Hey everybody! Happy Halloween-Eve! Or, you know, Halloween, depending on where you are!

This month’s wallpaper is by Skech! Looks like it’s time to go hunting for some penguins!

For more of his work, you can check his Deviantart!

EDIT 11/16: It seems I’ve made a slight error with the crediting. Sketch did the lineart, but Maesma did the colors. You can see more of her art at her Deviantart! Sorry about that you two!

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Hi guys,

So we’ve been a little quiet lately because we’ve been working away on the game like mad. It’s coming along really nicely, we’re working on a whole bunch of stuff like quests, unique npc behaviours and generated towns.

The building mechanics are becoming close to complete, so we thought we’d show off some of the basic systems (there will be lots of tools to find!).

 
Each player is equipped with a gun that can levitate, place and remove blocks and items. It’s capable of placing single blocks or blocks in groups of 4. So you can very quickly fill the space you need to fill whilst having the option to tweak smaller details. Every object that looks as if you can stand on it or place another object on top of it functions as you’d expect. Removing blocks with the block tool is quite slow (it’s not intended to replace mining tools), but it has the benefit of long range.

Any block can be placed in the foreground or the background, left click places/removes blocks from the foreground whilst right click places/removes blocks from the background. Allowing you to quickly alternate between the two.

We’ve tried to create a very visual means of building so the experience plays out beautifully in multiplayer, where you can see exactly what your friends are doing and build in a cooperative way.

There’s also some very basic usage of the wiring system in the video, watch out for that. Needless to say the wiring system is capable of much, much more.

Hi guys,

I know it’s been a little while since I’ve blog posted. That’s largely down to us crunching down on the game. So worry not, we’re making great progress.

Recently I’ve been asked a lot about how dungeon generation works. So I thought I’d give you a very brief run-down.

Essentially dungeons are divided into different rooms/corridors. Each room is made of a single image. Each pixel in an image references blocks, objects, spawn points, connection points and so on.

The engine then intelligently connects these rooms together to produce new dungeon layouts. It creates monster spawns and places chests in random locations inside the dungeon.

Here is one such image from the entrance to an Avian tower.

Most of the pixel colours here reference various blocks and objects. But of special note are the grey, pink, blue and black pixels.

The pink pixels tell the engine to accept anything in that location.

The grey pixels tell the engine to fill those locations with the main blocks from whatever biome the dungeon appears in.

The blue pixels tell the engine where to connect this room to another room.

The black pixels tell the engine that there should be sky in this location.

Once the engine has read the image, connected it to other rooms and placed it in the world it looks like this:

There are hundreds and hundreds of these images being used to generate all manner of different dungeons, temples, crypts, etc.

The engine is also capable of randomising what a particular pixel means, so a single room could appear in a multitude of different ways.

LUA scripts can be built directly into dungeons and wiring works too.

A video on travel from planet to planet coming soon!