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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ;)
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.
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.