for a future rewrite. This is a prototype afterall.

The next (much larger) chunk of code will be a pathfinding algorithm. Dijsktra will be the way to go for me because of its relative simplicity. I’m not too concerned with performance at this moment, but I will have to add in tricks like putting AIs to sleep after a certain distance from the player, or moving them on a map chunk based navigation instead of per-tile, etc.

Added a rolling horizon the other day. This was an interesting challenge. It took me about 8 hours to finish, which I’m pretty sure is about 4 times it would’ve been if I had any sort of proper training in programming, but where’s the fun in that? *dies a little inside*

I was fortunate enough to get some help from @andipossess regarding the implementation. (Kudos!) Although the tips I got included using both vertex and fragment shaders to achieve this effect, I went the easy route and skipped the vertex shader as it looked a bit scary for someone like me who has never touched shaders before. So I went ahead and did all the Y position manipulation for the tiles beyond the horizon in the C# script, added a flag to tiles to be able to determine whether they’re “tall” or not, and then made a copy of Unity’s Sprite fragment shader and added a step() call to cut off drawing “flat” tiles above the horizon. Pretty simple stuff really.

Working Title: “Exploro”

I’ve decided to start blogging my progress developing my game, both for my own enjoyment and learning, and in the hopes of building a source of extrinsic motivation for working on it via exposing the game to more people.

I’ve been working on the game (codename “Exploro") since February. Before that, I have worked about a year on and off on a prototype for another game, first in Processing, then in CraftyJS. I really haven’t touched programming for more than a decade before doing a few Processing sketches for this blog, so it’s all been quite a challenge. The latest ones being learning OOP and Unity basics.

I’m mostly stumbling through my issues by trial and error with the occasional googling, so even some basic things take quite a while for me to understand and implement, but I’m having a ton of fun so it pays off. Seeing a piece of work as interactive as a game finally take shape after days or weeks of struggling with one issue or another is really something.

The Legend of NetHack: Zeldacraft

My elevator pitch for Exploro would be something like “The Legend of NetHack: Zeldacraft.” In more general terms: imagine a vast, endless, top-down 2D world with an infinite number of dungeons, where you can travel and fight using real time combat mechanics, collecting all sorts of resources to improve your character, craft better gear, and to build an environment where you can survive many days and nights.

↑ One of the first mockups. All I knew was that I want a tiny person in an endless world.

A likely way the game will work in terms of overall flow:

Explore world to find deep and varied dungeons

Survive said dungeons and get better stuff to survive with

Repeat

At its current stage Exploro has the following features:

Pseudo-infinite, procedurally generated world with a handful of different biomes

Tile map chunking to keep things snappy and smooth

Day/night cycle (visuals only for now)

Player can move freely where the map permits (running, swimming)

Player can destroy certain tiles with certain tools (choice of sword, hatchet, or pickaxe)

↑ Procedurally generated map with multiple biomes.

Features to be added in the future:

Creatures to befriend and to survive

Multi level caves and dungeons to explore, incl. boss fights

Many weapons and accessories to find and craft