itch.io

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.

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:

I think i will pass but once again, thank you for the offer.

Sounds cool but I am broke af lmao, also it seems you've sent this request to many other folks aswell, I am confident i n my own ability to formulate my game's story with my sibling aswell but thank you for the offer.

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

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

Fair, I plan on completely updating the platformer controllers if I turn this into a full game. I also plan on adding other platformer mechanics like ledge grabbing

Thank you, I plan to turn this into a full game at some point so ill make sure to polish those platformer controls a bit lol. I think the gravity just picked up too quickly which I should be able to fix, problem was I only really got feedback from my brother about the gravity after most of the level design was done already

LOL. The funny thing is I actually just chose this grayscale artstyle because it was easier to make assets and I could focus on core mechanics rather than art. My brother commented it looked similar to limbo and after looking up some playthroughs of it, I designed the game with some inspiration from it.

Thanks! Im thinking of turning this into a full game. I have the idea and style in mind, Prob gonna do 1 or 2 smaller projects to practice my weaknesses before I start tho

Thanks! A couple people did also comment on the gravity, I think it picks up too fast, maybe next time I should be a bit more careful with the values on my platforming controller lol