Morningstar -- Quick Update and Patreon Page changes!

I have been very busy working on the Terrain tile-sets for Project Morningstar. 

When I was a kid, i loved -- loved -- StarCraft. Not the online elements that most people I know enjoyed, but the map editor. ;p 

StarEdit, was insane. 

It was electron magic. 

Let me explain what made StarCraft's map system so special.

The entire game began its life as a Square, top down view of the world, seen here: 

Courtesy of Code of Honor and Patrick Wyatt.

Which is very similar to our beloved RimWorld which is top down and Dwarf Fortress inspired. But as Patrick Wyatt, lead developer on Starcraft, explains in his blog, they decided to tilt the camera 45 degrees to make it look and feel more dynamic, much like Diablo was doing at Blizzard at the time.

But this led to a problem. 

The game was not made of diamonds, because that would require Diamond tilesets all over the game world where in every corner of the square image there are 4 Alpha channels, or invisible elements, wasting space on the disk and costing valuable cycles to render on screen. 

This also meant all their cliffs and objects had to be broken up into those little boxes.  

The game was still fundamentally square. 

I tried replicating this to not so great results. 

It turns out the best way to tackle this problem is to abandon the squares all together and switch instead over to isometric blocks. 

This totally eliminated seam edges and left us with a cleaner, fresher look, and it fits on a diamond grid using Unity's far more powerful ability to cut the cost of rending so many alphas. 

Pathfinding is something I'll have to explain after this is fully implemented, but we've agreed for now that until such time as our budget allows, we're cutting Z-Levels totally, so there will be no Up & Down ramps. I don't personally like that very much, but the sacrifice allows us to focus on the core mechanics of the gameplay and trim a lot of overhead. 

Our AI, being motivated by their core 5 PENTA Stats like Aggression, Endurance, Intelligence, Perception, and Charisma, will enable dynamic behaviors like fleeing from combat early with low Endurance, or attacking furiously to the death with high Aggression. Without having to worry about ramps, we save tons of time. 

I have to figure out how I'd like to handle the visual element of that paradigm. I hadn't considered "mining" up until recently and the destructibility of terrain, but killing Z-levels allows us to contemplate that. It becomes possible, even if it is somewhat of a distraction from the core of the game, which is the party based narrative dynamics, conflict and resolution, raiding & trading, and exploration. 

I want players to be able to set out on a grad adventure across the world and not get tied down to any one map, but still have the freedom to settle in a town and build it up from a camp up to a thriving fortress city if they so choose.  That's definitely a stretch goal depending on how robust we can make that system, but the goal is to create a map generator that every time you drop into a new tile, it creates a map that looks unique and plays different from the last one, balancing for the biome and time of year. 

You're never going to get stuck seeing the same level layout twice. But at the same time, we can avoid irrational, unnatural layouts.

It should also enable changing seasons between summer and winter as well. 

This Month, I'd also like to change the Patreon Page Layout!

This month I'm going to start cleaning up the tiers and the main page, and swap out the old UI designs for the new stuff, as well as make the page nicer, more relevant, and more exciting.  

With STAVE now functional and the art done I'm prepping to start producing decks by hand and sending them to people who want one. I also need to retool this page's main body to be more neutral and present image that are up to date, instead of old WIP images. The main page should represent what we are doing, what we've done, as opposed to concepts that may or may not reflect final products. That's what these updates are for, to show the latest stage in the game's evolution. 

All the art here is stuff I'll be using in game. The mountains, the map, the characters, etc, all that is actually stuff that's going into the pot. We can't afford concept art, it's really an expensive luxury. Everything we pay for needs to be usable assets, not just for looks. But it is also subject to change, so old stuff needs to be cleaned off the first area you see when signing up to our Patreon. 

So this week I'll wipe the body text, redesign it, and reboot the Patreon for newcomers. 

All the stuff you've already got, the 10 of you here, that will remain the same, but I'll clean it up a bit to be more concise! :) 

We also need to stat looking into hiring more artists and another relief coder who can tackle sub systems while Kent and I tackle the main systems. A game like this should ideally have 4 of us working on it, not just 2, and expanding our team roster for the long haul should be something we have ready at our publisher pitch in March.