Edit: 04/10/203: https://odysee.com/@Lethn:3/By-the-gods-building-mechanics-playtest:c?r=9uVBCUZNktJFSny4AurVAhURKecvDwFD
Gameplay video dropped!
Edit 11/08/2023: Holy balls mods! Thanks, I did not expect this to be pinned, will update the thread with links when I get something significant done and new content drops, for more regular updates check out my gab page. I frequently post WIP content there among other things.
Right, celebratory white pill moment in my life, I've been living in a renovation project I moved into for almost 2 years now and I'm finally free. Garden has just been finished off and there are only very minor jobs around the house to get on with at any time since it's interior yay.
So I've mentioned this before, but I'm pretty much getting setup as a startup indie game dev and it's been my dream since I was about 10. I've had quite a lot of drama in the process of finding my ideal workflow even with just researching software as some of you will have seen in my rants across this site, been an absolute pain in the arse but I've pretty much gone for as much open source software as possible so even if leftists get mad at me they can't cancel me through any licensing and so on to prevent me from finishing projects.
I've got some big business plans in mind, some are small projects, to stay realistic and grounded and make some money as well as spread my reputation for my brand so I don't end up like one of those people with a ton of unfinished projects in my name and piss people off. Some are bigger in nature and are early access which will take awhile to finish and all of them I'm excited about. As we've seen, there is something of an opportunity growing big time in the games and film industry and I intend to capitalise on it.
First off, the small projects I have planned. I'm actually creating something of my own sci-fi IP which I have so far named 'Space Era Millennium'. I'm still working out the details, early days and all that, but it will be a star wars-esque style space opera type sci-fi universe with lots of sci-fi cheese involved. If you've watched any anime space operas, kind of like that, except I want it to not only have lots of space combat but infantry ground combat as well with lots of pew pew lasers.
For my first set of projects that I should be able to get done in fairly short order. I've got some short films planned that will give people a nice introduction to the universe lore. I have a working title for an RTS survival planned that's a bit of a spin off and will be loosely based on it called Endless Alien Swarm Survival ( Will change if there's any copyright issues lol ) and it will be an RTS wave survival game mainly. I could be pestered into doing other modes and such or even adding multiplayer if people like it enough. As you've guessed from the title, this will be about base building and keeping a horde of aliens at bay starship troopers style. In the loose lore, you play as the Red Sunset Corporation which will be a human faction I recently game up with.
The game is barebones right now and will undergo some heavy design changes especially to the art, but I plan on being as transparent as possible with my development process and post regular updates. This will be the main thing I'm focusing on this year and at the very least getting a proper playable demo churned out. I'm pretty happy though because I've gotten most of the main code done already.
Here's also a little starfighter animation I did up in relation to Space Era Millennium to test out how to get things working in blender the way I wanted.
Now for the big one ( Yes I know there's more :P ) By the gods, this is a title I've written about before but now it's time to give you the juicy details. This is an early access game, however there are two things business wise that I am going to be doing differently from a lot of developers. You will be able to download the game completely free up to a certain version and play it, I've posted all the details in the link below to a pirate site I intend to upload everything to in order to get more exposure.
https://cs.rin.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=118298&p=2513513#p2513513
The game itself is the god game genre and I've been shamelessly influenced by an old game called Black and White if any of you remember that and I don't care how much ire I potentially get from the creators I will finish this lol. This project is very similar to what war for the overworld did to dungeon keeper, which I recommend checking out. If they didn't get sued over it then I should be safe.
https://odysee.com/@Lethn:3/By-the-gods-Pre-Alpha-Gameplay-1:1?r=9uVBCUZNktJFSny4AurVAhURKecvDwFD
This is a very old video, I have done a huge amount of work since then including making a switch over with the project to the Godot engine from Unity in order to protect myself from any political and back end stupidity. The newest version will be pre-release 0.1 and I think I'll specifically define these versions as pre-release from now on to avoid any confusion about naming conventions.
Recently I've been working on miracle behaviour and getting it looking decent, I've just gotten the workshop partially functional and will be exploring building mechanics for by the gods at some point. I also have a gab account where I regularly post devlog style updates and I plan on posting way more videos on the regular to show you guys what's going on when I do make proper progress with my projects.
You will also find that I post my own research up their too even things that aren't necessarily gaming related, lots of stuff like blender tutorials I come across and things like that. I also have a github, as part of my transparency I want to post my stuff up to show I'm not a bullshit artist. Some stuff is open source and some isn't and I'll be clear about that later on. I have no problem however with people who may want to mess around and start modding my games etc. if they ever want to which should be entirely possible through the Godot engine but I am investigating that.
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/110820298530063733
Now for the business pledge, because I can't believe I have to do this but honestly the woke stuff has gotten so out of control that yes it looks like devs and people like me are going to have to separate us from that crowd and be vocal about it instead of hiding away like cowards. Hopefully this may even end up inspiring people.
. I will not take ESG money
. I will not make shady deals with glowies for money and spy on my own customers
. I will never associate with anybody from the WEF or has connections with the WEF and will break off contact immediately if I find out about that
. Singleplayer content will always be offline, you will not be forced to log into anything or have any shady third party software installed on your PC
. I will always be transparent about my dev process, the maths of my games will be explained for people who are curious about it so that gamers can understand how everything works in the background
. I will do straight content only and not do any SJW style virtue signalling about sexuality and gender especially on pride month ( This one should be hilarious )
. I won't beat women with the ugly stick constantly if it doesn't make sense to the lore and have attractive women in my content
. I will be transparent about my plans with pricing, my early access model for early access projects is going to be similar to what mount and it will always be heavily discounted early on before release day, see the by the gods link on the pirate forum for more info
. When you buy my games, you're buying the full game and nothing else will be added on extra, so any updates or changes made will come with the game and not be paid DLC/micro-transactions
I don't know how I'm going to update this thread with the way the formatting works, but I will keep you posted on what I'm doing all the same. My workflow is definitely going to get underway now that I'm free of living in a renovation project for so long so people can expect fairly regular updates.
As another aspiring indie dev, best of luck to you!
Good luck! It can be fun to do. I liked Godot the little bit I messed around with it. I've been using Unreal Engine right now. The visual scripting has helped me through some places I'd roadblock in the past, boring things like programming the intro menu for example. I had an entire game written for Xbox 360 using XNA, but the menus and all that were just such a pain in the ass in that architecture that I never released it. It didn't help that it was not fun to play either. At all. I might try Godot again for another project if I actually finish this one.
I've been making an FPS now with mechanics I'd call "Doom 3" style, so a little more run and gun and no ADS, no snipers, no cover mechanic. Partly to limit the scope, partly because I like that style. Will it be a breakthrough in anything? Not a chance. At this point my goal is like a $20 game on Steam that isn't awful. I've got more done than I probably give myself credit for, just because all the little details will take ages to work out. It will probably be a bit generic because I'm not really interested in 3D modeling so I'm using free or purchased stuff. I don't think it will matter that much in the end, the lighting and atmosphere is the game, not whether or not I modeled the microscope on the counter or the wooden crate on the floor. If I had, it's still just a microscope on the counter and a wooden crate on the floor. Still, if 6mo to a year from now I have enough of a game that it seems realistic to release, I'll probably pay someone to model a main character and some of the bosses, the music, and the minuscule bit of voice acting I'd want.
Just curious, have you checked out Unigine at all? Seems to be rapidly gaining popularity as an alternative to Unreal. Not sure if they have anything as robustly fine-tuned as Epic's Blueprints, though.
Most people I've encountered who use Unigine mostly used it for productivity purposes rather than gaming, but it seemed interesting.
I hadn't heard of it honestly. Which is really odd because before I started this foray into trying a 3d game I looked into a lot of different engines. Maybe I try something for the next game if there is one. I'd like to try something in Godot too, just thought in the interest of finishing something I'd be better off in Unreal for an FPS game. I've got somewhat of an idea for a 3D puzzle game I may try in Godot some time. As of now, if I have an idea while I'm working on this I put it in a notebook to try later so I don't get too distracted.
Blueprints are nice, but I've ended up doing a lot in C++ too. What I like is how they let you layer them, e.g. I made a C++ class for the weapon that does all the basic stuff, fires, etc. If I want to make some one off unique weapon? I can just override the actions in Blueprint to do whatever I want. I've heard it's bad on performance so I haven't used a ton of that for gameplay, but for a settings menu? That's not really enough to matter and it let me make menus and things in a tiny percent of the time versus learning how I need to interact with a text box in my code.
Makes sense. Unigine isn't widely advertised because it's mostly used by a specific kind of designer. Some of the new features look really amazing in a real-time runtime environment, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKQbj_zvueA&pp=ygUHdW5pZ2luZQ%3D%3D
Oh definitely. You can always tell games that rely on a ton of Unreal APIs because of how it causes a lot of slowdown or stutter. But it's good you're going the coding route to improve optimisation. It seems to be something a lot of larger studios forego these days.
I haven't heard of that before, interesting, might look at this video by gamesfromscratch and take note.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAHQZfS8maA
I will point out that for my purposes at least, Godot 4 is proving to be more than enough and I haven't run into any problems implementing what I want. The main issues were incomplete documentation that I had to work through as well as reverse engineering a lot of old code. This is partly why I post my github up on places so that people can check out the various controllers because Godot 4 has changed a huge amount and also features some major improvements to performance.
People definitely underestimate the capabilities of Godot 4.
Oh that's really good to hear. Working through the incomplete documentation will help pave the way for a lot of other devs who follow in your footsteps using Godot.
Have you been uploading videos to YouTube as well with the documentation updates as you progress? I'm sure there are some aspiring devs out there who might also be working through similar issues and could probably use that guidance in their projects, too.
Oh sorry, for the record I haven't been making documentation updates on the site or anything, I've just been posting my code up for github that I've been looking at. So it's things like a properly functional FPS controller as an example, I managed to get one working that acted very similar to half life.
The other big one I did recently was working through with someone else RTS box selection which really should have been something included in the documentation. Unfortunately due to the stupid drama on the Godot forums, that thread has been lost, however I went through an old tutorial and got the code for that working in Godot 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFQXI3to0b4&t=111s
I posted comments here as well if anyone's interested but the github format is so much better for code.
We don't even really have decent FPS' anymore because they've all been turned into painfully average battle royale games filled with bots and 12 year olds using aim assist so it would be a good thing for the market to get more genuine FPS'.
Sincerely good luck! While I love coding, I don't think I could ever get all the different pieces together to make a game. Anyone who can juggle the media, design, coding, and business sides deserves a ton of respect!
I hate to ask this, but are you worried either about getting doxed or about people coming across your name on this site and then slandering you and your games elsewhere?
Let's just say I've considered the risks and have been preparing contingencies for that eventuality. Shitposting aside, I think in this political environment doxxing will be an inevitable because of how petty leftists are. What I can do though is like with my choice of software is make sure that any damage they attempt against me financially especially is minimal.
Have you released any finished projects yet? Trying to do two projects at once is a motivation-killer and is a common mistake that new devs make. If you have the time and resources to work on two games at once, go for it, but you may find you've drastically underestimated what that means once you get deep enough.
For what it's worth, I think Totally Not Black and White 3 is a niche that desperately needs filling and a decent game of that type would do quite well. If I were you I'd focus on that. Lionhead really dropped the ball with that franchise and nobody's picked it up. I would, however, be careful about making it too similar. You might run into legal problems down the line. I think if you avoid the whole virtual pet aspect - which I never liked anyway - you'll be fine.
If you want to turn this into a career, unfortunately Unity is by far the best way to do that. Godot has almost no hiring activity and I doubt it ever will. As much as Unity sucks, it's where the money's at. Of course, if you don't care about joining a studio and just want to do your own thing forever, Godot is a fine choice.
I released one very nooby platformer on steam ages ago called Rabbit and the moon that I might re-do and re-release in Godot, it wouldn't take much since it's just a platformer, I'd do that one for free this time around. I completely get your argument about doing too many projects at once and will try to avoid that, but frankly as well I get bored being stuck too much on one thing so it's refreshing to bounce around and try new stuff.
I have actually been smart about that though I think even by the standards of cynical gamers, the projects like Endless Alien Swarm Survival are smaller and I'm being very realistic about the timeframe. I've already got group selection and box selection mechanics all in as well as the basics needed for an RTS. I'm going to be doing art design now and getting that all setup, I also have focus fire mechanics working and will be doing other combat related stuff.
Same deal with the short films, they'll be short short, I'm going to use them as a way of introducing everybody into Space Era Millennium's lore and I think this is all doable. As for by the gods, there's always options that I can code in, so if you don't like the creature system I'll put an option in to not have that if you start a skirmish game or whatever or maybe I'll even have it in the campaign but I'll need to think on that generally. I thought about the legal side of things with by the gods and I'm going to risk it regardless, obviously yes, there's a risk of a potential court case, but at the same time that would be hilarious and only increase my notoriety.
Also, I really want to play a proper god game and an RTS, I'm bored out of my mind anyway with the state the games industry is in lol. I did actually upload By the gods ages ago to that pirate site, but annoyingly megaupload ate my upload and by the gods 0.1 is going to change the game so drastically in a good way though what you currently see is completely out of date. When I have by the gods ready I'm going to upload it as a demo to Itch as that's the most straightforward way.
Oh and fyi, with regards to my engine knowledge, I know C# and GDScript, I also technically know a bit about how to use Unreal. I definitely want to do my own thing though and like you point out that's why Godot is perfect so I'm going to be working my arse of now on all of that. Godot is about future proofing my projects against any outside interference.
Question out of curiosity. Do you think it would be better to:
A) Normalize non-straight people NOT being front and center, such as some irrelevant NPCs, in order to attempt to shift how they're seen/used in games back to a state of normality
OR
B) Outright exclude anything but straight
Some older Squaresoft games, as an example, might allude to homosexuals at times, but it wasn't typically a front and center thing. I was never really bothered by that, and I imagine most people here weren't either.
I'd prefer if projects like these could be considered "normal" in the public eye, rather than be labeled deliberately 'exclusionary'; even you admit you're worried about that. Nobody can accuse it of exclusion if they're still in there in the background, after all.
I don't care which way it goes as long as it isn't the boring woke shit we get so often now, though. I imagine you'd rather stick to your principles, though. Good luck with the projects!
I mean back in the day I would have taken A and been fairly moderate about it all to be honest and I have thought about that. I don't give a fuck what the leftists think so really it's irrelevant. What I have potentially considered is that simply saying 'straight content only' is probably going to trigger them so hard if they find out about it if they're stupid enough to make articles about my games I can leverage that to my advantage with the free media.
I've technically already done this even in my code, it's completely innocuous because it's just listing the genders of the villagers as male/female like anyone normally would. However as we've seen the games industry has gotten so bad that they even put those stupid pronouns in the character creator for gender or don't even correctly show the gender now which is just confusing.
I think I want to piss them off on purpose which is why I'm fully prepared for a doxxing situation. The joke is, even if I post about this and post exactly my intentions, they're leftists, they have to respond, because nobody, especially a dev is allowed to rebel against the woke ideology.
Yeah, if you want to stick it to them, might as well go all the way without being directly offensive in the eyes of sane people.
If it does get called out for 'homophobia' and stuff for simply not having any LGBT people in it, that would be pretty unreasonable to most normal people, and especially if you get doxxed for it.
That said, if leftists like the games enough it won't even matter. Just look at the hypocrisy of them when it comes to the Five Nights at Freddies creator. "You get the pass if we like your stuff" basically.
You get it, that's pretty much the plan, the thing is I've even had to deal with this shit with that admin in the Godot community who was trying to justify the LGBT virtue signal because he just went "What's wrong with people doing that?". So okay then, let's do the exact opposite with our own content and see how they react if they decide to be lunatics over it, then they'll red pill the normies hard and I can throw their own arguments right back at them.
Good luck. Keep us posted
Thanks for writing this up. You've mentioned your development work enough that you had me curious. I propose this be declared as "KIA2 Gamedev Project 3". u/DomitiusOfMassilia
Stickied
04/10/2023: https://odysee.com/@Lethn:3/By-the-gods-building-mechanics-playtest:c?r=9uVBCUZNktJFSny4AurVAhURKecvDwFD
Dropped the gameplay video.
Nice, Really reminds me of black and white. Also why has the god lowered its standards to standard fireball xD
Lmao don't worry, there will be upgrades and different miracle types, it's all about getting the barebones stuff in and making my code modular, then I can add everything in way faster as I go up the versions. I've been hyper focused on the building mechanics lately because they're such a major part of the game. The best part is because this is my own 'original' title I'll be able to deviate and fix stuff that was broken or incomplete in that game.
I'm obviously not going to post anything definitive until I've got the 0.1 build properly ready, but I am very happy with the progress I've made so far.
Considering the shit Molyneux pulled with Godus, he has no legs to stand on against anyone for any reason every again.
In fact, it might be worth looking at that game just as a handful of examples of what not to do regarding a God game, because its an absurd failure in so many unique ways. Made even more upsetting by the fact that it started out okay and became worse with every single patch to reach the shit point it currently is at.
16/02/2024: Great news on the building front, it's all tested and working, got to make sure that the transfer behaviour is working now that's sorted. This will mean brand new villages anywhere within your influence.
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/111938570910414997
09/02/2024: https://rumble.com/v4caod0-blender-cycles-liquid-sim-test.html
This is a bit of an experiment I did following along a liquid simulation tutorial using Blender cycles, I enjoyed it, however the rendering times were agony and it wasn't a long animation either. Going to be doing lots of research into this as cycles will be a major way I can compete with the big boys in terms of 3D quality.
It's looking like I'm somebody who as I've ranted about before can actually justify a high end rig. I'm probably going to need to get one at some point anyway if I want to use a Rokoko suit for more advanced ideas I have in mind.
28/03/2024: https://rumble.com/v4m3ctx-by-the-gods-playtest-0.1-prealpha-gameplay-1.html
It's been awhile since I posted but it's for good reason, happy to report that I've got a gameplay video to show you guys. It's buggy as one would expect but I've got the building mechanics just about working smoothly now. Breeding mechanics are all in for the villagers for the most part, I've just noticed one or two silly bugs with things not updating correctly as usual.
Been playtesting this like mad trying to slog through the code, I think I'll get more done now and be able to post more as that was definitely the worse of it. Backups have been made so there shouldn't be any issues if I make any oopsies at this stage. Village capturing is also in to a degree, I need to expand on the miracle behaviour a bit more to make it more consistent so you can build villages and expand your influence properly.
I definitely need to implement a population limit for the villages.
What I'll do is I'll keep this thread here and if anything significant happens I'll post the date and a little update at the bottom, that will keep everything contained in the thread and give people new links to look at.
04/10/2023: If you loved the god game genre prepare to get excited.
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/111174285603235415
Good luck. If you hit it big and get a buyout offer, I wouldn't begrudge you for taking it, by the way.
It's a common thing that, where if you get big the competition wants to buy you out before you get too big. However I've seen how detrimental that is to the gaming experience. More often than not, the fuckers specifically buy people out in order to shutter popular projects that are eating away at their market share. Or they buy the game dev out and proceed to ruin the title so it becomes a total shell of their former self.
I have no interest in any of that, these games that I'm making I want to play regularly and make them last, that includes mods and self-hosted multiplayer. This will drastically extend the life of a game as we know if you allow people to freely mod things. With the Godot engine, it should be fairly straightforward to do, however modders will of course need to learn the Godot engine in order to do it.
If you finish it, you'll be doing better than Lionhead did with B&W. That game had a ton of promise but was such an unfinished mess. Peter Molyneux was notorious for having great ideas with horrible execution.
I actually installed it a couple years back; was kind of a pain to track down the necessary patches to make it work, but I was interested in seeing how well it played on modern hardware. Turns out even when you get solid framerates, the gestures are still pretty clunky.
The gestures were pretty gimmicky so that's far down on my list even though it was an interesting mechanic, I tracked down the sort of code they were probably relying on to execute them, it might be possible to make something cleaner with modern software, I'll have to see. I know gesture recognition is possible generally. The problem with the shape drawing is they were somehow doing it on the terrain itself so it was easily broken depending on the camera angle. A better way to do it would be like Arx Fatalis where they have the gesture drawn on the screen.
So far I've managed to fix the throwing, I found the motion mechanics very buggy as well, I simply did it similar to most modern throwing mechanics. You can define the throw strength with shortcut keys and then you right click and release to throw. I'm thinking I might let people do the maths themselves and set the X and Y strength for much more precise control.
The miracle casting is easy to deal with because you can just do shortcut keys, I'll maybe, maybe look at gesture casting if I suddenly come up with something. Buildings, miracles and villager behaviour are my priority right now as well as influence and the belief system. I could re-upload the 0.0 unity version I did ages ago but it's so old now, there are going to be a lot of changes in 0.1 and it will be for the better.
Pickup and throw mechanics are all working fine and I'm getting them working in a modular way ;) you can also grow trees with the water miracle again. Currently I'm working on the wood miracle and I've got a plan for the fireball miracle, I also want to get to work on destruction for my buildings and have the rigidbodies working correctly. The big thing for 0.1 is I finally got a bunch of villager models and animations done up which will help with behaviour.
Godspeed. No pun intended.
I was skeptical at first. And I apologize for that.
Good luck on your project!
After how many devs even I've seen making projects and abandoning them or outright scamming people? I don't blame you at all, it's down to me to prove myself and develop a reputation. Now people are seeing me get work done it's going to be about getting the project into early access and then if I get it released resisting the inevitable SJW struggle sessions attempt, but honestly the last part should be easy because I'm an anti-social fuck anyway.
I like the black and white inspired one. Don't make promises like Peter Molyneux.
Good luck
DUDE. I was just thinking the other day how awesome a spiritual successor to Black and White would be... Especially if it was VR capable and you literally could fill your floorspace with the game world.
VR is indeed possible and a thing in Godot, I don't know if it would necessarily work with by the gods though, would need to experiment. That would be something way down the line if people pestered me for it, also the issue of even buying a VR headset because they're expensive and I'd much rather shell out money for a good quality mocap suit lol. The game would have to get pretty popular for me to justify the investment really.
sounds interesting. I enjoyed Age of Empires/Mythology, starcraft, etc, so the RTS could be interesting.
Kinda addicted to survival crafting games atm, though. (trying to single player my way through ark's story rn, lmao.)
sidenote: Linux support? I can go WINE if I have to, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
Also, offline multiplayer is a must for me, personally. I understand if it's a PITA to code, though.
Linux support will be easy in Godot, as for offline multiplayer I'll poke around about that. LAN is totally doable, a lot of devs don't even bother these days because they're all about the multiplayer micro-transactions, you can't monetise LAN the same way.
honestly...selling the LAN as a dlc could be a way to go for that kinda dev...it oughta be a standard feature, but offering it as a paid add-on would be something at least...
No way and no need lol.
agreed, but for the cforporate devs who wanna monetize everygoddamnthing...I could see it as a reasonable compromise...
You know it's bad when the indie dev is more adamant about not monetising everything unnecessarily than the gamer, you've been gaslit by companies over that for way too long. LAN believe it or not is simpler to implement than multiplayer over servers because you don't have to worry about ping and network synchronisation half as much. Devs don't do LAN as much anymore because they can't put tons of micro-transactions in that and force you to connect to a central server just to play.
lol, nah. it's more throwing my hands up in defeat. I know with major studios I'm not likely to get LAN play any other way, not that I play that many "AAA" games anymore, anyway.
Seriously, thoughthe minute I hear the words lootcrate, or microtranaction I cringe.
DLC is...hit and miss for me...it really depends on what it is...costumes/skins? hell no. soundtrack? even if I love the soundtrack, I don't love it that much. Pay to win. Okay, now I don't even wanna play...
But campaigns, scenarios, maps... that's the same as old school expansion packs right there, lol.
...And yeah, I'd love if basic features were included, but at this point, I've accepted that the big players consider it an obsolete feature.
22/08/2023: Currently organising the building mechanics for by the gods, it's going well and mostly up and running. Just got to throw some more code at it to make it so the finished building spawns and then I can post a gameplay video to show the progress.
Good luck my man
10/11/2023: Well that was a bugger of a job, I came across a very weird engine error that could frequently corrupt my entire project due to strange naming conflicts with my scenes. Running theories are that it was either due to me somehow naming certain scenes exactly the same and borking everything.
Or I borked it by importing my villager models from the same .blend file and the engine treated them as if they were the same somehow which seems likely and I simply didn't notice. Either way, I think I have an idea of how these errors happen and I'm more back on form with the mechanics and debugging stuff behaviour before I add new things in. I'm thinking of putting in some quality of life stuff too, there's a little menu and loading screen in now and I think I will do a little guideline in-game for the hand raycast behaviour so people can accurately pick stuff up and throw it.
02/02/2024: Collision mechanics for my influence spheres are now working correctly, it's starting to feel more and more like a real game now. You also have the spheres changing correctly or hiding depending on their ownership integer. I will be working on belief mechanics and putting in village capturing.
The hype is real!
04/02/2024: Gifs seem to have a strange playback problem on Gab, not sure what that's about so I'll be sticking with Rumble uploads even with the shorts. The expansion and building is working brilliantly, had a little run in with my rigidbody setup for the houses, will need to revisit that for 0.2 but very happy with the progress.
Extra things still need to be done like custom population limits for owned villages, not sure how I'm going to handle neutral and enemy villages yet will need to think on it. Could maybe setup some kind of global default you can have in the settings.
Interaction is working correctly too, influence now matters so when you see the X icon on your god hand that means you won't be able to interact with anything outside the influence sphere you own. The big thing is now it all happens through code so you should be able to infinitely build villages and expand influence wherever you want. Still pondering how to handle things like uneven terrain for buildings.
Need to focus on general debugging, putting in more belief related behaviour and the custom population limits.
Check out my gab post for some very early screenshots!
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/111874268035879080
05/03/2024: Very pleased, got some significant work done recently, the village centres are all completely functional, just need to do lots of testing. I have ownership integers working correctly and the text colour as well as the owner of the village centre itself is changing the right way. Now I have to tweak how belief works as well as interaction because neutral villagers shouldn't be able to transfer out of their village centre and into the player's for example.
Will be posting up a video of me building up a new village sometime after capturing one, again just need to tweak things and test it first. The construction sites all seem to be working great now. However I need to make sure as well that housing slots are updating correctly when villagers are swapped from different villages too for whatever reason.
It's all a bit unfinished at the moment but functional and a lot less bugs and glitches.
23/01/2024: Studying up on dictionaries now and dumping all that stuff into a file, once I do that and get it working that will be the main options menu stuff done aside from a bit of audio which I don't think needs much right now because I don't have any music. May make it so that you can mute the voice prompts though.
06/12/2023: This was another bugger of a job but the solution was staring me in the face the entire time. Just about solved any pathfinding problems with the villager breeding behaviour in the AI. I need to keep playtesting to see if there are any issues but I'm very happy I got through this problem before the end of the year now I just need to make sure everything is consistent and do checks so that the villagers know if their partners exist or not.
14/11/2023: Influence shaders now very much finished and working consistently, debugging time for my mechanics and making sure to add stuff going in. Going to stick to my 0.1 goals so I don't get too carried away and can potentially manage a proper early access release.
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/111407504381724043
18/04/2024:
Grain/Wood pile animations coming along fine, they're pretty simple but thanks to me finding that silly reverse playback out I don't have to worry about reversing everything by frame so that's going to save a hell of a lot of time. I also have the reversed particles prepped for picking up piles. Going to have to make a little grain bushel model for the god hand to pick up so that all works correctly.
https://rumble.com/v4q9ay6-by-the-gods-new-wood-pile-animations.html
06/12/2023: You guys might very well be interested in this particular aspect of the game dev because now we're getting to the part where I'm testing out large numbers of AI agents on the screen at once.
I've found it remarkable how well Godot is coping with what I'm throwing at it. Almost certainly going to have to put some custom population limits for people to tweak for the sake of optimisation but I'm very hopeful about the performance of the game. In Unity this would have been a pain in the arse to pull off.
Currently in the process of debugging and making sure everything's good but once it is I'll have a new video up. Bearing in mind, construction mechanics is largely already done on the back end. I just need to add buildings and their individual behaviour for the villagers.
Must remember to make sure to disable bits before I have them do new stuff so I don't have to deal with the debugging nightmare I had before.
By the gods AI agent stress testing
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/111535271180394860
07/02/2024: Villager pickup and drop behaviour is in, need to get to work on the village centre construction which should work fine. I did a hell of a lot of setting up with the village centre so it would all work should just be a matter of spawning it in when the construction is finished now. Getting very hyper about this project lol honestly didn't think I'd make so much progress this quickly but things are so nice and quiet.
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/111887659695485538
Those anti woke arguments are good stuff. Good luck, this is a risky as fuck genre you picked up.
12/01/2024: I am working away on the options menu which isn't as bad as I thought it would be, this is the current default keybind layout and yes will be putting in customisation for it. Getting the options menu out of the way so I can focus purely on the gameplay next.
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/156/885/948/original/e69c15bcf31a880f.png
22/01/2024: I am getting stuff done! I thought I'd struggle with the keybinds but I found a great tutorial on it that wasn't too ridiculous and it saved me a ton of coding time. The main thing I've got to look up now is how to dump and grab dictionaries from files. Tested the keybinds and they're all working in runtime so it's just saving everything now.
https://gab.com/Lethn/posts/111800296803879728
Will also need to look at audio which should be more straightforward.