Adding Weather and New Locations to my Voxel Game - Lay of the Land
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- Опубліковано 29 чер 2024
- Wishlist Lay of the Land on Steam
store.steampowered.com/app/27...
Support development and play the game early
Patreon: / tooley1998
Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/tooley1998
G'day everyone. I'd just like to start off by apologizing for the long delay between major updates and the lack of content in this update. The huge boost in popularity the game received from the building video lead to a huge number of bug reports and an extended hotfixing period. This is not a bad thing, I am extremely grateful for all the support and these bugs needed to be discovered and fixed at some point. I have also recently moved house 600km away from where I was living. As you can imaging this was extremely time consuming and I am only just now starting to get back into the swing of things. Now onto what's new:
Weather
I've added weather to the game. Each weather type can either be weak or strong. Also each biome can have unique weather e.g rain in Mystical Forest and dust storms in Outback Canyons.
Procedural Ambience System
I've made a procedural ambience system that places/adjusts ambient sounds depending on the surrounding environment/weather conditions. No more generic looping background ambience round here.
New Points of Interest
I have also added a variety of minor points of interest to the game. These replace the enemy camps you could find along roads. Their loot is currently super boring but that will change in the future.
linktr.ee/tooley1998 - Ігри
Wishlist Lay of the Land on Steam :)
store.steampowered.com/app/2776090
Support development and play the game early
Patreon: www.patreon.com/Tooley1998
Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/tooley1998
my steam deck is waiting 😅
@@luckydev3911 Right there with ya.
@@luckydev3911right
any chance it'll ever appear on GOG?
Pls, open early access on steam
If this game doesn't have a fishing mechanic already it NEEDS one.
hehe we'll see ;)
Agree!
I kind of agree too, but maybe it could be an update after release and he's clearly already got a very ambitious vision. But I do love fishing in games like this because it's just a nice atmosphere for something relaxing.
If a game has fishing in it, IM PLAYING IT!
singing bass please
Imagine snow where each snowflake is a voxel with collisions and it piled up on the ground where it lands. Man that would probably kill people's PCs haha
I think it's a great idea. I saw it done on a 2D game back in a DOS game on a 486. If you simplify the physics and simply give it a random direction to "roll off" and there are only 4 directions for which the snowflake rolls off another snowflake (on the ground), then as it stacks you have another heuristic to calculate when the snowflakes build or fall this would create pretty convincing snow.
They could do it that it is a particle when in the air, but once it lands it gets transformed into a voxel where it landed.
And then only do that for some of the particles, not all.
Or just randomly add snow voxels if its snowing.
Anthem actually promised that's what they be doing. Exept... yaknow.
And then melt into a water voxel that absorbs through dirt/sand, down to the water tables. And when the streams make their way back to the oceans, the water voxels evaporate into clouds, then back to rain or snow ;)
Sandstorm voxels could do damage to armor or HP.. that would be neat
aaaaah! the weather looks so good! keep up the great work!
Thanks!
Here is my humble opinion on where to expand this weather system into:
Seasons!
What good are seasons? They add a natural loop into the game that your other systems can hook into. And like weather, they alter the game world to feel a little less static.
What do you need for good seasons? Temperature and its effects. You need water to ice over, you need body temperature, you need weather systems to hook into it (rain to turn to snow, and maybe stormy seasons in certain biomes), and it needs to all happen per biome. It needs to affect crops, fishing and hunting per biome too.
If you add body temperature, it would be good to add simplistic room detection and heat sources, along with shade detection. You should rely on "status overlays" for extra immersion - a frosted up screen when you're freezing (and breath particles!), or a slight shimmer and bright vignette when very hot.
If you're going to have farming, it can be seasonal, and you can have a more complex system than just "plant whenever and it'll grow in 10 minutes". You can also add food preservation on top of this for winter months.
And since your trees look so nice, I wonder if having them shed leaves would be viable! You could have leaf particle effects in the autumn - the leaf voxels could change colour and eventually disappear. Haven't seen any other voxel game attempt that (likely for good reason - just an idea)
A lot of this leans more into survival gameplay, but part of the description on Steam is "How will you survive?", so maybe there's an interest in that.
In my opinion, open world exploration games need one of two things to be great in general:
- A winding, unfolding narrative that leads you around the world in a natural way
- A dynamic, dangerous world that pushes you to new places in order to survive.
The really good games have some mixture of both (like Subnautica, although it falls short in terms of being dynamic, the environment itself can crush you and you're always thinking about air, air capacity, swimming speed to get around, go deeper, go further) but it's very hard to get that right!
If there is to be no narrative, I think being dynamic is the way to go. Seasons help to pace and delineate that dynamism properly. If the game starts in the summer, you can forage for food and collect seeds all the way into autumn. If the food can go bad, it means you need a way to process and preserve it for when food is more scarce in the winter.
You can hook into specific "season ticks" (or simply "days") and have events that happen on the nth day of each season, perhaps escalating each year on top of that. This can be as fantastical as you want - for example, a blight or kind of rot that threatens to wipe all plants, fish or wildlife in a region because of some dungeon/boss nearby. Or maybe it poisons the water or causes acid rain - basically something you have to go "fix". Or problems could come directly to you, like being raided by enemies that grow stronger every year, etc. Or a combination of both!
So yeah, seasons. Just an idea dump for inspiration. I'd understand if it doesn't match the vision!
Vintage Story has seasons and it's the best thing! It's mildly annoying when someone else on the server plays for 20 hours when you're away and it's a new season when you login again though
Seasons are a bit tricky since time doesn't pass in unloaded chunks of the world. It would have to be done in a way that is more cosmetic so it can easily be converted from for example winter to summer instantly when you load a chunk that's been unloaded since previous seasons.
@@johalun maybe you could asynchronously load chunks, apply the season changes, then save them while the player's not moving much. It wouldn't be perfect, but at least the changes would happen. There's plenty of time to do this work on the background, in small batches to keep the memory usage low, while the player is busy building or remodeling their base.
Vintage Story's solution is that things that affect blocks, like snow accumulation happens once the chunks are loaded, but things that are counted up, like crop growth time or food spoilage are just caught up instantly by running the equation. It's Immersive enough that you don't really notice it in normal gameplay
Some things like ice thawing in spring will be noticeable if you go to a chunk that hasn't loaded since deep winter, but it's a good balanced solution
@@johalun You are right, although I would think that you should implement it from the beginning as a Master function that needs to be checked before the information of the chunk comes through, meaning that everytime a chunk is loading has to match the conditioned season and then start loading everything inside with the correct modifier applied to it. This way you will always have the correct condition for everything inside. The growing plants/crops have to pass through a mathematical equation to balance the timing when it was not loaded to the actual time.
I would like a pine forested area or other tall trees, Redwoods would be so cool
always looking forward to these updates :) keep up the good work
Thanks :)
love how the water's reflection acts realistic in a pixel stylized way that it doesn't feel out of place
also a mini suggestion would be to increase the speed of the foliage swaying a bit more during thunderstorm and dust storm to really emulate the speed of the wind and match the speed of the rain drops and dust particles
I know you probably get a lot of gameplay recommendations, but I'll just put this out there. I think having emergent gameplay is vital to an open world game like this. If you can somehow make NPCS, like villagers, who interact with each other, the environment, and other NPS without the player, that creates an immersive world where stories and events happen naturally and unpredictably. Like villages generate new building if they have enough resources, rebuild after fires, get attacked with real consequences that the player can see. A world that is alive and interacting with itself, like in dwarf fortress (I know that is a big complicated ask, but some semblance of it) creates a game that a player will never get tired of playing in. It has lore that happens because of sheer cause and effect of the games mechanics.
Oh god, so many times this. Dwarf Fortress has stood the test of time because of this exact reason (besides the level of detail it generates everything with).
This is also why rain world is so praised and we still make Oblivion memes to this day
that's a ridiculous amount of work tho
Found the guy that has zero experience with programming lol
There isn't really a game that does this besides Dwarf Fortress though. I haven't played Dwarf Fortress, but I believe you when you say it. But you are asking a solo dev to create something that doesn't exist in any other open world game, that's just unrealistic.
I'd love the option to turn keep inventory off. If you're worried about entity lag, your corpse/tombstone could act like a chest, holding all your items.
I love the risk associated with carrying your valuables in treacherous lands & needing to recover them if you're reckless. It's a crucial mechanic for a survival game, especially if you ever plan to add multi-player.
It would be even cooler if that were something the player could choose for themselves to use or not, rather than have it forced on them. That way both types of players could enjoy the game, both those who like the risks and challenges of recovering your valuables through hostile territory without the protective gear you are trying to recover, and those who don't like the grind of entering a dangerous location far from your respawn point to recover items you may have spent a long time to acquire simply because of an accidental death in a game. Both perspectives and play styles are valid, but to force one play style over another excludes an entire group of players just to service the other. If it were a selectable option, both groups could play the way they prefer without preventing the other from their own play style. For those desiring fairness in the style of sameness, you could have a "Equal Versus Mode" of PvP play wherein all players of a given instance must be using the same settings. One could also have a "Freestyle Versus Mode" of PvP where anything goes and the Keep Inventory crowd could pit their strategies against Recover Inventory crowd knowingly. Multiple play styles available allow for a wider range of experiences without sacrificing specific play styles for those wanting a single style of play experience.
@@AdamBragg you say that but as the community grows bigger people are just going to hate on the "keep inventory" option, it shouldn't be choice.
@@Cry_ct I disagree. None the less, it is a decision the game designer will eventually need to tackle - permit a wide range of play styles or enforce a specific way to play. In either direction he will be choosing who will want to play his game.
@@Cry_ct I also disagree, just because you hate it, doesn't mean everyone else are going to hate it too. And why would anyone bother to "hate" an option you just have the right to use or not? It does not make any sense to me. Can you elaborate what you mean?
@@AdamBragg i said it should be a choice in my comment
After watching you along through this whole series, I have some suggestions:
• fireflies. Someone in your video on day/night cycles mentioned this and I wanted to expand on it. I have a couple ideas for these, they can just be flying around randomly, but I think it’d be cool if they hover in groups and kind of make their own paths that lead to specific landmarks. That way you can use them by following them to ruins and other such treasures. I think it would also be really cool if you could put them in jars and hang them up as permanent light fixtures, whereas torches would go out in a day or two. That way nighttime could be more realistically dark while also still being fair and lit up.
• certain enemies are immune to certain things. I’ve already seen that the skeletons seem to be immune to fire, but maybe making them charred when you try to use fire on them would be cool. And maybe if you used fire on those wind enemies they would just absorb the fire and become fire tornadoes instead which deals more damage to the player. It be pretty cool if certain weapons backfire when used on certain enemies, and it would balance the magic system a bit better than just nerfing them.
• Birds & variants. I think that it would be cool if you added birds into the game and that’s where the ambient bird noises came from (like the kookaburra). It would also be cool if you could collect the feathers from them and make wings at some point, but I don’t know if that’s too much. It’d also be cool if you had variants of some of the wildlife you already have, I’m pretty sure you replaced the old deer model with a new one, but I kind of like both so it’d be cool if both were in the game just as variants.
• Hinges. Imagine if you could make the hinges of doors so that you can customize them all you want. I don’t know how hard that would be to make, especially because of collisions, but it seems that with the doors you have at the moment there’s already a slight issue with collisions, so I don’t think it would be that big of a deal? I think it would make for some pretty neat contraptions when people got creative with it.
• Enemy damage when attacked. I think it would be cool if enemies got damaged over time, and it would be really cool if you could disable them by shooting off an arm for example. Then an enemy could pick up the weapon with their other arm. This would be even cooler with the golem boss, if you made it so that one voxel would get removed each time you hit him and that would diminish his power overtime. It would also be cool if when you shot deer (for example if you shot them in their leg), their leg would go limp and they would be slower and therefore easier to catch. That way it would be way harder for beginner players to catch deer because of how fast they are (if you increase their speed), but pro players would know to sneak up on them and then shoot their leg before they start running.
(Sorry for the word salad…)
Another thing is that I REALLY wanted to make some foley and possibly a soundtrack for this game since I first saw it, and I wanted to contact your Email about it, but I can't find it so I'll put this here...
I really adore this game since it reminded me of Cardlife which is a game that has a similar premise but with cardboard. Recently I completed a project that I was passionate about that ended up not releasing, and I thought that I could use some of those sounds from our game but reused in yours (specifically with UI interactions). I think that they would fit PERFECTLY so if you wanna hear, just lmk a way to contact you if that's ok? I also made a bossfight song for our game and so I wanna see what you think of my style and if I could try to make something for your game.
Best of luck with the development of this project.
As a person that has played a lot of Minecraft over the years, i am really looking forward to this game. Just keep on going and never forget one thing: to make the thing really successfull, you gotta do what all long lasting very successfull games do and make it orbit around the community. The two single most important things it needs to have is 1: Multiplayer and 2 A bunch of possibillities for the player to see this game from a creator standpoint. Add a creative mode with tons of features and modding integration whilst keeping performance in mind and there you go. You just made Minecraft but better and I say this as a MC player that played the game for thousands of hours in all areas and knows basically almost everything about the game (really not trying to show off, if I need to point this out).
Awesome! Indeed amazing!
I'd like to add fishing to this game, and one physical change: when player goes up the hill, his speed decreases, but when he goes down, it increases. It will bring more sense of the landscape.
Also it would be good to see multiplayer in this game, I think it's actually needed.
And the last thing in my opinion is quests. Just imagine, fantasy world entirely made by dreamers and since if you can upload world with quests online, it will keep game alive and interesting not to spend several hours in it, but dozens of hours or days
Sandstorms and blizzards are my favorite atmosphere in any game because it closes the world in around you increasing immersion
That rain is bound to completely mess up youtube video compression, but it's immersive! It would be interesting if the weather effect changed the gameplay like the wind messing up projectile trajectories or fire propagation.
This might be the most impressive devlog I'm following.
I will pay good money for this game when it's ready.
I just wanted to say, please take your time! We can't wait to play this game, but we can wait for it to be done right and as intended. I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that for me, your game brings me so much hope for the future. It brings back that much needed passion-project vibe I want to see more of in games (like a certain other "blocky" game used to quite some time ago). Keep up the excellent work!
Also, congrats on the new place. Hope it is to your liking and working out for you!
This is the only thing I'm excited for.
looks incredible, so grateful to be able to watch you progress on ur journey. the directional rain is super immersive. im a big rain fan and love realistic rain and the cosiness that comes from sitting in ur base while it rains outside, or the immersion that comes from hunting animals under the cover of rain. fantastic work.
I love how the rain accurately falls through the windows. I know its because there isn't any glass but still cool to see the rain accurately blocked by the voxels.
That looks very atmos, so cool! Keep going bro!
This looks incredible!
looks amazing! Keep going!
Incredible as always!
God tier game thus far. I love the consistency of this game. Everything is made of these voxels.
Looking awesome!
It's really impressive how good the performance is with such small voxels and wide view. I would be really interested in the optimization behind it.
This game gets better and better with each update!
I love how's your game's progressing very GOOD!! 👍❤
i have this on my steam wishlist, cant wait for it to come out!
Everything about this is amazing and gorgeous
WOW I love this game ! Good luck !
Love it. Wow! You are a genius.
This is impressive! Keep up the good work.
I love seeing the lighting in the distance.
Nice job!
I can see myself playing as if it was my first time exploring Minecraft
I’m genuinely impressed. This is phenomenal work. The water physics are incredible
i havent been this excited for a game since i was a kid.
This is looking great 👌👌👌
weather is such a crucial element in bringing a world to life
Absolutely stunning, jaw dropping environments at a voxel scale. Deep admiration here. Love it & thank you for your time & effort. 💙🌱
love it. My first impression is that the pooling reflection effect is a bit too much but that could be just me. Reminds me of when my Minecraft RTX normal maps break and everything looks shiny.
The ambiance and the music choice has teleported me back to Daggerfall.
Thank you!
Looks awesome, Its amazing how many stuff u add with each update!
Btw, I think adding animals or small critters or something like that may make world seem more alive. I can see there are big monsters and animals, but you know, some butterflies, bees, rabbits or something :D
Man...this looks so goooooooood!
i love these vids and the game looks so awesome :3
this looks incredible
THIS IS SO AWESOME 😍
This is really amazing.
Amazing game, This is a nice update I'm personally waiting for full release to record more videos. Is the crashing issue fixed yet btw?
What an incredible game! I am so excited for Lay of the Land!
The rain and other weather effects look very nice. Looking forward to playing it someday. Also, it would be nice to have some mechanical parts to the game as well, like cogs, windmills, wheels, etc.
Modding for this game will be amazing
The interiors look so cozy and warm, I just want to sleep in one during a storm
I have not been more excited for a game in a good while
Wauw the ambience reminds me so much of morrowind in the best way!!!
I await patiently for a release build of your game. Between the music and art style It makes me think about TES:Oblivion and the wonderful memories I have with that game. My mouth is foaming and frothing for the building system you've got as well. ❤❤❤
Wow. Very breathtaking. Didn't realize it before, but the roads really make the game feel alive like it's a real world with people living in it.
this is torture! It looks amazing but we still have to wait :(
but take your time for perfection. Great work
Dust storms look straight out of Morrowind, love it!
I forgot to subscribe last time, looking forward to try it!
cant wait to play this game
Oh, this recording must weight a full hard-drive :D
this is looking amazing already, even as a WIP I'm already pumped into testing the building mechanic of this game
That is a seriously beautiful game!
Super super cool! How did you get the rain to fall in from he windows?
Great looking game already, so atmospheric!
Just added it to my wishlist. Looking forward to a release date!
Incredible work Tooley
Thanks so much
Greetings from Nerkin!
mood: "Under sun and sky, outlander. We greet you warmly."
This looks so good...
You should add some camera effects so it looks like you're walking, not gliding
Whatever you do, it's the best
looking great as always!
It reminds me a lot of Noita, I both wish this has some absurdly in depth secret ARG and also don't want to ever go through that pain again.
I love the graphics and the ambient sounds, this game will be awesome when its finished! Btw does this game use a raytracing shader?
This game looks crazy good, i love it and cant wait till it releases
This is looking awesome!! Two questions for you, what if you made the grass and trees react to rain, and can the windmill turn?
I am so keen for this game
Thanks to a UA-camr named nerkin, I found out about this game and am really looking forward to the release, good luck with development!
This looks awesome! One suggestion is that you could make the grass, plants and trees dynamically sway in the wind, I really think that it would make the game come alive!
im so excited
The weather system looks really good, I especially like that it seems to cast "rays" from a direction, leading to it raining through the windows in the video - Very cool!
However I would add a little bit more wind-like movement to vegetation in the rain, and the reflections look to still for the rain(maybe add ripples/distortions?).
Wow! All that's left to do is animate the vegetation during the storms and it will be perfect! This game looks really promising.
That's beautiful...
I'm in love with how this looks. Good work!
My two cents: flowing bodies of water like streams should, imo, have carved a bit more of the terrain away. That way you could have stream and river surfaces sit a couple of voxels beneath the surrounding terrain height rather than be flush with it. As it stands, the streams currently look like a texture/material change that is painted onto the terrain height map.
I don't knbow who you are and what this is but I love the feel of it. I'm glad this got recommended to me.
First time I heard about this game. Looks interesting. Wishlisted it and will see how it progresses. While watching the video I noticed that in many scenes it looks like the person you are playing is very tiny, just slightly bigger than the grass. It may be an illusion, but it stuck out to me, so I thought it might be worth mentioning.
this is so good
Your mystical forest lakes needs some lighting as particle effects. You could add fireflies or fairy Pixies dancing around in the air
The weather themselves already make an immersive experience for me. The dust storm especially reminds me of Morrowind, a sight of red ashes but seemingly beautiful.
One of the things I'd like added into this game is attributes. It requires not to be complicated, but rather simple and direct. In a given example can be:
Strength where you can increase your attack damage.
Magic where you can use arcane arts to cast spells.
Agility where you can increase your overall movement speed, attack speed and even unlock double jumping.
Durability where you can increase your overall health and defense.
I think that these attributes can provide a more immersive gameplay experience for all of us players given that it gives a sense of freedom to choose how we play and what methods we use in our adventures.
There are tons of other attributes out there too that can be implemented but I think these four makes it all up to be as essential in a game where combat and exploration are features.
I'd like attributes to be a feature in this game as I think the game provides lots of exploration and I think that with the addition of these attributes, it'll make the gameplay much more exciting and more immersive.
Such an amazing looking game.
Man, standing ovation 👏
The grass walk sound somehow sounded like a grocerybag being swished behind me.
It'd be awesome if you could save blueprints of structures that you've built before. You could funnel resources into this 3d blueprint until all the resource requirements are met. Upon putting all the resources into the blueprint, it'll begin to automatically construct itself.
So that players can't abuse this & just build a mansion in a second, the construction should take time; in accordance with the quantity of resources needed & the blueprint's scale over large distances.
There could even be a 'blueprint mode' that you could switch into on the fly. A flat world where you have an unlimited amount of resources to build as many prebuilt structure blueprints that you wish. There could even be a sharing system, where one can exchange these blueprints with others.
Your favorite house that you've spent hours on could be saved as a blueprint for later use.
looks dope
Hell! So damn beautiful!
Man, this looks so good already...
HOLY SHIT. This is INCREDIBLE!
Will the game have a flood system? That would be an impressive difference. Don't build your house next to the river, when it rains you will lose it! Great work !