August 2022 Update!

August has been a busy month! 

STAVE, the card game we've been working on since 2019 is done and ready to publish. PROPAGANDA is the next board game that's ready to enter production phase, balancing, and play-testing. And finally Morningstar has been super busy. 

Curtis is still hammering away at the big Procedural Generation system. 

This is a quick flowchart of some of that behind the scenes work. 

Coders familiar with proc-gen will appreciate what we're doing here. 

Basically, Morningstar will have a graph editor and a code base working in tandem to develop unique blends of biomes and the shape of terrain. 

So, if you settle this tile on our World Map, you can tell from the far out view that there is a C shaped area of water, and the rest is land. It has some percentage of fertile green terrain, no hills or mountains, and sparse trees. 

All that biome information will be coded into definitions with symbols for the terrain types available, and percentages of each that map may hold. That is true for grass, cliffs, and the lists of foliage, resources, etc that may spawn.

The generator will take this really low resolution picture into consideration when generating the landforms on that local map. 

It's an incredibly complex system, and building editor tools, refactoring version of the system, and iterating towards a complete system that is highly performant has been a long walk. 

After that is complete, which Curtis is aiming for a mid-late September date for that, we'll move on to merging with the older prototype's layer sorting algorithm and cliff-wall system. That will allow us to begin focusing on adding items to the proc-gen, and populating maps with trees, rocks, items, and other resources. 

I've spent a lot of my work time this month on getting animated creatures ready to go. There are a ton of critters we need to develop for the game to fill various niches in the economy and ecosystem. Bows & Arrows need feathers and cordage, clothes need animal fibers for warm coats. 

We also need critters to fight! And some to carry heavy or light burdens. 

I've also begun adding our arsenal of modern earth based weapons when taking a break from those animals, something that will be in our vertical slice. 

Kent has been busy working on our UI system and character creation, which last month wrapped up with its design side. 

Getting additional body types into a game like this isn't particularly easy, but we're trying it as a bonus objective to our rigging & mesh deformation system. Instead of needing to make additional art for every weight class in every sex, we just deform the mesh a little bit to round out the body for high weight, and cinch that waist for skinny folk. 

Kent also worked on the CharGen's ability to save & load data, the preset system, implemented the Color Swatches for hair, outfits, and skin, and an importer tool that reduces the workload importing assets by assigning their art to a Symbol. Those xml files are then quick to name, give a description, and edit. 

Symbol itself also received a significant update from James, allowing inheritance between Symbols and revolvers for those potential conflicts. This is a major item we needed in our code base from similarly related games where managing lots of items comes into play. Modders of RimWorld and Bethesda games are probably familiar with the way we're tackling inheritance. 

September will be a bit more of a grind on these continuing fronts, and we hope by October I'll start showing off some in-game snippets of these systems working together in their earliest iterations.  

If you're in Tucson this September, I'll be at Tucson Comic Con! Our buddy Chris from the Tucson Game Developers printed us out some stickers of the Hethinn logo. Come hang out with us! Get a sticker! 

See you next month! :D