I'm 2 years into development of my sandbox game, Moonman | Hacker News Reader

I'm 2 years into development of my sandbox game, Moonman

bp.io

135 pointseigenbom71 comments

Been following Moonman for 2 years :) I am a relatively quiet lurker on TIGSource but I can't wait until Moonman is finally out (as in.. out out). The playable demos so far have been amazing.

Unfortunately, the start-up community is more cynical than the indie gaming one (blah blah Terraria clone). But, I for one, wish you good luck sir!

I love the indie community because it fosters creativity over success; the process over the end result. Unlike the start-up community (where the exit is what really matters). I dabble in both. The realism on HN keeps me grounded but the naivete on TIG keeps me dreaming.

Thanks, glad you've liked it. Yeah I know this isn't really HN material and my game is fairly niche already. Nevertheless it seems there are some gamedev people on here, which is great to see. :)

Honestly, I think this is HN material. You built something awesome, that at least should inspire others here to get cranking on some of their own, "crazy" ideas.

This looks great. I wish you the best with Moonman.

Thanks!

> The realism on HN keeps me grounded but the naivete on TIG keeps me dreaming

Spot on! Balance is key :)

Terraria is a clone itself. Also it's probably a separate genre already.

Similarly to the startup community, where everything's been done, "clones" are OK in this sense. Dissimilarly, you don't have to be the best with an indie game, you just have to have some fans.

What is Terraria a clone of?

I guess minecraft.

Terraria takes inspiration from Minecraft, but it is not a clone of it.

Zynga's "The Ville" is a clone, for reference. [1] Terraria is what happens when a dev sees a neat game mechanic and thinks "Oh wow, I know what I can do with that" and extends it, which is to be embraced. It's how whole genres are launched and how we got some of the greatest games in the industry.

1) http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/08/10/clone-wars-z...

Which itself clones many attributes from dwarf fortress. Frankly, if they are fun games and "different enough" then I don't care.

Minecraft is a clone and evolution of Infiniminer.

Notch has stated that he originally wanted a game like Dwarf Fortress in tone before he stumbled upon Infiniminer[1]. I think you are right in that it's more correct to say Minecraft is a clone and evolution of Infiniminer, but was heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress.

  [1]: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/09/building-a-hit-one-block-at-a-time-the-creation-of-minecraft/

Oh definitely. I didn't really mean to say it wasn't, even if it sounded a bit like it.

As someone who tried repeatedly to make a game but never finished (or came as far as you have), I can only congratulate you on doing better.

I could only see the video on youtube as the site is down, but it looks a lot like a "2D Minecraft". Not that that's a bad thing, but a lot of people will dismiss it because of this. Do you have any plans of expanding the gameplay into a direction different from Minecraft?

The mining and crafting is like the bread and butter of this genre, which I'm happy to call minecraft-like. I'm inspired by the traditional rogue-likes (like nethack) and modern ones (like brogue), so I hope to bring elements of those into the game. Procedural quests, ancient machines, and richer landscapes are also priorities.

Procedural quests and ancient machines sound promising. Good luck and keep up the good work!

It does look very interesting. Perhaps it would be better served by a look that is unlike Terraria, to prevent the knee-jerk reaction many people have.

If anything, it seems similar to Terraria. I'm not going to call it a clone because I personally find the term derogatory. I'd rather call it a 2D platform sandbox game that has similarities to Terraria but still unique.

A clone of Minecraft in my books is more FortressCraft / UberBlox / Manic_Digger.

Congratulations to the OP though. Overall looks pretty good.

Yep it's definitely influenced by Terraria and has similar mechanics. But I see these set of mechanics as forming the base primitives of the game, like running and shooting in Doom and Half Life, selecting and targeting in starcraft and c&c, or pointing-and-clicking in maniac mansion, etc. Hopefully I'll be able to colour this game enough so that people don't just write it off based on the core mechanics. :)

You avoided using the term "clone" because it's derogatory and then applied it to three other games... (?)

Yes. I should have added an additional statement that these games actually promote themselves as clones.

UberBlox

"Im making a kinda of Minecraft Clone"

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/605337

Manic Digger

"an open source clone of minecraft"

https://github.com/henon/manic_digger

I made a mistake with FortressCraft. After reading the Wiki apparently there was a dispute between themselves and Minecraft.

I think it's awesome that people are creating more games like this -- Minecraft is a huge success, which suggests there is a big market.

Another one I like is http://deepworldgame.com/

To me it looks like a pretty straight clone of Terraria and that game was a commercial success.

Personally I didn't like Terraria though. Way too simple for my taste.

I loved Terraria, lot's of interesting things to explore. I whish they'd offered more help on the bosses. The one where you had to throw a voodoo doll into the lava was about as obscure as you could get.

I have played Minecraft since back when it was still a browser game and played Terraria a lot as well from day one and honestly Terraria has been much better simply because it had a lot more content. By the way, the 1.2 update is almost out, he has been working on it for a while and kept pushing the date back but apparently has finished it and is just left with bug fixes now (multiplayer is finally fixed too so you wont need something like hamachi to play).

Going off the youtube link in the hackernews discussion since the website is down, this seems to have exactly the same mechanics as Terraria.

I'm curious to see if there's anything differentiating this game from Terraria.

I find it interesting that you took the classic advice of "just use Box2D" for a 2D platformer and it worked well for you. It doesn't seem like your game using anything much more complex than basic box vs. tile grid collision and doesn't use any of the advanced features of Box2D. No complex constraints, rigid body usage seems simple or non-existent, etc. I could be completely wrong about that though, this is all speculation based on the video and your devlog.

What kind of issues were you running into with implementing tile based collision? Was it intersection tests with slopes? Performance issues? Stability (crashes)?

Intersection tests mainly, I'm sure the reason is buried somewhere in the devlog. At the same time it looked like complex dynamic machines (with pistons, pivots and other parts) were also going to be a priority. It was definitely worth the extra effort, and I still have plans for simpler machines, rope-style bridges with connected parts, and more complex monsters which will no doubt have constraints between their parts.

In addition Box2D has given me super quick spatial tests, which I use for melee, mouse-picking, and ray-casts for the particle system (which is a quick custom built thing).

Not to mention helps you solve some more advanced problems like tunneling and collision resolution with no extra effort. I think it was a very smart choice to use Box2D rather then rolling your own solution.

Those aren't advanced problems in most tile based platformers. It's pretty easy to solve tunneling by making sure you check every tile along your movement path for objects that try to move through more than one tile in a frame. Collision resolution is also simple in most platformers, clamp to the tile edge you intersect with and set velocity to zero.

OP gave solid reasons for using Box2D though (machines, rope bridges, fast spatial tests).

Is there a standard FOSS world generating library for use in video games? I.e., one that would generate the right kind of 2D and 3D noise, average it out according to parameters, apply "biome" tags to regions, create underground tunnels, etc.? These tasks are probably typical enough that most games need not reimplement them.

Moonman v0.4 in video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM

This looks great. I would play this. Cant wait to see the progress.

Thanks guys. Sorry about the server crash! Follow me at https://twitter.com/eigenbom for news about the game in future.

[D:]

At ~1:58 [0] there is what looks like a piece of pie in the dirt near Moonman. Is that an homage to Dan Piraro's Bizarro comic? He hides a piece of pie in every comic.

[0] in this video from a sibling comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM

Heh, yeah it's a pie, but I've never heard of Bizarro. I was playing Fable 2 once, in which you can dig up pies, and my wife commented on how ridiculous that was. So the pie is an homage to her.

Wow, hadn't seen http://www.tigsource.com/ nor its forums before! Is it the place to unveil your indie hobby games once they become big and playable?

Great website. They used to update news way more often but for a year or so now it's been more an active community than a frontpage.

They have a section for devlogs also, so you don't have to have it playable to unveil it.

Looks very cool - I love the idea of a deep platformer. I personally feel that (first-person) 3D is way overused, 'because we can', when it usually restricts rather than enhances gameplay.

Woah! AWESOME! You actually MADE all that? That's the ambitious kinda stuff I only manage to dream about. But you actually BUILT that stuff! Major Kudos! :D

Please put it up on github! I am sure there's a ton of stuff we could all learn from it, not to mention we'd love to help, pushing the project closer to completion.

(Unless of course you plan on putting the game on a market place and earning money from it)

Ha, thanks, yeah it's taken a while, and I took a lot of wrong turns. The game is commercial and so closed source, as I'm trying to turn this into a paid day job. And besides, my code is dense and horrible. ;)

Well then maybe open source bits and pieces of it? Because you list a lot of really cool stuff that you did in the game and we'd love to see that. You could just blog about it every now and then and explain some the really complex parts one at a time

Sigh... You can open source it and turn it into a paid day job. No one is going to not pay you because the code's available.

That said, 2D Minecraft? Hell. Yes.

Yeah, how many do you think would want to compile the game themselves? :/

Thanks Hacker News for keeping me sane during that time. :)

Looks like Hacker News has also killed your DB!

Hacker News giveth and Hacker News taketh away.

Great job handling the traffic spike by still giving us links so we can check out your game.

Cached: webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://bp.io/post/1501

Sounds like an interesting game. Too bad I can't see any of the images.

Clickable: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Here [0] are some, together with development history (I hope OP won't mind me posting it).

[0] http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21997.0

I love the music in the YouTube video. Anyone know of bands/groups that do something similar?

The music is by http://giolobato.com/ who has some more albums on bandcamp if you're interested.

Cool. I was considering making something like this a few months ago. Didn't know Moonman existed. Now I'll just remove that idea from my list and wait for you to finish it so I can play ;)

I uploaded a few images while I fix the server..

http://imgur.com/a/y7nC8

Moonman is Minecraft 2D? I'm okay with this.

Cool Idea ! Some Minecraft parts in 2D combined with a jump & run... and old console/c64 retro look :-)

The background music and game sound effects are mellow, subtle and beautiful!

Congratulations on your determination, persistence and effort. Seriously.

And here I was excited by the prospect of a Terraria-clone set on the moon.

.... Not so much. More like a terraria clone set on an atari 2600.

Terraria devs, if you're listening - moon! Lunaria! It writes itself.

set_gravity(1.622) set_landscape(flat_boring_and_homogenous)

Done ;)

What, like this?

http://playstarbound.com/

Two years full time? Impressive in any case.

It was probably about 1 year equivalent full time.

Fix the server. I want to see the pictures.

Moonman? Like Neil Armstrong?

yay..another pixely indie game...yay..really..yay

You do know the reason behind why this tends to be the case, right? It's not like indie-developers have the man-power, resources and (sometimes) experience to make a AAA-game.

......

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