Prelude

So, I'm about a month into this project and I decided to make a devlog - mostly to document my process for the future but it also means people can join me for the ride (if they're interested!). I've already written the first few sections to this devlog once before accidentally tapping the "Back" button on my mouse and only then realising that itch.io doesn't have an auto-save feature :(

If I seem a little salty about that, you'd be right.

Anyway! Let's rewind; back to August we go!

Humble Beginnings

I started out this project wanting to make a strategy game (weird how these things turn out, huh?), but with the added twist of making your own world to play in. In most strategy games you'll spawn into either a pre-made or randomly generated map. Well in Landraisers, there'd be nothing but an empty watery wasteland to start off with! You'd use mystical devices called (surprise surprise) Landraisers. These would raise terrain and objects (such as trees and other resources) from the ocean which you'd then use to your advantage.

So I made a tile system. Added the Landraiser (which would raise dirt and then simulate grass growth and erosion to ensure it wasn't just a jumbled mess of tiles), added a player to control it all, made objects, implemented object placing, a temporary inventory, then I-- hang on a minute, I've accidentally made a sandbox game..!

And there we have it, Landraisers is now a sandbox game!

Proper Pixels

I'm not somebody who can stand to look at bad looking games, a thought I'm sure I share with many others. So in the interest (and sanity) of my own two eyes, I spent a while using an actual palette, putting in some actual effort, and adding some semi-decent shadows, and this is what came out the other side!

The shadows look a little off for now, because the pixel ratio doesn't match everything else so the shadows are 4x higher resolution than the game, but we'll solve that later. It was important to get shadows in the game because, being a top-down 2d game, you can't see the sky! And in a game with a day/night cycle we need a reliable way for players to be able to tell how much daylight they've got left. So instead of tracking The Sun (other celestial bodies are available), the player is able to track the shadows along the ground to determine the time of day.

Another weird quirk about this screenshot is the logs. When placed vertically next to each other, there's a gap in-between! Or, there appears to be, anyway. This is because the objects are 12x8, while the tiles are 8x8, which gives the objects "height", but means they don't stack up properly. The way to solve this problem was to ensure the 12 vertical pixels would be split in a 1:2 ratio, with the top 4 pixels for the "top" of the block and then the remaining 8 pixels for the "side". This means that I can then simply duplicate the 4 "top" pixels over the top of the gap to make it appear as if the gap is filled with another log.

Content Galore

Over the next week, I went absolutely crazy with progress. Adding all sorts of actual survival-game content such as a crafting system, plants, animals, weather, lighting... I won't go into all of it in great detail or else this post will end up longer than all the reasons I think itch.io should have an auto-save feature. I will simply dump some screenshots here for your viewing pleasure! More details on how it all works will come in the future, when it's all relevant.

I haven't been completely lazy since the last screenshot on the 6th, I've spent the last few weeks fairly busy and the time I have spent on Landraisers has mostly been engine work preparing for the future, in order to streamline development.

Future plans

So, the future of Landraisers.

The eventual cycle of the game will be to raise land using the Landraiser, and then use all the resources it provides for you in order to construct the next tier up. In total there will be 5 tiers of Landraiser, and they will be able to raise anything from simple trees all the way up to Dungeon Entrances (leading to randomly generated dungeons), Chasms, and whatever other mysteries I decide to add. In addition to this there'll be all the normal survival-sandbox game tropes of base-building, farming, fishing, etc. And yes, multiplayer will be a thing so you can create a world with friends.

Sandbox-Survival-Dungeon Crawler - here we go; let's get developing!

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