eigenbom

Thanks! I think I averaged about 30 minutes per day on these, with a few pieces taking up to 2 hours. The daily practise has had a huge impact on my speed, more than anything else.

Host a massive minecraft server.

Pixel art may have come from the limitations and formats of the past, but it'll continue to evolve and change like other art styles. It's simple to get into and complex to master.

There are some good points in the article, but pixel art in games (or art heavily influenced by pixel art) is a style that many people enjoy, especially when it is done well. It's very puzzle-like and you have to think economically when creating larger pieces. Pixel art and low poly art are fundamental art styles of gaming, I think partially because they are so overtly digital.

I think my favourite pixel artists show how the medium is always changing and getter better, e.g., Paul Robertson, Pixels Huh, Yuriy Gusev (Fool), Barney Cumming, and Mrmo Tarius.

PS. I'm a game developer and also run a pixel art on community on Twitter called @Pixel_Dailies. Come check us out sometime. :)

Oh definitely. Minecraft does this in a simple but effective way. Though the interestingness of the landscape lasts until you've seen a few instances of each type, and then you have a model of the system in your mind, because it's just a few simple functions composed together. There is a lot of fun stuff to do so the terrain is only just the backdrop to that fun.

Instead of {noise(x,y)>0.5 = desert} let's simulate eons of weather, geological events, floods, and then feed that back into the lore of the game world. Dwarf Fortress is one of the few games I'm aware of that attempts this level of world generation. Unfortunately it's quite impenetrable as a game, due to its complexity.

Perlin Noise is a cheap way to get repeatable and smooth randomness but should just be one tool in a world generation toolbox. I think most infinite worlds quite quickly collapse in 'interestingness' because after travelling for a short while in any direction you quickly see that there is nothing new out there.

So, instead of creating infinite worlds I'd like to see a lot more focus on procedurally-generating very interesting finite worlds. For games with a simple 2d tile-based grid, we then don't have to limit ourselves to just crafting noise-based functions -- as we can create the entire world at once. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Spelunky, Nethack, Terraria, etc., all follow this approach, and I'm trying to do the same in my own game, Moonman. So get our your IDEs and start creating house, face, forest, creature, item, and cloud generators. :)

If you're interested in how artists use these systems, McCabe's Bone Music is a good start: https://vimeo.com/17329897.

Thx Bending, yep the backend went through quite a few major changes, and is now about 70k LOC of C++. I had to do a few big rewrites but it's pretty solid now :)

Glad you enjoyed it! When finished the devlog will span the full five years of development, including releasing on steam later this year and then hopefully consoles next year.

Thanks :)

My wife and I have lived off one salary while I have been working on the game. We're not able to save any money or go on holidays, but we live much better than 99% of the world, so I can never complain. :)

Extra costs, like a desk in a co-working space, may seem unnecessary, but I worked from home for 2 years and it drove me a little stir crazy. The KS will be able to offset some of those things, so we can start saving for bigger things in the future -- like hopefully attending GDC next time around.

My gamedev story is probably a bit longer than it needed to be, because I wanted to start 'from scratch'. I've got a CompSci background and was really curious how a game engine works, and so Moonman uses a custom game engine that I built. If I had used an existing engine then I have no doubt it would have shaved off a year of work. So I guess my advice is to use an engine like Unity for your first commercial game, then when the financial pressure is less, go explore downwards into the tech -- if that's your kind of thing.

Cheers!

Thx, I'm pretty proud of my devlog, it'll be fun to look back in a few decades :)

Thankyou sir :D

Thanks! And yep, that's what the Kickstarter was for.

I've had people help with little bits along the way, but I've never been able to afford to bring someone on in a bigger capacity. Now I can and I've just got to find the right person.

Hey HN. I quit my job as a postdoctoral researcher 3 years ago and have since been working full-time on my first PC game. It's called Moonman and is a mix between Spelunky and Terraria. I've written all the code (60k LOC of C++) and done 99% of the artwork.

I'm now seeking crowdfunding so I can spend one more year on Moonman and finish the game! http://kck.st/1DElnw3

I'm happy to answer any questions about the game or my 3 year journey to Kickstarter. :)

"It's a mix of feelings, we're still thrilled by all the love for Threes. But it has me wanting to never make a small beautiful thing again." - Threes dev Greg Wohlwend on Twitter (@aeiowu)

I liked 2048 and its offspring, but it's a shame that this sort of rapid cloning can discourage talented game designers from working on great little games like this.

I'd wager that the current rasterising pipeline is more flexible than one based on raytracing - capable of generating a range of styles, not just photorealistic ones. And therefore having an extra dedicated chip for raytracing seems uneconomical.

The comparison examples given in the article were slightly ridiculous. How does a non-reflective car represents 'traditional' rendering? Look at any great AAA game and you'll see reflections, refractions, radiosity, etc., that are all pretty amazing. I don't think that general demand will be there for alternative rendering hardware for quite a while.

I think there's a CLI intended for SpriteLamp too.

If Sprite Lamp can fit a similar niche to Texture Packer then it can be successful. For example, if it implements multiple normal-determination algorithms, has loads of parameters to tweak, accepts and outputs many different formats, and has a stable and great looking GUI.

Sure, here's the input I supplied:

http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Img_Diffuse.png http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Img_Left.png http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Img_Right.png http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Img_Top.png http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Img_Silhouette.pn...

After manipulating some parameters, the software can then spit out a variety of maps, like these:

http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/img_AO.png http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/img_Depth.png http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/img_Normal.png

Drawing lighting profiles seems much simpler than drawing normal maps, and more flexible than drawing height-maps. I had access to the Sprite Lamp alpha, and was able to come up with these images [1][2] in a short amount of time. I am enthusiastic about the future of pixel art games that use sprites that have more information encoded in them (lighting, material, physics).

1. http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/hospital2.gif 2. http://bp.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/img_Preview.gif

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

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. ;)

Thanks!

It was probably about 1 year equivalent full time.

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

http://imgur.com/a/y7nC8

set_gravity(1.622) set_landscape(flat_boring_and_homogenous)

Done ;)

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. :)

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. :)

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).

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.

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.

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

[D:]