Flask & Barrel

Hi Everyone,   Back again! I've got a fun one this time around with version 0.4.0. First off, this project finally has an official title! I'm happy to announce... Flask & Barrel! Now, on to the new stuff! Highlights  Site Updates I did some work recently to clean up this site. I tried to make it a bit more visually consistent, and hopefully make it a little easier to search for Lighting and Rendering The new lighting system caused quite the headache with this update, and it took a bulk of the work. I tried a lot of different ways of making the lighting more dynamic and realistic, but, as per usual, isometric is hard . The core of it comes down to the fact that the engine "pretends" that the scene has depth, when in reality it is just fancy math being done on a 2D plane. I ended up creating an entirely new rendering system to be able to better talk with the GPU and use shaders more easily, and that's allowed for some fun stuff.  I think it could be better, but

Hi Everyone,   I'm back from the dead. My last post was well over a year ago, announcing v0.2.0. v0.2.0 was a bit of a mess, strung together to make nice looking GIFs and screenshots. The code was an absolute nightmare, and there were some fundamental problems with my engine that really worried me about the reality of this becoming a game. It became really daunting to work on, and I ended up falling out of the project entirely for a few months.   During this lapse in progress, I was able to spend a lot more time making pixel art. A lot more time writing. A lot more time with the piano. A lot more time playing other people's games. It was a needed reminder that I was making a video game because video games are made out of the things I enjoyed doing, not the other way around. So, here we are. Version 0.3.0, and its quite the doozy. Grab a snack because this is going to be a long one. Highlights  World Design We have a new town! The town design has been fleshed out pretty well no

 Hi everyone, So it's been a while. I'm back with another update. Before I get into that, today is the one year anniversary of my first post on this site so there's some celebration to be had there. 2022 will also mark 3 years since the PixelEngine in its current state came about, so cheers to that as well. To make up for the lack of updates the past 4 months, this one is jam packed, and is a full v0.X release. Let's start out with the obvious, the new art. I've added quite a few new things to the game. We have trees and vegetation now, as well as several new buildings and ground tiles. I've been trying to pick up the pace with the art so I don't get buried in it.     Next up, I have added the framework for NPCs into the game. Currently they're very basic, but they can walk around and the player can interact with them (right now they just have some arbitrary dialogue appear over there head when you interact with them). From here it will be very easy to a

  Hi everyone,   I'm back after some extended time off without updates. Here I present to you v0.1.0, the Brewing Upd -- wait a minute I've said all this before.   Surprise, surprise, its been about 2 months since my last update and I haven't much to show for it. Progress on the game has slowed down quite a bit in recent weeks, so I don't really have anything to post about. I've gotten a new job that is a bit more involved and I'll have less time on breaks to sort through minor problems and make minuscule progress towards adding features. While seeing this to release is still one of my biggest life goals it doesn't exactly pay the bills.   I've decided to take a day or two out of every week to really just sink a few straight hours into the game and hopefully make up for the loss of progress. I hope to make updates more frequently as I establish a good schedule between work and the game, as well as my free time that's required elsewhere.   I thi

Hi everyone,   I'm back after some extended time off without updates. Here I present to you v0.1.0, the Brewing Update. Unfortunately, this one will be a light one since most of this has already existed.   A lot of behind the scenes work went into getting this to work alright, but brewing is now a fully implemented system with relatively few bugs. Because of the nature of this work, there isn't a whole lot to show this month. While you can now make potions and all their pertinent data like how long you've cooked them, what additives are in them, etc. is all there, there's no final use for any of it. I do believe that this is a good ground work, I do not want to put too much energy or detail into it when it could get a large overhaul soon if it doesn't fit well with other planned features     Speaking of planned features.... I wanted to talk about the road map for this game. If you've been keeping up with the Trello board, there's a lot of debate between pres

Hi again,   This month I present to you, v0.0.2; the Potion Update! This one is pretty exciting for me as this is the first real gameplay feature that is part of the game. You can view the demo clip below:     I'll break down what's going on here since I've never fully explained it. First, the player can open the "Tank". The tank is the first brewing machine in the process. Here you add your base ingredient, and the tank is automatically filled with water. The tank brews for a bit and creates a "wash" or "wort" (haven't decided yet). This wash is the base for your potion, and the base ingredient is responsible for the modifier of the potion effect.   Once the tank is finished, the wash automatically moves to the Kettle. In the future, this will probably be done with some player controlled valves and pipes, I haven't gotten that far yet. The kettle has an input slot, here you add in the main ingredient of your potion, this ingredient is

Hi Everyone!   Its been just over a month, which means its time for another monthly update! These past two months have been a bit slow, but luckily this is my last week of any kind of traveling for work so I should be back on my regular schedule. This month I have a fun announcement, I've decided to consider the game as it is as an early release version, v0.0.1. I've decided to take up classic semantic versioning, vX.Y.Z, where an X iteration is a major overhaul or milestone, like full release. Y signifies major updates and content expansions, and Z signifies smaller updates and bug fixes. This update is the inventory update, a smaller update that contains a significant amount of UI work, and some actual things you can do/interact with in the world. First and foremost, let me introduce you to developer mode. This is what I am looking at about 99% of the time I'm actually running the game, I've just decided to call it something. As you can see, there's quire a bit go