Character Customization is coming...

This is going to be a sneak peek for a feature that makes procedurally generated characters possible as well as the character customization.

Yes, you will be able to customize your character in game, this is the very first prototype:

Here is a low resolution gif of the video above:

I will list all the possibilities, but I can tell in advance that: height, body parts, skin color, eyes shape, nose, cheek, eyes colors, hair color and hair style will be fully customizable.

In future, I expect to have a more detailed explanation on how it works and all its capabilities, maybe in a video?

The game is 15% complete and 29% ready for alpha release.

Shifting gears to Artist mode

These last days I had to go back to Blender to adventure myself again as an 3D animator. 

The game was in need of lots of basic character animations, such as: running, jumping, getting hit, falling to the ground, combat stance, basic attacks and more...

I'm working on the basics for me to be able to have a first gameplay iteration ready as soon as possible.

I also need basic facial animation, but I'm not done completely rigging her face yet. So that will come in a later update.

The game is 16% complete and 31% ready for alpha release.

Starting the gameplay

Back into coding! Now I set a priority of something to play with.

This last days I've been working with the basic camera controls and animation tweens.

You can see it on this video (sorry for the low res. the game was one pixel less than 720p and youtube downsampled it to 480p 🤦

I've been busy but not with super shiny stuff as you can see, I'm still building brick by brick, it will be shiny in the end :)

Oh, yeah and she blinks, I did the animation myself. I'm so proud I finally learned something from 3D design :D

The game is 16.5% complete and 32% ready for alpha release.

Planning & Estimation Review

These last days I've been working on basic gameplay basic features, like player logic and camera controls.

However the big update this time is that I have gone through every single future game feature extensively to review all tasks I have done and plan the ones I have schedule to be completed, this is to better estimate when and how the game will be released.

I will repeat this process again in future to make sure planning is realistic and estimations are accurate.

Here is the result breakdown of my plans:

• The game has 758 Tasks in total.
• 330 Code Tasks
• 428 Art Tasks
• In general, Code tasks weight ~60% more than Art Tasks, making code 56% of the total game work and art 44%

The Game will have 7 Major Releases:

1. Sandbox Alpha - Released when the project is at 35% Total completion
2. Closed Alpha - Released when the project is at 63% Total completion
3. Open Alpha - Released when the project is at 83% Total completion
4. Closed Beta - Released when the project is at 95% Total completion
5. Open Beta - Released when the game is feature complete
6. Release Candidate - Release when the game has all major and most minor bugs are fixed
7. Official Release - Release when all bugs are fixed

One big change is that I decided to split the first Alpha release in 2, making the first release a Sandbox version of the game. 

Unfortunately this estimation review process revealed 10% more tasks tasks than what I had previously planned.

However, that's not a set back because thanks to the fact that I split the alpha in 2 we are a lot closer to a playable build than before.

This means the first Alpha will be released 6 months sooner: around May of 2024!

Now with the new estimations: The game is 14.9% complete and 38.5% ready for alpha release.

And here a footage of the basic run ability I was working these last days, so you have something to see as expected :)

(ง •̀_•́)ง Fight System - Part I

Sorry for the delay, I had to travel to visit my parents, didn't have much time for anything else during the last week. 

But now we're back! ᕙ(`▽´)ᕗ

This is one of the three main features of the game. Because of that, this log will be the first part of a lot of upcoming updates (maybe 20 or more, they won't be posted in sequence as I will bounce among different features of the game).

The first important feature of the Fight system is the Camera and enemy targeting, like other 3D games, you will be able to focus on a target when pressing a focus button (Z or R button in a controller for instance).

This is how it looks as of today:

Notice that I start in a free-camera, and once I press the "focus button" the camera locks to the target.

To be honest, I actually press 2 buttons, the focus button as discussed and another "engage button" to make her go to fight mode (like drawing your sword), this is because it will be possible for you to target both foes and friends in case of dialogs for instance. 

I know, baby steps, but brick by brick we will build a great game, you will see :)

The game is 15.3% complete and 39.6% ready for alpha release.

(ง •̀_•́)ง Fight System - Part II: Jumps

Jumping animation and physics first round is now complete.

Now the character is able to do:

•  a regular free jump
• fight side jump (dodge)
• fight backflip (also as a dodge move).

Here are all jumps:

In the next phase, I might pause the fight system development to switch back to the Editor to work on some low level UI for the menus in the game.

See you in ~10 days with more updates :)

The game is 15.7% complete and 41.0% ready for alpha release.

Don't take anything for granted - pt. 2

Another very basic feature present in any game engine is GUI (Graphical user interface), every menu you see in a game is powered by a GUI system in the engine.

So my engine has it, but it looks like this:

As you can see, it's an user interface for Game Editors, not for an actual Game.

So these last days I got busy making very basic features for a simple GUI for a game, right now I have a very simple ui:

First version, no actual game design in there, just getting the UI system to work :D

And yes, keep it low, but... we may have a name for the game... (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧ Shine Fall! Not official yet, so just between us for now :)

The game is 16.3% complete and 42.5% ready for alpha release.

(ง •̀_•́)ง One Punch Girl (Fight System Pt. 3)

Back to the Fight System once more, making attack physics, animation and camera framing.

Here are the current results:

Will an attack be strong like this? If you level up enough, it maybe even stronger :)

Sparks, sounds, damage and particles are missing... Right now we have the bare minimum for me to advance to the next step.

There's a new Planning & Review cycle coming up next, estimatives will be updated. 

So far, I presented some very vague concepts about the game, I will return with a few more solid information in the next update, expect to see 4 of 5 main features of the game. The last one I'll review a bit further down the line because it's so bold I'm not sure how I will deliver it, so please stay tuned :)

The game is 17.4% complete and 45.5% ready for alpha release.

Editor Data files

After last planning section, the objective is to make the Editor as powerful as possible before diving into the game itself, even the first releases will be only about it.

For this and the next few updates I may present more technical topics of procedures that usually are taken for granted on existing engines out there, with the only exception being me switching back to Art mode to produce content for the editor itself. 

One of the first challenges I'm facing right now is this:

That is one of the 3D model files I have and it's already over 180 MB of space, it takes almost half a minute just to load it to the game.

Well it was before I fixed the problem, it turned out that I could remove lots of redundant information, optimize the mesh geometry and reduce animation key count based on linear distribution. Also in order to improve the loading time, I had to create the engine's own data format:

The file size was reduced by 89% and the loading time now takes less than 2 seconds.

I made a whole data file editor in the editor, I called it pak maker:

Now every non-procedural art component of the game is packed compressed and optimize for fast loading during the game.

The game is 17.5% complete and 50.2% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Texture Editor

A few posts ago I presented the engine's noise editor.

Now I will show you a more techinical version of it I just finalized:

Sorry for the choppy animations and low resolution, the maximum upload size for these gifs in here is quite small.

What you see is the texture shader editor that is capable of creating procedural textures with random inputs that may create different results each time it's executed,  I may do a video explaining this deeper in future if you are insterested).

With this I conclude the first iteration of the engine's texture making system.

In the next update I might reveal the engine's name :)

The game is 17.6% complete and 52.3% ready for editor alpha release.

Welcome to Biomancer

The Game Engine now has a name:

Props to Kory (https://www.artstation.com/kory), the amazing artist who created the image from the engine's Splash screen/About window.

The proposal of Biomancer is to create procedural generated "organic" game content (as of "create organic from machine" ), thus its name and Kory's amazing art, this will be essential in the development of Shine Fall.

This will be the last update of 2023, I'd like to thank you for accompanying my project through this year and we will continue in 2024 at full speed, cheers!

The game is 17.75% complete and 54.5% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Geometry Making (pt 1 of 3)

I've been working on Biomancer's Procedural Geometry Making tool. This allows you to create procedural 3D surfaces visually.

The objective here is to author 3D content that can be customized and randomized by the gameplay, it's like a simplified version of blender but for programmers and what you create can be changed during the game, like making a table with different amount of legs or different shapes or amount of edges, you can do it for the player to make his own table or for it to be randomized to make variations of it.

This is the first of 3 iterations, in the next one I will show how to make parametric surface via code. See you soon :)

The game is 18.0% complete and 57.0% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Geometry Making (pt 2 of 3)

Biomancer (the procedural game engine I'm creating with and for this game) now can create 100% procedural surfaces via its own scripting language, I called it Biocl

The language resembles a mixture of C#, C++ and GLSL, it runs on top the Lua interpreter in the editor and gets converted to C++ automatically when exported to the game.

The purpose of this is to add static 3D procedural assets a props to the game,  keeping my promise of bringing 100% procedural environment to the game.

On the next and last stage I hope to add Marching Cubes to the table to add way more possibilities of procedural surfaces.

The game is 18.8% complete and 60.0% ready for editor alpha release.

Going Through a very long Tunnel

Our development train is now going through a vastly long tunnel: Refactoring the physics system.

The current physics system is old and rudimentary, it does not even support relatively basic stuff like rotational mechanics, custom mesh collision and ragdoll physics.

So we are remaking the physics module, I may use PhysX or some full physics sdk otherwise I'd take forever to remake it.

This was part of the roadmap as my current physics engine is over 10 years old, so the time has come to replace it. 

I'm basically working on transplanting this module, so nothing is building correctly right now, hopefully next update we are out of the tunnel so I'll have some cool screen captures to share.

The game is 20.3% complete and 67.7% ready for editor alpha release.

New Physics System & Estimations/Dates

Wow, this was quite a big refactor in the game engine, we now have a brand new physics system. Faster, better and all kinds of shapes are now supported.

Gameplay mechanics are not fully upgraded yet, I'll leave this part for after Biomancer (game engine/editor) release.

I'll be back to Biomancer itself to start the level editor next!

Now...

ESTIMATIONS!

To be a bit different this time, I'll disclose some information about the release dates according to my planning calculations.

There are 10 releases planned for our roadmap.

• 2 first releases are the Game Engine release.
• 2 next releases are a sandbox version of the game, with almost all gameplay mechanics available
• 6 last releases are all related to the game itself.

I'm still considering if I'll release as 3 different projects or not.

Here is the estimation breakdown:

This are quite artificial estimations, they were generated by spreadsheet calculations based on how much of my free time I can dedicate to this project. Later down the line, after the first release, I plan to open it for collective funding and if all goes well, I may be able to dedicate more time to it, as I always wanted and expedite.

The game is 20.6% complete and 70.0% ready for editor alpha release.

Material Editor

I'm back developing the game engine, this time I completed the first iteration of the Material Editor:

Sorry for the choppy animations, all due to the size limitation in here.

Right now you can customize color, roughness, metalness and sub-surface translucency, I'll add more options in the next iterations.

Now for the next weeks I'll be back on the 3rd and hopefully last iteration of the engine's 3D procedural geometry generation.

The game is 21.0% complete and 72.6% ready for editor alpha release.

Procedural Art Maker

As I promised, the art of the game will be 100% procedural (with the only exception being part of the characters only).

On these 3 part update I did a procedural geometry editor via coding, which is nice but not very useful as an Art tool.

So, I'm solving that by upgrading that scripting tool to work directly via 3D editing:

Now it's real time, unlike before, you can see how you can combine in lots of ways several 3D shapes into one.

In that GIF, I combine that ellipsoid with the rest of the surface smoothly creating a pleasant curvy look. There's also a"stairs-combiner" that literally create stairs in between the Ellipsoid and the other shapes.

For that I used a math concept called Signed Distance Fields. I can dive more in details about it in the next updates if you want :)

Keep in mind that this maker is not ready yet, there's more features to come. Now imagine the possibilities! And just you wait once I get into domain repetition.

(I said domain repetition, not domain expansion, but it's going to be as cool as domain expansion, I promise)

The game is 21.4% complete and 74.5% ready for editor alpha release.

Infinity

A very important aspect of the game is the infinity. Some levels will be infinite, and for that I will need a math concept called Domain repetition:

With that I can repeat any procedural geometry in any way I want.

We are getting close to release the first alpha version of the Editor.

The game is 21.7% complete and 78.9% ready for editor alpha release.

More Design Possibilities

Sorry for taking too long to post this update, I had a lot going on in these last few weeks.

However, I haven't stopped working in this project during my free time.

So I've been adding a lot of functionalities for the 3D Editor.

I'm planning to port all these to the game itself so the player can create anything in game via this procedural editor, this will make content creation much easier and way more fun!

Here is me playing a bit with it in the editor:

The game is 22.1% complete and 84.5% ready for next editor release.

Planning & Estimation Review 4

It's time for another round of estimations review.

This time decided to change one big thing: Instead of presenting the game engine as a release, I will present the Sandbox (Demo) version of the game. This is because if I take your precious time, I'd like to make the most of it and show how the game will look like instead of how the tech behind the curtains works. The issue was that from my engineering side, 75% of all work is going to the game engine rather than the game itself, that's why I felt like releasing the game engine/editor first. However from a marketing perspective, it doesn't make any sense for me to show deep technical features for gamers prior to presenting the game itself. That doesn't mean I'm not going to publish the game engine, I surely will, that is the main mod tool for the game itself, I'll make sure to make it available for modders.

The estimations are becoming more solid each review, now here are the new estimation dates:

As always, it's important to remember that, these are quite artificial estimations, they were generated by spreadsheet calculations based on how much of my free time I can dedicate to this project. Later down the line, I plan to open it for collective funding and if all goes well, I may be able to dedicate more time to it, as I always wanted and expedite.

As a progress update, I've been working on a Class System Editor, even though very important it's unfortunately nothing visual, so no fun screen capture this time :(

After this Estimation review, the game is 22.1% complete and 82.1% ready for Sandbox Pre-alpha release.

Scripting

I've been busy with a module of the engine called "Class Maker" that allows me to create any entity in the game (like, enemies, camera, NPCs...). I'm creating my own scripting language to help me fully create the game in the engine itself. The reason why I'm creating mu own scripting language is to be flexible and efficient at the same time, as this language will be converted to other languages behind the curtains depending on what is the purpose of its execution call.

Now, not to kill you of boredom here is me creating a 3D House in 3 minutes using my game engine:

I said it before, but I really want this content creation to be part of the game itself :)

The game is 23.6% complete and 88.0% ready for Sandbox Pre-alpha release.

Bioscript: The Engine's scripting language.

I'm finishing up the basics of the engine's own scripting language. I believe that it may be complete by the next update. Here is how the syntax looks like

With this language I hope to code the game live within the engine. For that the language is converted to Lua at run-time and to C++ when exporting the game, so it's fair to say that this language is a "scripting" language as fast as C++.

If you are here just to see some cool gifs, I've got you covered. Here is me punching a hole into a solid surface.

Now, this is the same thing but in the middle of it, I make the surface is now hollow inside in a flick of a second:

The game is 24.6% complete and 91.6% ready for Pre-alpha release.

Destructible Scenario & Physics 

Setting up the scenario in the engine I'm now able to do this:

That blue square "explodes" the ground every time it touches it, making a crater, the other brown ball just collides with the scenario normally.

I will also make the opposite: creating object and making them interact with the scene at play time.

We are getting close to the first alpha version of the game engine release, I will tell details in the next posts.

The game is 25.1% complete and 95.0% ready for alpha engine release.

ALPHA RELEASED

We hit Alpha!

Right now it's Closed Alpha, but you are free to join our discord and test it yourself!

We also finally have a page for the Game Engine

The game engine is 43.0% complete.

The whole project is 26.3% complete.

Biomancer (Engine) 0.1.3.0 Alpha Released

♥(ง☉‿☉)ง ♫♩ 乁(☉‿☉乁) ♥

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 44.3% complete.

The whole project is 27.0% complete.

UI Editor - 0.1.4 Alpha

ヽ(⌐■_■)ノ♪♬

Minor trypophobia warning!

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 45.5% complete. 

 The whole project is 27.8% complete.

Bioscripts: 0.1.5 - Alpha

I completed the engine's script editor, the scripting language is called Bioscript.

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/876634/bioscripts-015-alpha

You can load the test project by clicking in Open Existing Projects and choosing "./samples/TestProject/TestProject.bioproj"

I owe you a tutorial, I'm aware, it will come once the engine is feature complete :)

Meanwhile here is me fooling around with the engine's 3D Editor.

That's like a bulding done 1 minute, and Here is me navigating through the building:

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 46.7% complete. 

 The whole project is 28.5% complete.

2 Years of Shine (And Biomancer)

A few days ago we hit the 2 years mark of me posting about the game and my game engine online.

I want to thank everyone who has followed the the project over the past two years! It means a lot!

Here is a full dev log:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/890417/two-years-of-biomancer-a-major-...

And here is a discord invite in case you want to download the game engine and try it yourself!

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 47.9% complete. 

The whole project is 29.3% complete.

We hit the 30% Mark!

The project is 30% complete and that's a hell of an accomplishment!

Here is a new Devlog for you!

And here is a cool preview of what's in the Dev log! I'd be glad if you checked it out!

And here is a discord invite in case you want to download the game engine and try it yourself!

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 50% complete. 

The whole project is 30% complete.

Today Biomancer is in Open Alpha!

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/960820/open-alpha

You can now download the Game Engine on Itch:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer

You can join our Discord to get more regular releases:

https://discord.gg/nrZeYy3UM2

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 57.1% complete. 

The whole project is 33.5% complete.

Human-like AI

I just finished the first version of the Game's AI. It's based on LLM (the same tech as ChatGPT, it's llama actually), so you will be able to fully talk to it in the game! 

It's all offline, no connection to any AI server.

To test this new AI made for the game I create a discord bot and powered her with it!

She is called Matriel and you can talk to her in our discord!

Here is me asking her to explain the 3rd and last big feature of the game:

Here is the full dev log: https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/987475/human-like-ai

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 59.8% complete. 

The whole project is 34.6% complete.

Talking to multiple NPCs

I'm still in AI land making sure the game engine can produce a very immersive AI for Shine Fall (The game).

Now, the player can talk with multiple NPCs "at the same time".

Here is the full dev log: https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/1012971/talking-to-multiple-npcs

The game is not out yet, but I made a Discord bot to test the game engine's AI, she's called Matriel, you can chat with her in the project's discord server.

And just to keep up with my tradition of showing something cool from the engine:

Here's a screencap of me testing Biomancer's (The game engine) infinite scenario:

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 62.3% complete. 

The whole project is 35.7% complete.

Audio Finally Came to Life🎧

For a while now, Biomancer has been able to load audio assets—music, sound effects, heavy files on disk—but that was about it. The engine knew what a sound was, it just couldn’t do anything with it yet.

This changed, I finally wired up the missing half of the pipeline: runtime audio control. Now Biomancer can actually play audio it loads, and not just play it, but control it the way a real game engine should.

Full Devlog:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/1104343/audio-finally-came-to-life-in-biomancer-

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 72.1% complete. 

The whole project is 38.4% complete.

Skydomes, Smarter Data & Script Quality-of-Life

This month I've worked on a group of features that together will make it possible for me to start creating the game I wanted in the end.

You can see all these features in my devlog:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/1134957/joining-all-features-for-beta

Biomancer is getting closer and closer to beta release, there are less than a handful of missing features for it and only big one is exporting the game itself. You may expect beta coming this spring.

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 79.2% complete. 

The whole project is 39.2% complete

We are 40% Complete!

This is a big achievement, it's been a long time and we are getting close to finish up the game engine so I can finally start the game itself.

Here is a new devlog:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/1314755/last-post-before-beta-release

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 82.1% complete. 

The whole project is 40% complete

All Major Game Engine Features are complete!

Yes that means we achieved BETA!

It's closed beta you can access it in the project's discord: https://discord.gg/nrZeYy3UM2

Here's the full devlog:

https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/1389731/feature-complete

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 88.7% complete. 

The whole project is 41.4% complete

GAME ENGINE OPEN BETA!

Biomancer (my indie  game engine I made for this project) has reached Beta, which means all major features are completed and thus Shine Fall (the game) development starts now!

You can download my game engine in here: https://fearcode.itch.io/biomancer/devlog/1459798/open-beta-is-here

This is a huge milenestone! I'll now switch to game development (instead of engine development) and start the second half of this project!

Biomancer (The Game Engine) is 100% complete. 

Shine Fall (The Game) development has just begun.

The whole project is 42% complete