Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows not a moon, but a planet!
(Well, okay, with a moon peeking in at one corner.)
The week just past was perhaps a little slow--but a few perhaps-notable things did get done:
Monday, December 6. 2021
Planetary Presentation
Summary: In which planets are begun in earnest; planets gain a map-representation; the handling of doors and breakable walls is reworked; and breakable walls have map-representations, and other objects might gain them.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows not a moon, but a planet!
(Well, okay, with a moon peeking in at one corner.)
The week just past was perhaps a little slow--but a few perhaps-notable things did get done:
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows not a moon, but a planet!
(Well, okay, with a moon peeking in at one corner.)
The week just past was perhaps a little slow--but a few perhaps-notable things did get done:
Perhaps most salient of all, and as shown above, in the week just past I made a start on planets!
As I think that I've previously mentioned, the cosmology of Moons in Crystal is a little unusual, and a part of this is that each solar system has a single planet, located at its centre.
Now, these planets aren't the focus of the game--that, as the name implies, is the moons. But the planets are nevertheless present and an intended part of the experience.
But I had been unsatisfied with what I had in mind for them, I think. There were badly mismatched scales, and uninteresting encounters, and so on.
In the week just past, then, inspiration came to me towards a different approach: planets would be presented as from a distance, showing continents and terrain and biomes, and with the player visible only as a bright spark against their surface.
This, I hope, might convey a sense of planetary scale and surface-variety. Further, I hope that it conveys the planets as relatively "mundane" (if still fantastical) beside the moons--not the somewhat-elemental places that the moons are, each with their theme or focus.
And as you can see, this is what I implemented!
Furthermore, I implemented the start of a simple map-representation for planets, using the same base data as is used in rendering the planets themselves:
Now, the terrain that you see there isn't intended to be final--those mountains in particular don't look good, I fear. And indeed, figuring out how to produce terrain-maps that look decent has proven to be quite a challenge!
And further, there are some elements that I'm uncertain of--how to convey the planets as living places; what the player might do there; and so on.
Still, I think that I do like this approach thus far!
In other matters, in the week just past I made some changes to the handling of doors and breakable walls.
In short, these previously were held by the "room"-objects of the game, as with most objects. But this caused problems when they could potentially be viewed from multiple rooms: If the room that held a given door was not yet revealed, then the door would likewise be unrevealed--even if viewed from an adjoining room from which said door should be visible!
So, now doors and breakable walls are instead handled by the "level"-objects, with additional code to handle their interactions with rooms--things like only revealing them when one of their connected rooms is revealed, and so on.
What's more, breakable walls now also have representations in the game's maps--no more should maps give away the presence of secret passages by a gap where the breakable section stands!
(And indeed, the feature that allows such map-representations is not restricted to breakable walls--I believe that there's the potential now for showing other objects on the map, should I decide to do so.)
And as per usual, there were tweaks, fixes, and changes that don't seem worth detailing here--design-doc work; a change to room-fading; the ability to access doors and breakable walls by name; and so on!
That, then, is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
As I think that I've previously mentioned, the cosmology of Moons in Crystal is a little unusual, and a part of this is that each solar system has a single planet, located at its centre.
Now, these planets aren't the focus of the game--that, as the name implies, is the moons. But the planets are nevertheless present and an intended part of the experience.
But I had been unsatisfied with what I had in mind for them, I think. There were badly mismatched scales, and uninteresting encounters, and so on.
In the week just past, then, inspiration came to me towards a different approach: planets would be presented as from a distance, showing continents and terrain and biomes, and with the player visible only as a bright spark against their surface.
This, I hope, might convey a sense of planetary scale and surface-variety. Further, I hope that it conveys the planets as relatively "mundane" (if still fantastical) beside the moons--not the somewhat-elemental places that the moons are, each with their theme or focus.
And as you can see, this is what I implemented!
Furthermore, I implemented the start of a simple map-representation for planets, using the same base data as is used in rendering the planets themselves:
Now, the terrain that you see there isn't intended to be final--those mountains in particular don't look good, I fear. And indeed, figuring out how to produce terrain-maps that look decent has proven to be quite a challenge!
And further, there are some elements that I'm uncertain of--how to convey the planets as living places; what the player might do there; and so on.
Still, I think that I do like this approach thus far!
In other matters, in the week just past I made some changes to the handling of doors and breakable walls.
In short, these previously were held by the "room"-objects of the game, as with most objects. But this caused problems when they could potentially be viewed from multiple rooms: If the room that held a given door was not yet revealed, then the door would likewise be unrevealed--even if viewed from an adjoining room from which said door should be visible!
So, now doors and breakable walls are instead handled by the "level"-objects, with additional code to handle their interactions with rooms--things like only revealing them when one of their connected rooms is revealed, and so on.
What's more, breakable walls now also have representations in the game's maps--no more should maps give away the presence of secret passages by a gap where the breakable section stands!
(And indeed, the feature that allows such map-representations is not restricted to breakable walls--I believe that there's the potential now for showing other objects on the map, should I decide to do so.)
And as per usual, there were tweaks, fixes, and changes that don't seem worth detailing here--design-doc work; a change to room-fading; the ability to access doors and breakable walls by name; and so on!
That, then, is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
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