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I'm 2 years into development of my sandbox game, Moonman
- phoyce 13y agoCongratulations on your determination, persistence and effort. Seriously.
- eigenbom 13y agoThanks Hacker News for keeping me sane during that time. :)
- voltagex_ 13y agoLooks like Hacker News has also killed your DB!
- sfjailbird 13y agoHacker News giveth and Hacker News taketh away.
- avgarrison 13y agoGreat job handling the traffic spike by still giving us links so we can check out your game.
- chatman 13y agoMoonman? Like Neil Armstrong?
- mugenx86 13y agoCached: webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://bp.io/post/1501 http://bp.io/post/1501 Sounds like an interesting game. Too bad I can't see any of the images.
- mbel 13y agoHere [0] are some, together with development history (I hope OP won't mind me posting it). [0] http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21997.0 http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21997.0
- mweibel 13y agoClickable: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://bp.io/post/1501 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- alx 13y agoMoonman v0.4 in video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM
- dested 13y agoThis looks great. I would play this. Cant wait to see the progress.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- eigenbom 13y agoThanks guys. Sorry about the server crash! Follow me at https://twitter.com/eigenbom https://twitter.com/eigenbom for news about the game in future. [D:]
- jessedhillon 13y agoAt ~1:58 [0] there is what looks like a piece of pie in the dirt near Moonman. Is that an homage to Dan Piraro's Bizarro comic? He hides a piece of pie in every comic. [0] in this video from a sibling comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lna75hti3jM
- eigenbom 13y agoHeh, yeah it's a pie, but I've never heard of Bizarro. I was playing Fable 2 once, in which you can dig up pies, and my wife commented on how ridiculous that was. So the pie is an homage to her.
- sspiff 13y agoAs someone who tried repeatedly to make a game but never finished (or came as far as you have), I can only congratulate you on doing better. I could only see the video on youtube as the site is down, but it looks a lot like a "2D Minecraft". Not that that's a bad thing, but a lot of people will dismiss it because of this. Do you have any plans of expanding the gameplay into a direction different from Minecraft?
- eigenbom 13y agoThe mining and crafting is like the bread and butter of this genre, which I'm happy to call minecraft-like. I'm inspired by the traditional rogue-likes (like nethack) and modern ones (like brogue), so I hope to bring elements of those into the game. Procedural quests, ancient machines, and richer landscapes are also priorities.
- sspiff 13y agoProcedural quests and ancient machines sound promising. Good luck and keep up the good work!
- lucian1900 13y agoIt does look very interesting. Perhaps it would be better served by a look that is unlike Terraria, to prevent the knee-jerk reaction many people have.
- candydance 13y agoGoing off the youtube link in the hackernews discussion since the website is down, this seems to have exactly the same mechanics as Terraria. I'm curious to see if there's anything differentiating this game from Terraria.
- copx 13y agoTo me it looks like a pretty straight clone of Terraria and that game was a commercial success. Personally I didn't like Terraria though. Way too simple for my taste.
- johnyzee 13y agoLooks very cool - I love the idea of a deep platformer. I personally feel that (first-person) 3D is way overused, 'because we can', when it usually restricts rather than enhances gameplay.
- Impossible 13y agoI find it interesting that you took the classic advice of "just use Box2D" for a 2D platformer and it worked well for you. It doesn't seem like your game using anything much more complex than basic box vs. tile grid collision and doesn't use any of the advanced features of Box2D. No complex constraints, rigid body usage seems simple or non-existent, etc. I could be completely wrong about that though, this is all speculation based on the video and your devlog. What kind of issues were you running into with implementing tile based collision? Was it intersection tests with slopes? Performance issues? Stability (crashes)?
- eigenbom 13y agoIntersection tests mainly, I'm sure the reason is buried somewhere in the devlog. At the same time it looked like complex dynamic machines (with pistons, pivots and other parts) were also going to be a priority. It was definitely worth the extra effort, and I still have plans for simpler machines, rope-style bridges with connected parts, and more complex monsters which will no doubt have constraints between their parts. In addition Box2D has given me super quick spatial tests, which I use for melee, mouse-picking, and ray-casts for the particle system (which is a quick custom built thing).
- zerooneinfinity 13y agoNot to mention helps you solve some more advanced problems like tunneling and collision resolution with no extra effort. I think it was a very smart choice to use Box2D rather then rolling your own solution.
- Impossible 13y agoThose aren't advanced problems in most tile based platformers. It's pretty easy to solve tunneling by making sure you check every tile along your movement path for objects that try to move through more than one tile in a frame. Collision resolution is also simple in most platformers, clamp to the tile edge you intersect with and set velocity to zero. OP gave solid reasons for using Box2D though (machines, rope bridges, fast spatial tests).
- willvarfar 13y agoWow, hadn't seen http://www.tigsource.com/ http://www.tigsource.com/ nor its forums before! Is it the place to unveil your indie hobby games once they become big and playable?
- wingerlang 13y agoThey have a section for devlogs also, so you don't have to have it playable to unveil it.
- devindotcom 13y agoGreat website. They used to update news way more often but for a year or so now it's been more an active community than a frontpage.
- dvt 13y agoBeen following Moonman for 2 years :) I am a relatively quiet lurker on TIGSource but I can't wait until Moonman is finally out (as in.. out out). The playable demos so far have been amazing. Unfortunately, the start-up community is more cynical than the indie gaming one (blah blah Terraria clone). But, I for one, wish you good luck sir! I love the indie community because it fosters creativity over success; the process over the end result. Unlike the start-up community (where the exit is what really matters). I dabble in both. The realism on HN keeps me grounded but the naivete on TIG keeps me dreaming.
- eigenbom 13y agoThanks, glad you've liked it. Yeah I know this isn't really HN material and my game is fairly niche already. Nevertheless it seems there are some gamedev people on here, which is great to see. :)
- fredoliveira 13y agoHonestly, I think this is HN material. You built something awesome, that at least should inspire others here to get cranking on some of their own, "crazy" ideas. This looks great. I wish you the best with Moonman.
- eigenbom 13y agoThanks!
- CmonDev 13y agoTerraria is a clone itself. Also it's probably a separate genre already.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoWhat is Terraria a clone of?
- 13y ago
- tofof 13y agoAnd here I was excited by the prospect of a Terraria-clone set on the moon. .... Not so much. More like a terraria clone set on an atari 2600. Terraria devs, if you're listening - moon! Lunaria! It writes itself.
- eigenbom 13y agoset_gravity(1.622) set_landscape(flat_boring_and_homogenous) Done ;)
- James_Duval 13y agoWhat, like this? http://playstarbound.com/ http://playstarbound.com/
- Kiro 13y agoFix the server. I want to see the pictures.
- telephonetemp 13y agoIs there a standard FOSS world generating library for use in video games? I.e., one that would generate the right kind of 2D and 3D noise, average it out according to parameters, apply "biome" tags to regions, create underground tunnels, etc.? These tasks are probably typical enough that most games need not reimplement them.
- eigenbom 13y agoI uploaded a few images while I fix the server.. http://imgur.com/a/y7nC8 http://imgur.com/a/y7nC8
- CmonDev 13y agoTwo years full time? Impressive in any case.
- eigenbom 13y agoIt was probably about 1 year equivalent full time.
- progx 13y agoCool Idea ! Some Minecraft parts in 2D combined with a jump & run... and old console/c64 retro look :-)
- muhfreedoms 13y agoyay..another pixely indie game...yay..really..yay
- okamiueru 13y agoYou do know the reason behind why this tends to be the case, right? It's not like indie-developers have the man-power, resources and (sometimes) experience to make a AAA-game.
- brokenparser 13y agoMoonman is Minecraft 2D? I'm okay with this.
- Chrisplux 13y ago......
- babuskov 13y agoCool. I was considering making something like this a few months ago. Didn't know Moonman existed. Now I'll just remove that idea from my list and wait for you to finish it so I can play ;)
- xerophtye 13y agoWoah! AWESOME! You actually MADE all that? That's the ambitious kinda stuff I only manage to dream about. But you actually BUILT that stuff! Major Kudos! :D Please put it up on github! I am sure there's a ton of stuff we could all learn from it, not to mention we'd love to help, pushing the project closer to completion. (Unless of course you plan on putting the game on a market place and earning money from it)
- eigenbom 13y agoHa, thanks, yeah it's taken a while, and I took a lot of wrong turns. The game is commercial and so closed source, as I'm trying to turn this into a paid day job. And besides, my code is dense and horrible. ;)
- sillysaurus2 13y agoSigh... You can open source it and turn it into a paid day job. No one is going to not pay you because the code's available. That said, 2D Minecraft? Hell. Yes.
- xerophtye 13y agoYeah, how many do you think would want to compile the game themselves? :/
- xerophtye 13y agoWell then maybe open source bits and pieces of it? Because you list a lot of really cool stuff that you did in the game and we'd love to see that. You could just blog about it every now and then and explain some the really complex parts one at a time
- ph4 13y agoI love the music in the YouTube video. Anyone know of bands/groups that do something similar?
- eigenbom 13y agoThe music is by http://giolobato.com/ http://giolobato.com/ who has some more albums on bandcamp if you're interested.
- zomgbbq 13y agoThe background music and game sound effects are mellow, subtle and beautiful!