Mini World: Prototype Environment

My Progress

These images are not representative of any game look as explained on "this page". I have not filled in any water volumes because of the way I am putting them together in Photoshop, and these sorts of elements would be setup in engine anyway.
You can download any of the MagicaVoxel project files as I am working on them so you guys can examine them in MagicaVoxel in better detail. Eventually I will briefly explain the various game-play functions of each section so you guys know what you can experiment with but in the mean time based on the design doc you can sort of guess what's what.

You can click on any of the sections to see a much bigger/detailed version of it.

Tuesday - Oct 11th

And here we are, The Mini-World . 99% Complete.. why 99? only gameplay testing from now can see how things will work so based on tests things may indeed have to be tweaked. I have added the "Hub" area on section 5 and the overriding goal of this prototype world is to find and collect 24 pink cubes and deposit them at the Hub. Asides from that I have modified other sections quite a bit since the last update.
I am a little bit behind in terms of where I would like to be with things, so I will say this weekend to expect the new document detailing how every function in this prototype works and how the player progresses through it.

This is the final update on this page, I may tweak things before setting things up in unity, but they will most likely be aesthetic changes. For the most part, this is the final prototype world and wont be changed much so please download this page including its images and whatever for reference because its likely I will change the root URL of this project on my server now and again.

Sunday - Oct 9th

Ta-Dah! The last two sections inserted, sections 3 and 6. However, I still want to go around and add more details , for example a small ice island toward the top just to make use of that bit of water, and other things like the item drop area / into NPC in section 5,I also need to make further modifications with regard player progression and some other things. Section 3 up there is a rather special section and along with everything else will be explained in detail in the next few days. But for now this is the general gist of how our mini-world prototype will look (In terms if layout, it will look very different in engine with shader/filters see this page)

Standby for the break down on how things work. (2 to 3 days)

Thursday - Oct 6th

New Section 9, and various modifications on some other sections. Section 9, 6 and 3 will feature and Ice theme, the behavior of the player cube is a little different in these zones.
When rolling on Ice , the player can roll once onto a square but then the player will slide to the next square in the direction of the orientation of the roll (unless there is a regular non-ice square in the next square, in which case the player wont slide)

Climbing up onto an elevated cube, or dropping down , wont initiate a slide, wading through shallow water wont initiate a slide either.

In general wading through shallow water (globally 3 cubes high in context sea level of the ground) ) will cause a slower movement of the player cube.

The cracks on the top edges of some of the ice blocks also represent clues to which side rolling off will result in death.
These cracks/notches also indicate where the likelihood of hidden items are.

This section also includes a moving element, and how this section woks along with the other will eventually be explained when I am complete with the build of the mini-world.

This section by far took the longest so far to make, had to think of so many things at once, and it was changed and modified so many times I've lost count.

Monday - Oct 4th

Two new sections, section 4 and 7, big change on section 8, and minor alterations around the rest of the mini-world so far.
Things here may seem randomly placed together, but there is method to the madness, When I complete all 9 sections I will go through each one and explain what the various functions are.

So far I have made this prototype so we can test the following things:


Basic Tests:
- Player Movement / Death / Re-spawning
- Color Pickup Puzzle Mechanic
- Item Pickup
- Basic NPC Animation / Dialog Triggers
- Simple Moving Elements on Triggers
- Simple Sound Effects Implementation

Advanced Tests:
- Linear Player Progression through multiple zones
- Puzzle Mechanics and their Playability
- Simple AI or Pathing for Enemy NPC's

Saturday - Oct 1st

I will eventually explain how things work here.. take for example Section 1, part of this section has a zone where 3 NPC cubes live, on entering a zone, each one will attempt to move toward the player in the shortest possible path at half (or so) the players cube speed.
each of the triplets stands guard on one of 3 elevated areas.
The top cube will stay on its top level, the ground cube will stay on the ground, and the trench cube will always stay in the trench.
when the players cube is on the ground level the ground cube will move toward the player at double (or more) speed. If the players get too close to the ground cube they can drop into the tench level and the ground cubes speed toward the player will reduce to normal speed (half or so the speed of the player), however now the trench cubes speed will be moving toward the player at double (or so) the speed of the player. There are 3 steps up to the elevated (top area) when the player is resting on one of these 3 steps then the triplet cubes start to slowly move away from the player.
Another mechanic to this could be the triplet cube are only in movement when the player is moving ... this sort of puzzle would have to be tested in a gameplay context to see how it would work best.



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Original Opening Text For This Page

The Mission for the Next Two Months.

After spending a few weeks now on building up and refining the general game idea, and after chats with you guys regarding its development I have come up with a suggestion as to how we can get the project rolling with some tangible momentum. So based on the Doc and chats we all know what's what.

Perhaps right now since so much as been outlined there might be a degree of not knowing where to start from or not knowing how to gain some traction with regard getting it past the ideas on paper and into early dev phase. So I have come up with a suggestion that might help the project go in a more practical direction.

The viability of working in the editor with voxels as apposed to regular mesh has still not been finalized yet, so in the meantime my idea is to just go with mesh imports so we can at least work to get some prototype environments working. After experience with some prototypes then we can come back and look at the whole voxel system idea which if done right would still be much better then importing mesh.
Even if we use only mesh I have developed a really good pipeline that is also efficient. I can now import MagicaVoxel assets directy into Unity very cleanly, with some handy options. These imports have the added advantage of using vertex coloring as apposed to UV textures, so each imported piece wont need any additional texture maps/uv, instead only using tiny png pallet strips that can be different for each import. Obviously these sections will need to be broken up to separate the emissive, reflectivenes..etc so they can be applied in engine.

Over the next 2 weeks my mission is to build a "Mini World", this world will comprise of 9 imported sections of world that are each 120 x 120. The center section will be where the player starts, and each of the 8 sections around this start section will each comprise of examples of various aspects/mechanics as outlined in the design doc. In other words I am going to build a small scale world with functional elements in this world that we can test such things as, player movement, collisions, basic/simple item pickups/hazard squares, puzzle layouts, simple dialog triggers, and perhaps some early sound effects... We don't have to implement all the functionality of this Mini-World but whatever we can do is great.

While I am working on these sections, I am going to give one of them to whoever is working on player control. Between the two of us we can work on a consistent method of importing the sections so they are imported at the correct scale and its cubic resolution matches perfectly with the unity scene cubic grid so everything just snaps. Once we discover a good method for this, replacing sections of world with updated sections wont cause any issues. We can also use this exercise as a way to develop a consistent method of project synchronizing.

So the general idea here is to get a tiny world with limited functionality in terms of gameplay working, and try our best to get done by the end of this year or early next year. Based on our work and our "working" prototype mini world, we can then consider getting the project established in public, perhaps not steam yet, but other sites such as indiedb might be ideal for very early projects.

As we are developing things I will constantly replace the images on this page, replace/modify the this heading text of the page, magica project files.etc So this page is designed so you guys can see my progress on producing this Mini World and you will be able to see in advance what sort of functionality it might have so you can then in the meantime be thinking of ways to do this or that. Check in on this page over the next few weeks yourself, but if there are any significant changes such as a new 126x126 section of world I will inform you guys via email.

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