block game's first crafting gameplay loop is in! \o/ break leaves to get sticks, combine with flamereeds to get torches, place torches to light up the darkness

no particle/emissive textures system yet so the torches look a bit club-like, sorry

starting a new dev thread to mark the occasion, previous posts can be found here: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/115418239486943047

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #IndieDev #ProcGen #PixelArt

to learn more about block game check out the website: https://enikofox.com/blockgame/
Block Game | Ultima/TES meets Minecraft

Ultima/Elder Scrolls meets Minecraft voxel sandbox game with building and crafting.

i have redone the torch to look a bit better until i can get a particle system going

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #IndieDev #PixelArt

i have updated the block game FAQ found at https://enikofox.com/blockgame

filed under "things block game does that minecraft doesn't," it can now handle rotated (oriented) bounding boxes. and also you can now target entities that are lying around the world :3

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #IndieDev

people keep asking about modability and (aside from reskinning the gui) i now have an answer

block game uses an entity component system so i've made a json file for entity templates so i can easily create entities. so if nothing else you'll be able to mod the game by editing this file

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #IndieDev

i can now spawn sticks under/near trees during chunk generation :3

they don't do anything special, since you can get sticks from breaking leaf blocks, but it's just a little touch that makes the world feel more alive

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now spawning bushes using leaf blocks. gonna give them a bit of a different look from leaf blocks at some point but the basic idea mostly works

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okay i've modelled and pixelled bushes that aren't just leaf blocks and yeah, this is looking nice and lush now! you can also walk through bushes as requested, and you can still break them for sticks for torches

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #IndieDev #ProcGen #PixelArt

well would ya look at that, we've got a whole little crafting gameplay loop going. bash together flint and a stick to make an axe, use axe to break bark blocks, use the axe on the blocks to create wood, use the axe on the wood to create sticks, combine sticks with flamereed to create torches, then go and light up a cave :D

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #IndieDev

finally got to make a new block: rough planks! you get these by using an axe to cut bark blocks into rough wood and then using rough wood on itself to craft the rough planks (consuming 2 pieces of wood in the process)

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got tired of tiny and off-center item icons so i spent some time in the icon renderer to add auto scaling and centering for every item in the game

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also wow i have more items than fit in my hotbar already. i couldn't show torches cause i don't have a proper inventory other than the hotbar and they wouldn't fit lol

not the most exciting video ever but i've now done the necessary work so you can move items around your inventory and split stacks in block game

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implemented the renderer for item drops in block game. added an outline because i didn't wanna have to deal with alpha sorting these, but pure alpha testing looked kinda pants. pretty happy with how this looks though

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i managed to get drops done in the same day \o/ had to improve the physics so things accelerate and decelerate smoothly for the drops to move sideways, so now the player moves smoother, too. really happy with how this turned out

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #IndieDev

@eniko out of curiosity, do you have a design opinion on lumber axe (“delete tree”) style tools for cutting down trees?
@kouhai if you mean the "chop down one block destroy the whole tree and leaves" thing im gonna add that at some point yea
@eniko I wonder if replacing the cursor with a pixel-art hand would help with the weirdness of the cursor
@gkrnours what weirdness?
@eniko the mouse cursor feels off to me. Maybe it's because I'm watching from my phone all small, maybe it's my laptop using wii cursor as mouse icon. If I had to put into words, I would say it's like a piece of excel into your 16bit rpg/block game.
Again, maybe it's just me
@eniko that's good
it will be easier to tell when they are moving with the height shadow, but it's already looking nice
@eniko will there be various tools that are more and less (depending on the tool) suitable for breaking different types of blocks?
@eniko Since some of your foliage drops a stick and some doesn’t, it looks like you have some probabilistic drops. Can you have multiple possibilities? Also, is the random drop predetermined at creation or random at time of break?
@eniko I forget, are you including options for the font used? I have a little trouble reading that one.
@MachineLordZero right now thats the only font ive got
@eniko ah ok
@MachineLordZero i'll probably look into true type font options later on but i dont feel like spending weeks on that right now
@eniko honestly that's a vibe
TIL: "kinda pants" is the _proper_ game-dev vernacular for stuff that looks "I dunno, a bit, well, sorta...." (you know what I mean) @eniko
@eniko future idea: option for 3d item textures, which bob up and down
@eniko Also better for color blind people 👍

@eniko .. You do realize that a large portion of your audience heard "sort and organize your inventory" and maybe got just a teensy bit excited?

Means we can sort our inventory by type of item, or by color, or by name, or by theoretical weight, value, or group items together for recipes.

OK yes, * I * got excited. I really don't like it when games "auto sort" and don't let me move stuff around as I please :) so... Yay! Thank you! :)

@eniko Love the beveling in the cells!
@eniko I love your plants very much, they are green and fluffy and feel really alive! <3

@eniko

Look at that. A chore done, now you get to work on fun things again. I'm very excited for this game.

Hoping for different kinds of trees. Depending how easy you make this to mod, I have tons of ideas of things I want to put into it.

Building on @tiotasram 's idea of non extractive gameplay loop. I'd want to simulate pre-colonial North America and play in a fantasy version of it. DnD Druid rules of no metal. Plenty of magic and curating a whole magical forest.

@SmashToday @eniko see, once upon a time I started to build my own block game with "Elf Forest" as the target name. It didn't get very far beyond two ragged prototypes, but this was exactly the goal. Travel around as an elf, help people with horticulture and disease and shit, and use magic to grow houses out of plants. My best idea was that placing blocks would take ages, but you could instant-build in blueprint mode and then dwarves and/or elves with nothing better to do might help you build your vision as a community (of course, they might throw in their own ideas too).
@SmashToday @eniko I got bogged down in part because I decided I wanted each world to have procedurally-generated atoms and molecules that would help determine plant health, along with evolved predator/prey/parasite/symbiote relationships (and I was coding the whole thing in C). I did get a pretty sick geology system working though.
@tiotasram @SmashToday @eniko Atoms and molecules 😵‍💫
> dev accidentally codes the universe

@monilenyan @SmashToday @eniko no it's fine, see, I had no intention of coding quarks or gluons or ant quantum mechanics at all really. I was being perfectly reasonable! It's just that in the real world, we've got a nitrogen cycle, and things like phosphorous and magnesium are important for plant health too, so wouldn't it be cool if we picked a few made-up atoms to be plant nutrients in every world, and then the player had to figure out different systems each time? And different nutrients might be bioavailable by default or might need fixing like nitrogen? We could have worlds where two different fixing ecosystems were necessary instead of one! And the evolution system would be able to spontaneously come up with stable ecological graphs on top of all that, so when you'd find an exotic flower to take back to your base, you'd have you consider whether the beetles crawling on it were necessary for it's survival, and what they might need to eat...

Well, I think you can see why the project never got much farther than that :)

@tiotasram @monilenyan @eniko

Well, if you even manage to finish that, I would love to play it. That sounds like the coolest kind of puzzle game that could demonstrate the problems with invasive species.

@tiotasram @SmashToday @eniko Very bold! I've been there myself 😅 Nothing to show for it obviously 😆
@tiotasram That said, Sim Life did some pretty fun stuff with genetics and evolution in its time, so... maybe it's not inaccessible.
@eniko I remember when I discovered this in Minecraft. It! Was! Life-changing!
@eniko The obvious solution then is to make the hotbar bigger
@Igigog @eniko or multiple bars! That you can craft. And place around the screen ☺️
@eniko seriously, what the heck? A few days without checking socials much and there's already a whole game loop and tons of items! Well done!
@kaofelix i've been miserable with migraines and when i feel miserable i block game :'D

@eniko aah, yes, the power of pure spite against unfavorable conditions

I do hope it gets better though, migraines are no fun!

@kaofelix i'm actually feeling significantly better today!
@eniko If you want I can draft you a whole semi-realistic tree that starts with sticks and stones and ends up with plasma guns and giant Mechas 😜
@eniko it's completely off topic but to see that hid with that blue background just feels neat for a reason I don't know. It just hits right
@eniko I can't unsee these looking like mud bricks T_T

@eniko looks good

i like it

@eniko honestly i love the vibes, feels very homey and cozy
@SRAZKVT yeah it feels very nice and foresty. Makes me wanna build a little cabin!
@eniko This looks very good! Mastodon maps stars to likes, but all my likes on #EniBlockGame should be considered to be ❤️
@eniko i'm amazed how different it _feels_ to Minecraft. It's kind of softer and wetter
@eniko one of my favorite mods in mc was fall through leaves, which made leaf blocks not block you, just slow you down
this radically changes the game since now you can walk the jungles and not the canopies of the dark forest
it's also a nice secret entrance