The Moon Fields

[anothergod]

Voxels, sprites, Zelda, Souls, Hotline Miami, Android Arts, and chip hop. @sufresh and I are going to treat this thread as a group devlog which should be a good contrast to my real devlog here. Please feel free to read and comment and wonder and compliment and criticize. Also, uh, I really want this dude Boba Sweat to do the soundtrack to the game.

SWORDS
There will be three swords. If you don’t swing your sword (or use any other item) a hidden meter will charge. If the meter is maxed out using the sword will do a charged attack that deflects projectiles. Sword 1 is the weakest and most spammable regular attack. Sword 2 has good spammed damage and the fastest but relatively weak charge. Sword 3 has the best spam damage, longest charge, and biggest charge damage.

SHIELDS
Shields are active when the button is pressed. There are two categories of shields: light and heavy. Please see this post.

OTHER WEAPONS
The bow will have different quivers. Quiver 1 will have regular arrows that are relatively slow to fire. Quiver 2 will have a lot of arrows that are weaker but fast to fire. And Quiver 3 will have a very small amount of arrows that essentially are big fuckoff arrows.

There will be Regular Bombs, Super Bombs, and Oil Slick bombs. I am wondering if there will be other bombs in the support/weird category, but they need to be useful and fun and fit within a serious/mostly-real theme (this will be discussed in detail later). The weak/plentiful strong/rare theme will persist here. Bombs can be tapped to be dropped or held and let go to be thrown. I think a “dropped” Oil Bomb can be used in conjunction with fire sources to add a fire effect to the player’s weapon. Possible other ideas: alchemy bombs, magic bombs, poison dust, etc. I want to fill the world with a believable amount of living things/botany/etc.

The rest of the toolkit is as follows: something to remove trees, something to smash down walls, torches, lanterns, a wand, and a magic instrument. I want everything to have regular uses and “mysterious uses”.

The Treecutter was initially an axe, but I think that might be boring. The Oil Bomb might do this function because the Zelda analogue is burning down trees anyways. I like the idea of a spinning blade, but I don’t know how to make that be a realistic adventuring tool. I’m fairly certain the Smashing Tool is actually going to be a ball mace on a chain. I also like the idea of having the Hammerball follow you around. Maybe it’ll be so awesome that it’ll blow up trees, too.

SUPPORT TOOLS
Torches and Lanterns are supposed to overlap in the lighting category. They are both supposed to make nighttime easier to navigate, but they have slightly different uses. The Torch can do small amounts of damage and can be “inflamed” to do fire damage that does more damage to certain enemies and lights up other enemies. Water will “extinguish” the Torch, and I think time might as well. The Lantern will do a very small amount of fire damage, but can be used to light things and it’ll never go out. The two in conjunction will guarantee you can do moderate fire damage at any given time, but not as good as Oil Bombing your blade and lighting that. I am also thinking of somehow letting you use your Lantern to light arrows, but I’m not sure if that would get too clumsy.

The Wand and the Magic Instrument do similar things to different targets. The both exist in the mysterious category, so I want them to be less reliable and generally wonky and weird. The wand will shoot out magic bolts that have different effects based on what they hit. Maybe they will do damage to enemies, but mostly it is used to magically solve any garbage problem I have (e.g. an enemy that is too hard or if I want to have a longer distance battle with a particular enemy, etc.). I also had this idea of teleport stones that would teleport the hero to the location of where they hit, so that could be cool, too. The Magic Instrument would mostly be used to call a steed for fast travel, but it can also do things that are weird like identify hidden treasures or put certain non-innately-evil enemies to sleep. I imagine both of these will be nice to flesh out some of the world’s mysteries and make things seem more alive and nuanced.

EQUIPMENT ITEMS AND POTIONS AND BUFFS IN GENERAL
I have ideas for extra equipment items that augment certain stats. In the design doc there’s a ring to buff charge damage, one to regenerate HP, boots to move fast and increase quiver/bomb capacities. I also have ideas for potions that will do some of these things as well, but they would be limited. A ring that you equip to turn your magic bolts into something useful would be cool, yeah? A potion that grants charge and HP regen and other things would be cool too, yeah? I feel like we could go procedural generation here, but hey…

These are essentially the support things that help you focus your gameplan. You can go for more damage or more defense or speed. None of them will be necessary, but it will be fun to play with them.

HIT POINTS, ARMOR, AND THE CAMPFIRE
So instead of hearts this game is going to have Cherubs. Cherubs are essentially life points. Each armor that you put on has a certain amount of “HP” (anywhere from 1 to 3! Maybe 4? I don’t know!). If you lose all your HP you “die”. If you have Cherubs left you are brought back to life to try the current screen again.

The amount of Cherubs increase as you go on, but essentially shouldn’t affect your “win rate” of each individual frame. Your “HP” is determined by the armor that you have equipped. And the armor that you have equipped also determines other things like overall “Speed”, whether you have a “Dodge” (attached to an unequipped slot), and your overall carry capacity. If you decide to play naked you’d have 1 HP, 2 total item slots, can “Dodge”, and you’d move really fast. And if you decide to play with the heaviest armor you’d have 3 HP, 5 item slots, can’t dodge and move really slowly. The spreadsheets for this stuff are full but untested, so… you know how that goes.

Equipping items and armor happens at the Campfires. The Campfire is essentially your checkpoint and your safety. If you lose all your Cherubs you respawn here. If you need more Cherubs you should come here. I want the 3D voxels and sprites to play with the fire and be extraordinary looking but also mesmerizing.

As soon as you discover an item in the game world it will start appearing near your Campfires as well. I think standing over an item and pressing a key will be used to assign it to that key slot. Part of me wants this designed for modern controllers so X, O, /, [], L1, R1, L2, and R2 are your possible buttons and possible places to equip each item. I am interested in a plot twist where your items do not spawn at the campfire, but we’ll get there when we get there. If I can figure out how to not make it too cluttered to have all your items at the campfire I think this is the optimal move, but if not, there will probably be a menu. I also have no idea how to handle equipping the different armors, but hey.

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STATUS INDICATORS, HIT POINTS, AND USER INTERFACE
I want this game to be as free from menus and words as possible. There is no menu ala Zelda. Quest information, item stats, whatnot are all available at the Campfire. The more I think about this the more I think that I want this place to be a “safespace” for that kind of thing and communicate that when you get cozy at the fire you get cozy with your ingame logbook and words and everything can flow.

… This got a little long so hit up this response here.

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MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT
We want to get a demo out in four months or so. I think we can do it! Our last game Guulbusters looks kinda like what we want to make this look like! And we have most of the graphics already done! It’s just a matter of, you know, making the game.

The MVP is supposed to be a midgame dungeon (probably 2 or 3). We want to start at a campfire outside of a field. FYI we’re calling each dungeon a “Field”. You can equip armor and pick your items. You can play the game with armor so you’d have 2 hits per Cherub, a few items, and normal movespeed. You’d also be able to play the game naked with only 1 hit, 2 items, faster movespeed and a dodge.

MVP ITEMS
Sword 1, Sword 2, Bow, Torch, Strength/Regen Potion, HP+ ring

We want to have a tile system. I would love to figure out how to use Tiled in Unity so people can make their own Moon Fields maps. All of our voxels are 16^3 anyways.

MVP ENEMIES
Goo, Goobaby, Kultist, The Embalmed, Bones Blader, and Floateye

Goo and Goobaby are bouncey squishy blobs. They are mook enemies that are filler and will be interesting to throw hundreds of in a room to see how the player deals. If a Goo dies Goobabies are spawned. These are here because making Goomother a midboss is an easy move later down the line.

Kultist and The Embalmed are another pair of enemies. The Kultists are essentially Klansmen that worship the White Moon. These ones will be wizards that teleport and shoot their own magic bolts. The magic bolts are revive anything dead, and there will be a lot of dead Embalmed around. Reanimated Embalmed take a lot of damage and are weak to fire.

Bones Blader are skeletons with blades. They will be the only “smart” badguy that searches you out and dashes at you.

Floateyes are bats that try to float away and shoot projectiles at you.

MVP DUNGEON THEME
Flooded Tomb is a possible theme. So is something desert-y. So is very basic vanilla dungeon. I want to have traps, and there will be dungeon blocks that are essentially sarcophagii. I want to have the player find mostly enemies in sarcophagii and then find a key dungeon item or two in them as well.

[haley]

A bow that charges and fires a scattershot of arrows, make it happen.

[anothergod]

This is probably already obvious, but to clarify the game is always charging the items. When the charge meter goes over a threshold for an item (e.g. Sword 1 is 4 beats and Sword 2 is 2 beats at 120bpm music) the next item use is the charged use. I want the charge to feel like a bonus for being cautious and taking time to attack. Until you want to just mash the button and finish off an enemy. Essentially the charge system is supposed to function like the one we used in Guulbusters.

Someone said that the charge system in Guulbusters needed an indicator for when the charging was complete. I think that might be a good thing here as well, but I am not sure how to make this seem uncluttered. I’m adding a section in the OP regarding indicators for health and charge.

@drobe As far as arrows go, I only want to have 3 different quivers. Right now they’re all single target damage, but I think you’re right and we should probably go for multi target damage, too. I like the piercing for the big fat arrows so I’ll go ahead add that to the OP.

A special status effect for arrows is something I’m interested in, but I’m unsure of how to do it. I want it to be a few steps - almost clumsy - to emphasize how important and weird it is. I was thinking of having the Lantern’s active ability to drop a temporary flame/lightsource (ala OG Zelda) to light things that you use inside of it. So you drop the flame and you’d shoot your arrows through them to have fire damage? If you had thrown an oil bomb on an enemy, dropped the flame, and shot an arrow you could light an enemy on fire.

I like the status effect of pinning enemies to the ground (essentially boomerang + bow combined). I was thinking of somehow having the Normal Quiver pin enemies to the ground - maybe when you equip the power ring? I am worried that this level of specialization will seem random, but a lot of it makes sense to me so I’d maybe just have to communicate this better.

@seven I am unsure if I want the arrows to have charge attacks, but if they do, I don’t think they’d essentially change the way the bow works. So a quiver full of “Multi-Arrows” would be multi-arrows when you spam them and “Multi-Arrows” when you charge them.

Multi-Arrow is essentially AoE for me, so I’d have that or piercing. I think I’d prefer to be piercing for a more normal approach to the game as opposed to a superhuman/specialskillset approach. I think part of the theme is that the character is supposed to be as ordinary they can be, and all of these tools are normal, but from playing the game the character accomplishes extraordinary things.

Maybe this effect would have to be a crossbow with no charge at all. I like the idea of tools doing extraordinary things.

[haley]

The minimal UI for charging is a dot somewhere (near your healthbar?) that changes color for charge states. This doesn’t really need to be explained to the player at all; it should be obvious enough when they hit the attack button, immediately see the dot change color, and cycle back between colors after they’re done attacking.

e: my scattershot bow was a half-joke, but if you want an actual scatter-shot attack with a semblance of realism… a spelunky-esque musket with less damage than a bow, inconvenient knockback, bad ranged accuracy (i.e. the bullets all fly out at different angles) and higher reload times? if you want to differentiate it further you could have it only recharge while the player is standing still (they’ll automatically show a reloading animation while this happens)

[haley]

To introduce the concept of flaming arrows you can have rooms with torches hanging out in the environment and enemies that are only damaged by fire. Players should figure this out by accident if the visual design doesn’t give it away. Then give the player a few rooms where they need to put their Lantern down as part of a puzzle. Then give them a few rooms of regular enemies so they can put the two together on their own and feel smart. Finally, put them in a room with the same enemies who are vulnerable only to fire, lock the doors, and force them to figure it out if they haven’t already.

[anothergod]

STATUS INDICATORS, HIT POINTS, AND USER INTERFACE
I want this game to be as free from menus and words as possible. There is no menu ala Zelda. Quest information, item stats, whatnot are all available at the Campfire. The more I think about this the more I think that I want this place to be a “safespace” for that kind of thing and communicate that when you get cozy at the fire you get cozy with your ingame logbook and words and everything can flow.

But in the fields I definitely want to keep away from indicators.

The most important number-on-the-way-to-defeat is your HP. For the 2 hit system in Sunburner and Guulbusters we indicated 1HP remaining by having some sort of damage indicated on the player itself. In GB it was flashing red, and in SB it was a wobbly ship with smoke flying off of it.

We want up to 5 HP here in MF. I think the armors will stop at 4 and an optional item will let you have +1 HP. Unless you have a 1HPmax armor, having 1HP will have a graphic effect on the player sprite that indicates “brink of death”. In the original Zelda that was a beeping sound. Here I think it will be red flashes and beeping and maybe other FX. If you have a 1HPmax armor or if you’re at full regular HP the graphic effect on the player sprite should be completely normal. I like the idea of a weird light coming down from above illuminating the player when you’re at Max+1 HP. But I’m unsure of what to do when you have 2/(3 or 4) HP or 3/4 HP… Part of me just thinks there should be sweat bubbles that come out and 2 or 3 HP with a 4HP armor should just “look the same”.

Essentially 1HPmax armor: "normal"
2HPmax armor: 1HP “brink of death”, 2HP "normal"
3HPmax armor: 1HP “brink of death”, 2HP “sweaty”, 3HP "norma"
4HPmax armor: 1HP “brink of death”, 2 or 3 HP “sweaty”, 4HP “normal”

If you have equipment that gives +1HP then having Max+1HP gives a “magic halo” effect somehow.

God this looks so confusing.

Cherubs are either going to be shown after death with a Cherub Icon x Remaining Lives indicator ala SMB1 and/or somewhere in the corner. One status indicator can be elegant looking, and this seems like one that doesn’t exactly matter much, so it can be tucked away in a corner. I also think that having floaty, firefly-y “Cherubs” flying around the player character would look cool. It’d be like Navi but we’d call them Cherubs and they could shoot light sources.

WEAPONS AND ITEMS AND OH GOD MY INTERFACE
I don’t know how I want to have these guys shown. I don’t want 8 items splayed across the stark minimalism of my screen. Partially I want to make each item have some sort of visual indicator on the player and its the player’s job to remember which button does what. But I don’t know how I’d indicate a lot of the items like oil bombs vs torch vs whatever. This is something up for discussion for sure

As far as charging is concerned I actually think I came up with a good indicator as I was typing this. The player will only have a few items to charge and the items to charge won’t change until the player goes to the campfire to change their items. I think having the player character flash white when each charge is complete will be enough. Every time you attack you will subtlely see the white flashes the same amount of time afterwards. If you have 3 items with wildly different charges you will still get on rhythm if you see the first two charges. Even if it isn’t specific to each item, it will still get the point across that on the second white flash your second weapon is charged. This is also up for discussion. Please discuss

[haley]

I didn’t realize your commitment to complete UI-lesness at first but in that case:
HP reduction could be visually indicated with ghost trails a la Swords & Sworcery: they get progressively more frequent depending on how far you are from your max HP.
Alternatively, if players are going to (optionally) build up their armor over the course of the game, then make armor into additions to the sprite that disappear as you take hits. Based on videos you’ve shown there may or may not be enough visual detail on sprites to accommodate this. It’s worth trying as a “loose” indicator of HP though–and it’s certainly better to be looking directly at the player sprite rather than glancing at a corner of the screen.

Different items could have different full-charge-flash colors, if a dot is too much. Depending on how much you emphasize this feature you could even give bonuses to some weapons for attacking just when they finish recharging, with a little mother 3 screenshake and sound cue.

[haley]

I always enjoyed your game design posts on SB1, by the way. i doubt you’d have much use for an amateur programmer/UX/level designer with a narrow skillset and experience mainly with prototypes, but if you do for some reason, I’d enjoy helping out just for experience. Wanted to work on a zelda-like in particular for a couple years now.

[anothergod]

Thanks @seven. I will keep that in mind. I want to make a tileset for Tiled that saves XMLs that we import into Unity to build levels quickly. If you have ideas we can talk about it. Essentially it will be environment, trap, & enemy placement.

There won’t be armor “upgrades” in that sense. There are different that you can equip like Zelda has armors to equip. These are the armors we have decided on so far:

“Naked” 1HP, 100% speed, carry 2 items, dodge
"Hard Leather" 2 HP, 80% speed, carry 4 items
"Silver Guard" 3 HP, 60% speed, carry 5 items
"Fey Wrap" 2 HP, 96% speed, carry 3 items, dodge
"Traveler’s" 2 HP, 75% speed, carry 8 items

“Naked” is essentially hard mode. I think she’ll be explicitly clothed, it just refers to how armored she is.

“Leather” and “Silver Guard” are the armored types. I think there might be upgrades available to make either of these carry more and/or move faster.

“Fey Wrap” is supposed to be fully end-game viable as is. I might upgrade the carry capacity. Essentially it’s supposed to be lightweight faster mithril type armor.

“Traveler’s” is supposed to be to be the versatile type. It’s a green tunic. The flavor text will say something like, “this seems familiar”…

[anothergod]

Posted a tech entry regarding syncing sprites and voxels on the interdimensional devlog.

Please tell me your emotions regarding the way this looks. We’re 99% sure we’re doing sprites and voxels together, so work your critiques from that angle.

[anothergod]

The voxels are built using an external program called MagicaVoxel. As far as moving the voxels and sprites, I’m thinking we’re gonna try a weird new way before syncing everything to the pixel grid.

Essentially the way I want to do things is that when things are in motion - e.g. walking, particles, etc. we won’t restrict objects to the pixel grid. It’s when things are done moving - e.g. stopped or using an item - that we’ll snap them to the grid. If it doesn’t look too weird I think this will look good. That’s an awkward sentence, but I’m sticking to it.

[haley]

Soft shadows clash hard with limited color palette sprites, and I think that’s what’s making it look weird right now. If each “pixel’s” worth of shadow has a uniform rgba value, then the style will feel a lot more consistent.

I would also lean towards simpler geometry but it’s hard to say how much noise there would be in a finished map just from the screenshot.

I want to make a tileset for Tiled that saves XMLs that we import into Unity to build levels quickly. If you have ideas we can talk about it. Essentially it will be environment, trap, & enemy placement.

Rather than literal tiles, you could use a “tagging” tileset with layers for different classes of game objects (e.g. environments vs enemies) with a Unity script that swaps out each “tag” for its associated object at runtime (or, if you need to customize individual objects after import, then do the importing in the editor instead).

This won’t work as well if there are objects that don’t conform to the grid but the same principle would apply. Beyond that it’d just be about the finer details of how the XML files that come out of Tiled are formatted. Depending on the amount of features from Tiled you actually plan to use, if it was me I’d probably whip up my own minimal editor/format before taking the time to read and understand someone else’s documentation, because I am a monster.

I’m just spitballing based on the info in the thread though, so I don’t know if I’m just stating the obvious and there are more specific problems you’re concerned with.

[Mr_Mechanical]

I think it looks good except that your voxels appear to be casting shadows and your sprites don’t.

[anothergod]

@seven Yeah I think we’re on the same page. I saw someone use Tiled to have placeholder tiles that represent other things that are spawned into a Unity Scene.

The soft shadows are for long distance light sources. Essentially this is the sun? But I get what you’re saying. I want the game to feel smart, so if it’s important to differentiate sharp shadowed point lights from this soft shadowed sun, I’ll do it. If it’s not important I’ll make them all sharp shadows.

@Mr_Mechanical Unity does a weird thing wrt sprite shadowing. My programmer knows how to enable shadows cast onto and cast from sprites. I’ll message him tonight to see if we can update the images.

[anothergod]

@drobe can I use the regular 2D tools like animations inside the quad?

[Mr_Mechanical]

Oh wow Unity really can do just about everything. Very nice.

[haley]

The soft shadows are for long distance light sources. Essentially this is the sun? But I get what you’re saying. I want the game to feel smart, so if it’s important to differentiate sharp shadowed point lights from this soft shadowed sun, I’ll do it. If it’s not important I’ll make them all sharp shadows.

yeah unless there’s a day and night system or something that plays a significant role in the game, i think that universal angled lighting may be too much of a visual distractor, since it’s going to add a lot of noise on top of whatever the player’s actually going to be paying attention to. that’s going to be more of an issue than it appears in that test map, since a normal screen is probably going to have way more assets and non-uniform ground. plus it’s just hard to reconcile that kind of realistic unity shadow with the s/nes-influenced art style

[parker]

I can’t program worth shit and never had a good head for code or numbers, but I’ve been trying to learn unity anyway because the older I get instead of wanting a family or kids the more I think I maybe want to make a game. have to pass on my memes.

[anothergod]

Column #1: Naked, Red Hard Leather, Silver Guard
Column #2: Fey Wrap, Traveler’s, Gold Guard

[anothergod]

@drobe that is so incredibly simple and amazing. Seriously this is awesome.

Ok.

So the next thing up for the game is to make the perfect Link’s Awakening style 8 dir movement with 4 animation directions. Also, this more-than-8-directional rotating bow/quiver :

With real 3D shaadows