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Welcome to the newest team member

By Development

We’ve been working hard on getting Verdant Skies ready for 2DCon, but the blog fell behind a little bit. One big reason for that is because we got a new team member!

Check out this cute little guy!
New team member

He’s about 4 weeks old now, but this picture was taken in the first week or so. Things have calmed down and I’ve been back at work on Verdant Skies. There’s been a lot of fixes to all sorts of areas, improving playability and getting things ready for our first public showing.

Change log

If you’re in Minnesota, we’ll be doing some very small scale testing tomorrow at Glitch HQ’s Playtest event.

-Andy

Fishing!

By Development

A lot of games in this genre have a fishing system based on waiting for a bobber to move, quickly hitting a key, and then some sort of button mashing to reel in the fish. Most of these mini-games are sorta okay, but they are never too interesting, involve a lot of waiting, and can be pretty inaccessible to people with lower manual dexterity.

Instead, Verdant Skies includes the more exciting: Spear Fishing!

Video available: http://kortham.net/temp/FishingDemoHigh.mp4
A major inspiration for the spear fishing is the hunting system from old Oregon Trail games.

The fishing system isn’t 100% finished yet. The size of the shadow of the fish and how far away it is from shore will play a role in determining what kind of fish you get. I’d also like to dress it up with some trail effects on the thrown spear. Also, the fish count has already been reduced to a more reasonable level since the video was taken.

Fishing

Crafting in Verdant Skies

By Development

One of the recent features I’ve been programming has been the crafting system! After a lot of consideration, I came up with a list of features that were important for my vision of how crafting could work:

  • The player can make and place things like workbenches, watering tanks, etc. Making and placing these objects is both a way for the player to advance, and it allows customization and ownership of the world.
  • Crafting can take time, so players have an incentive to plan and prioritize what they are making. If they’re planning on making a lot of something, additional workbenches/ovens/etc will speed the process.
  • Different crafting stations can be used to craft different things.
  • Aid usability by limiting the number of craftable items in a single crafting station. (No huge lists that scroll forever)

So here’s what we’ve got mocked up so far:

Crafting

 

The UI still needs some clearer labeling, but the bottom row is the output, products that have been made. The large item above that is the one that is currently being crafted. The items to the right are the queue of items that are in progress. It flows pretty well when you see it in motion.

 

Crafting

When you mouse over the item you want to craft, it shows a description of the item, and what it takes to make that item.

There are a few things I haven’t figured out yet:

  • Will there be a crafting mini-game? The mini-games in Fantasy Life were great and really well done. The better you did on the mini-game, the higher the quality of the item produced. One thought is that you only need to do the mini-game the first time you craft something. Or you can skip the minigame to craft at the highest quality level you’ve achieved so far.
  • Do crafted items have a meaningful quality level? This goes hand-in-hand with the above question.

Water Reflections and Developer Updates

By Development

I really wanted to make the world of Verdant Skies beautiful- and as a developer, I figured the best way I could contribute was with fancy graphical effects like these reflections.

Verdant Skies Reflections

I wrote the reflection shader with the help of Scott (thanks Scott!). At first, it started as just a way to animate the water, so the first thing to add was the rippling pattern that occurs on the surface. I won’t get too technical here, but if you’re interested in details, the core idea is using a normal map to displace your UV texture lookup.

In order to actually generate the reflections, we select everything that is “reflect-able” and draw it separately. We also draw the background color, which represents the color of the sky that is reflected by the water:

Reflection map

Then we composite that reflection map on top of the water that we’re drawing.

Blend in the reflections...

 

The animated reflections are looking pretty cool, but it doesn’t really look like water.. kind of like a shimmery mirror. So we blend in a texture as the last step. Have you ever noticed that when you look across a big body of water and see a reflection, that moving doesn’t really change what’s reflected there? There’s a pretty constant gradient because of how the sky is reflecting in the angle of the water.

(not in game art… it’s a picture of a lake from Wikipedia)

In the 2D world of verdant skies, we simulate that by blending in a hand-painted water texture. The final result gives you a nice subtle color and texture difference from top to bottom:

But this is what our water really looks like!

In other Verdant Skies news: Beth has been hard at work doing the level design for the real map. I’ve got a huge list of mostly small usability bugs to fix. Lizzy has been working on the art for the player- there’s a lot of art to make for our fully customizable characters! More to come about that in a later post…