Week 29 went well!
As announced in the last recap, this week I worked on both my new shooty project and a ProcJam entry!
The ProcJam entry is finished now and its title is Your Personal Archipel and you can check it out here! It’s a voxel desert island generator in Pico-8 of which the islands then go through the seasons.
Interestingly enough, the process to get to this result was aimed at something quite different. I originally wanted to make a voxel tree generator, as a wink to my previous ProcJam entry from last year, FOREST.GIF! But along the way I had the idea for an island generator and I really wanted to make it so I made it first and it looked super good and then I went back to make tree generation and it didn’t look half as good. So in the end I improved on the island generator, working on performance and adding the seasons and I released that! Here are the different steps of the process up to the final result!
The way it works is the voxel data is mapped as 16×16 layers on the spritesheet and then, each voxel cell that is not black is drawn as a 4×4 square at its 3D position, just after figuring out the cell drawing order from the viewing angle.
Then each layer of the island is a new step of randomized cellular automata based on the previous layer. The water is added afterwards, filling the empty cells in the lowest layers. The season changing is all just reading the voxel map layers and replacing colors.
The water flickering is done by selecting random cells in the water surface layer and if it’s a water cell, randomly make it clearer.
The source code can be browsed through on the BBS thread of the generator! The voxel drawing part should also be fairly easy to extract if you too want to make some voxel action happen in Pico-8!
The rest of the week was spent on the king game! FX were added, AIs were added, enemies were added, and you can now choose whether all your followers shoot at your cursor when you click or whether they simply shoot at the enemies they see.
Not much to say about all of this as it was all fairly straight-forward. Everything is still on track and the project might be the cleanest of any of the projects I’ve worked on in a few months!
Here is what the game looks like right now!
I surprised myself enjoying doing the pixel-art for the enemies a lot. Up to this point I did enjoy doing pixel-art but I was kind of afraid to go beyond what I know I think? But this week I did these three-legged Bull-Dogs (not bulldogs) you can see on the gif right before this block of text. And I had never done anything like it before and doing it was a lot fun! Morale of this: Don’t be afraid of experimenting, it makes everything a lot more fun!!
And that’s it for week 29! It was quite good! Be sure to check out Your Personal Archipel –by the way, I know the english word is actually ‘archipelago’ but I think ‘archipel’ sounds better!
This week, I’m doing some planning for the shooty game. I need to figure out a title for the game and also a lot of design details and some very approximate deadlines. There will probably be some Pico-8 doodling as well. And at the end of this week, I will be at IndieCade Europe in Paris and it’s gonna be great and I’m very excited about hanging out with other gamedevs and seeing weird indie games!
Have a great week!
Take care!
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