andykorth

Lots has happened since 2DCon! There’s been 38 bug fixes or features added since the show. Another huge thank you to everyone who tested there, provided feedback, and gave us their ideas.

I’d like to highlight a few of the changes we made after 2DCon:

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Added some of the new style house art that Lizzy made. It looks amazing, and even better- it’s customizable. As developers, we can swap out the doors and windows for different styles, and arrange them differently depending on our needs…. and that means that when it comes to the player’s house, there are lots of decorating options!

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You can now cancel something that you are crafting at the workbench. You get back 100% of your materials!

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Buy blueprints with the money that you’ve earned from selling your crops:

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Fix up some problems and inconsistencies with the seed selector. It now has a close button, and your seeds no longer appear in the inventory- only in the seed chest.

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Added some more masculine hair styles:

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And a bunch of important fixes:
* Prevent bugs from sleeping multiple times in a row
* Fix missing fishing icon
* Fix bugs with the timer bar on the crafting window.
* Fix Wyatt’s portrait.
* Fix issues with the final quest not completing- add another quest to clarify what the player should be doing.
* Remove that annoying unclickable piece of scrap by Rosie’s house.
* Fix some save/load issues that no one at 2DCon ran into :O

We also added more dialog to Wyatt, the third character you unlock early in the game.

Stop by for the first public showing!

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!

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.

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

-Andy

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.mp4A 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.

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:

 

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.

 

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.

Andy and Beth will be at GDC for this entire week! GDC is a yearly game developers conference that’s held in San Fransisco- and it’s the big one.

The best way to reach us is our twitter accounts:
https://twitter.com/kortham
https://twitter.com/bethkorth

We’ve even got cards!

The team is trying to establish a coherent mood for Verdant Skies and a big part of that comes from Troy’s music. To begin the project, he established a palette of instruments that coalesced around guitar, drums, bass, and organ. Those aren’t everything, but it has done a nice job to establish the frontier-like elements of the game–an untamed wild, expansive and uncharted.

The trailer needed to invite the audience in and preview the musical style. For that, Troy decided a piano would be fitting. He used the EastWest Steinway virtual instrument treated with Logic’s built-in Space Designer convolution reverb plugin. This lent a grounded yet otherworldly, shimmering sound. He applied a tape delay to the pedal tones as well.

To structure the music, Troy focused on the three main scenes: a woman walking along a lake, a man walking through a swamp on an autumn day, and two friends meeting near a grove of trees. Each offered a glimpse into the possibilities in store with the game, so the musical material needed to build as the world opened up. Troy built clusters of lightly articulated piano chords filled with dissonances that didn’t resolve–we don’t know where the next scene will take us, or what we’ll find on this strange world. As it grows in volume and the range increases, we peer through trees to see evidence of a new colony and the Verdant Skies logo as an F# chord plays in the strings.

The final four notes utilize the main motif of Verdant Skies: an ascending major 7th followed by a perfect fourth a minor 6th above (in this key, F#, E#, C# & F#–and don’t try to tell him it’s an F natural!).

There is lot of exciting audio happening in Verdant Skies, so be sure to check back to hear what Topher Pirkl is doing with sound design and adaptive audio implementation.

Listen to Troy’s track on the teaser trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzj36LILqzY

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:

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

 

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.

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:

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…