This Week’s Update

Hello friends and welcome to this week’s update. The true work has started in earnest now and I’ve started on an exciting and vital aspect of the game world. Read on to find out what - but first, the next section will be guest written by our talented pixel artist auilix

Growing Gliese’s Forests, From the Roots Up

The forests of the artist’s youth

I admit, I thought that developing the forests of a planet through pixel art would be an easy first step into Settle Gliese’s generated alien world. I love trees and the comfort of forests and, armed with references and scholarly articles (check out these prehistoric trees!, I started off emulating tilesets of the trees from games gone by:

Ah, repeating tree tiles as far as they eye can see

Going in this direction was hearkening back to my own history with older consoles and JRPGs but was quite out of touch with the built up history of roguelikes and their much more constrained visual language.

The original Rogue (1980)

A forest in Dwarf Fortress (2002)

Even modern roguelikes tend to use limited sprites or ASCII art to evoke their worlds and inhabitants, resulting in a unique look and mood. With this in mind, I turned towards pictographic and logographic languages as an inspiration and began to draw up more conceptual representations of trees. Deconstructing trees and pushing symbolic meaning in the limited constraints of 16 x 24 pixel tiles let to some crop circle-ish results:

The top right tree partially inspired by a blanket my mom crocheted for me

I think my personal favourite of this series was on the middle row on the right which looks like it could be related to the Nazca geoglyphs of South America. Though these trees were recognisable enough, the main problem was that they’d be too limited in scope to be able to express Settle Gliese’s 40+ different planned biomes with that much diversity. So it was back to the Aesprite board to develop something both symbolic but not too pared down, with room for lots of biodiversity and personality.

Please excuse the in-development wanderers who are modelling the forest for us

These circuit board-esque trees hit the right spot for us. They look like they could be of some future age while at the same time wouldn’t look that out of place on an illuminated manuscript. And their complexity feels right for the look and feel of changing regions as you move throughout the world, while not straying too far from the look of its genre. The next step for me will be expanding this design to flora and fauna and fully visualising Gliese’s first biomes. More on that soon!

Introducing Players to the World

Thanks for that, auilix! Whilst they’ve been busy working on that, I can share for the first time in a world exclusive what exciting things I’ve been working on this week. That’s right guys - it’s the tutorial.

via GIPHY

Perhaps not the most thrilling for the readers of this blog, but an important part of the game. In the alpha, you were simply dropped on an alien planet and left to get on with things. Lots of players, especially those new to the text based roleplaying genre, would simply run off into the wilderness before speaking to anyone and get lost out there until they inevitably starved to death. I decided to provide some context to the game to help new playeres out - maybe they will still run off into the wild with their first character, but they will at least understand what they should be trying to do when creating their second. Rather than just show them a wall of text, I decided an interactive tutorial might be more entertaining. I’m about halfway done with it, and wanted to share my progress with you dear reader. The artwork is not ready so you’ll have to use your imagination.

When you first start a new game, you will find your character alone in a tiny apartment here on earth

The door will be locked. Eventually you will figure out the only thing you can do is sit at your desk and turn your computer on.

For a while, you will entertain yourself by playing pong, or perhaps some other moderately entertaining task

Click on the image to see it full size

And then you will be interrupted with an advert. If you press escape, you can return to the safety of your apartment. But for those brave (or bored) enough to press any key, will be taken to the ‘registration form’.

A fully filled out registration form. Click on the image again to see it full size

This page is intended to get players thinking about the personality of their character. Players new to text based roleplaying games tend to invent flawless individuals which can be uninteresting to interact with, so I have included some questions like ‘what are your weaknesses’ to guide these players towards making more nuanced characters. I had great fun randomly generating answers. Once this page is filled out, you are taken to a spaceship en route to the planet, where you will be shown a bit more about the world, and choose who to embark with.

Let me know what you think about the character creation page - if you have any good answers to the questions, they’ll be added to the auto generator and appear in the final game!

Next week I’ll be working on what happens when you’ve submitted your form and find yourself on a spaceship heading straight for the planet Gliese. You’ll meet a couple of interesting characters who explain the strange world you’ve found yourself in further.