PROJECT: Moonbound

Description:

You play as a strange cryptid creature, on an aimless journey to discover the secrets of the world they live within, dive into the abyss and find your answers, discover what lies below the soil and above the clouds

About Me + Game History

Hello Godot Community! I am starting to develop my game "Moonbound", A game I have been hung up on for awhile but only recently started making significant progress on, This game will be a, experimental genre if you will, "Puzzle Platformer" is what i'll call it here but I hope to strike something unique in terms of gameplay, in reality I hope for it to be a kind of "Narrative Driven Open World Sandbox-Puzzle Platformer", narrative driven more in the sense of a game like Inside or Little Nightmares more so than large RPGS, with a mild theme of horror : >, this game will act as a sort of Full Game version of my game for the godot wild jam "The Darkness Guides", and will have a similar premise in terms of general gameplay, only without the linear aspect and with significantly more fun and less janky puzzles lol. The sandbox element is in the puzzles of the game, I want to take an approach on the puzzles of this game that caters to the creativity and curiosity of the player, I want almost no puzzle to have one single solution, and I want to give the player access to a variety of tools and devices to mess around with and find creative solutions to problems they come across in their exploration

This game is highly influenced by Rainworld, along with the aforementioned games like Little Nightmares, Inside, and Limbo, funny enough I didn't actually didn't base the artstyle off limbo, I originally came up with this artstyle to focus on gameplay, as I only had 7 days to make the game for the wild jam, so it seemed sensible to use solid colors to speed up the art making process, however I've opted to just steer back towards that "dark to light" limbo pallete for the full, actual game. I hope for this game to develop what I felt like was missed with both of these games that I enjoyed, such as making exploration more interesting and the like.

I also have a soundcloud which currently only houses some of the game's Alpha Soundtrack:

https://soundcloud.com/galeboy/sets/project-moonbound-soundtrack

I have alot of little things for the game already planned out such as many narrative elements, a map of each area and its connections, and many notes on the general gameplay that I want, Currently in the actual game I have a simple player character with a placeholder sprite, some basic platforming mechanics, and a system for a Psuedo-3D Environment that I very much enjoy, hoping to improve upon that

Anyway its time to stop rambling, hope yall can enjoy the art and I will be updating here soon! Do keep in mind that I am a Highschooler making this game as a passion project in my free time so likely updates on here won't be totally consistent. And I can't promise this game will ever be released, however I can promise that I have been and will continue to work on this in the future, likely I'll release playtest builds for, well, playtesting, movement mechanics and puzzles for ya'll. Thanks!

Current State of the Game:

https://streamable.com/q2o0kx

Mildly annoying that this doesen't allow me to just pop a video or music directly in but, eh

Not sure exactly how to make a new addition to the devlog so im just replying to my own post, not sure if thats the elegant way to do this but its the way im doin it.

I don't have much to show sadly in terms of progress but I did make some concept art for the main character of the game, I'll just call him "The Wanderer" for this devlog, the cryptid creature you play as, hes a strange humanoid creature who, in the original game, his mechanic was that he was weak to light. I think i'll try to keep that, but the premise of the game will likely be less focused around that light weakness, it will still be prominent if I do, but I might change it to only weak to sunlight, or other way around and only weak to artificial light, because I don't wanna limit the graphics of my own game because of this little story aspect

Sorry about the enormous images btw, if you can't tell I do not use itch regularly, I have absolutely no idea what im doing. I very much enjoy this concept for the character, it looks significantly less "human" than the original I think, likely because of the proportions. This will likely be what I base his ingame design on.

Anyways for the actual game I want to make him sort of animated in a context-specific manner if you will, I hesitate to call it procedural animation as I still plan on using some traditional methods, I just want the character to be physics-based, that way I can develop much more creative puzzles, heres a bit of a concept of his height and what I generally want him to look like ingame:

I've been doing alot of research into godot's physical bone nodes and bone animation for this, along with how rainworld handles its own animation for reference, I don't plan on basing it on the same methods exactly but knowing is still useful. The character in the original game kinda just headbutted crates to get them to move lol, but I want something a bit more polished for this. Also I need him to be able to switch between a ragdoll and active state freely to create death and also to implement stunning mechanics, just as a little punishment for being too reckless with dangerously heavy objects :devious:

Its time to tackle this beast again, oh how i've missed you.

If you aren't aware, this devlog almost didin't exist due to the suffering I endured attempting to implement physical bone animation into the project, I quit the project for several months, came back, procrastinated by doing terrain art and the pseudo-3D enviroment, but to add much more to the game I will have to implement this physics based character, so here we are again, but this time, I have a plan.

It derives from characterbody2D, that way I have finite control over the character's physics, what im going to do is pin the cosmetic skeleton to the characterbody via the hips, use top_level to prevent any bone fuckery with parented controls, and attempt to first get a character that stands up, I want to make it so the characters limbs can be broken off during death, and other like things, think something like limbo's character. Im also making the skeleton symmetrical this time, that way I don't need to handle turning too much hopefully because physical bone hates being scaled.

Somebody on reddit gave me some revolutionary info, that I could pin collisionshapes to my character and use remote transform to make them follow the rigidbodies, which means I will NOT have to code my own physics engine thank the heavens. This information has been incredibly helpful! I already have a character up and moving that can react to the enviroment, and I plan on adding graphics to it soon. However I need to implement:

States to decide when the body leans forward, straigtens up, crouches, etc

IK for the limbs so that they don't just aimlessly flop about

More finite control on the gameplay body

I used a method im calling a "Gameplay Tail" or "Gameplay Body" Where I attach a rigidbody with a shape beneath all the actual bones that will be invisible ingame, this is an easy way to balance the character, and gives me finite control over how they move on terrain, hopefully I can get a demo vid out soon when its done.

Not too much progress today but I added a color changer to room settings which took more effort than it should have. Now we can have all kinds of colors, I hope to add a fog effect as well at some point and make that compatible with this. I also highly optimized the psuedo-3D, before I used 10 sub-layers for each layer but that especially got laggy with large sceneries so:

For one thing I added a "flat scenery" option which turns scenery into 1 sublayer, for if I need to put anything enormous in the background

For 2 thing I made it so non-focused layers have less sub-layers, considering my other systems are in place its not too noticeable luckily, now its:

Foreground: 4 SLayers

Midground: 10 SLayers

BG1 and BG2: 8 SLayers

Scenery1: 6 SLayers
Scenery2: 4 SLayers

Hell maybe I'll optimize it more later since its looking perfectly fine even with less layers, if I find myself needing to I could easily take away two more of foreground, scenery1, and BG1 and 2's layers, although this does in some cases make the box edges more visible which you may see in the screenshot with BG2 so maybe lets not get too optimization-crazy yet :>

Moonbound's enviroments in general are in need of a HUGE upgrade, right now its not bad but its very geometric and not anywhere near my vision. I want to use the background of the game as a way to incentivize and even directly aid exploration, for example you may see landmarks in the background that you can actually walk to by following them, you can get an idea of where in the map you are by those landmarks. I already have 3 huge landmarks I have planned that will aid exploration, being The G.A.P, The Skycrapers, and The Safehaven, these are all going to be important areas in the game and are all HUGE, so you will be able to see them during gameplay regularly and use them to guide you :>.

Im also hoping to achieve that same, or similar level of amazing and beautiful detail that is rainworld's enviroments, the way each screen could probably pass as a painting on its own just amazes me and I really hope I can achieve something similar, I doubt quite to THAT level but at the very least I want more plants, enviromental objects, decorations, just, THINGS to decorate the world

The official art at the top of this blog is a good example of what im going for specifically for the Echoing Wilds, im actually being inspired by the Spirit Wilds from the Legend of Korra if any of you have watched that (Amazing show btw, if you haven't totally go watch that and The Avatar: The Last Airbender if you havent (watch avatar first)). See, in the alien world of moonbound, the forests are going to look familiar, but not nearly the same as our own forests, im going for a fungus dominated ecosphere in moonbound, where the "Symbiote Trees" as im calling them are tall, long, and sprawling, covered in tiny bits of mold and fungus, showring anything below them in spores. The ground littered in mushroom caps and small cane sprouts, vines, giant cornstalk-like plants, optimization is a worry when I consider getting these into the game but I very much want to figure it out.

I am very enthusiastic about the future of our animation system here!

I finished the standing state for the character. I found out about linear damping which provides an absolutely PERFECT effect for what im looking for, prevents all that weird behavior and pendulum effects with the limbs, and fixes so many of my previous worries, theoretically all I have to do now is create different states of movement for the skeleton like a ledge climb, jumping. And in each of those states I slightly edit all of the body parts settings, like removing all the little illusions of balance when ragdolling, making the body crunch in on itself when climbing a ledge, making the legs move while walking using an animation player and the IK points, everything is starting to pan out here

After i get the character up, working, and some sprites to make him look like, well, him. I'll start working on the actual puzzle elements, and get in systems that will ensure I can create dynamic puzzles for our open world here.

Also I need to work on the room system to make sure the player can traverse the world as if it was 3D, adding doors and entrances to new rooms

Had this idea for wildfires to be possible in moonbound, as part of that sweet sandbox side. It would be something to watch out for when causing explosions or using items that cause fire, its an ambitious idea that I'm not sure will make it in, fire will def be there but spreading fire is something Im not sure about, its not high priority but maybe at some point during the game we can watch the echoing wilds burn.

Going to take a small break from moonbound, I've been doing alot of thinking about the project and I want to refactor alot of my current systems for terrain and player movement since they're a bit spaghetti-coded. Also I need to do a big think on the graphics of the game and how I want to execute implementing them, I think im going to switch my current tilemap system to only paint collisions, then put a large handdrawn level OVER it, painted in an external program.

This not only is more optimized, as I go from drawing thousands of tiles just to drawing one singular image per chunk of the map, but also means I can make significantly more detailed levels not strictly stuck to a grid, (although the collisions will still be stuck to a grid so I need to consider that). It also means the graphics of the game won't be strictly cubical, as I can edit each layer of the ten.

Assuming I re-add the 10 sub-layers per layer thing this means a maximum of 60 images will be drawn at a time, which is much more optimized than the previous tilemaplayer system and means I can have much more detailed scenery I believe.