#world generation

Who are you?

Aspen - Project Lead, Programmer, Pixel artist, Sound Designer.

Hey! I'm Aspen, I've been programming and making games for many many years in basically every engine there is... But never felt the drive to finish one, until now! I consider myself very experienced in the engine we're using (Gamemaker Studio 2.5) and have confidence we'll be able to make this game a reality. I also run the Tumblr account, so assume it's me behind the wheel as a default. Thank you for checking the game out!

Alec - Concept artist, Character Designer

H a l l o I'm Alec, I like writing and drawing and painting and designing shiiiiiiiit. I adore world building and have frequent bursts of creative possession in which I conceive and birth the greatest ideas and concepts in a mere moment. Otherwise, I can be a total dumbass and completely useless. I'm good at colours 👌 I have been a 85% a home-brew DM for about 2 years now and that is the greatest proof of my ADHD-given God powers of creativity. Slay.

What a cool guy!

Design pillars

Immersion. Above all else, I would like roleplay (casual or serious) to be natural and well supported. I would like players to find engaging with the world, and it's characters to be very personal.

Innovation. Tropes such as "You spawn in a green forest and can walk left or right" will be actively avoided. Biomes will have generation that presents more unique movement opportunities. Such as geysers in rock pools launching players high up, or giant twisting vines that hold up chunks of land to hop between.

More quality less quantity. Planets will be significantly more content-dense than Starbound, and perhaps controversially travel between them will be more difficult/expensive as well. This would encourage players to take advantage of all the resources presented on each planet, instead of hopping from one to the next. This would also encourage us throughout development to give each planet as much love as possible. Each planet should feel like a 'miniature terraria world'. Though actually achieving that is easier said than done.

Meaningful content. Procedurally generating creatures from 100 different pre-set monster parts could technically produce limitless alien creatures for players to encounter. But in both No Man's Sky and Starbound. I find this novelty to wear off quick, these creatures are not manually, meaningfully crafted and beyond an unusual appearance and some shallow gameplay changes... They do not create much of a memorable experience for the player. In my opinion, anyway. I would rather hand-craft every creature and make them all significantly unique and interesting. That's not to say procedurally generated creatures won't ever have a place in the game, but they certainly wont be as prevalent as others games.

Okay well... What's finished?

Fundamental lighting shaders akin to Starbound.

Some world generation brushes and basic commands.

A text mark-up language (heavily optimised), and game chat.

Extensive custom debugging tools

Hard and soft-loading of chunks to save on as much memory and CPU usage as possible.

Complete unloading, and compression of chunks on top of the previously mentioned system. As well as a live-saving system.

Setting, Story baseline, and conceptualization of the first 3 playable species. Each species will have a different starting planet, and immediately different playthrough.

Designs and cultures of several additional unplayable races.

Character proportion tests, sprites and sketches.

First-pass on collision functions.

Weighted Tile variance and tile connections.

CONCERNS

Multiplayer. While I have made an online multiplayer game before and it's definitely doable for this game, it would require some practice in a one-off test game to be fully confident. It would also take a LOT of time.