Category «Videos»

Mops & Mobs: Dev log for the weeks from 26-07-06

Friedrich:
After a re-evaluation of the next story chapter's quest line, I'm finally back on track, mostly. I'm writing new characters and quests, and while they're still pretty rough, I think I found the right direction going forward - especially with Jana's ideas for the last chapter it should all fit together. I plan to add some puzzle elements to the game that are a bit more than the usual button combination riddle, and already prepared some functionality for them. The final form is still TBD though. And there's now a debug menu that lets the tester teleport to each NPC in the current level - an addition that became important in the new level due to its verticality.
Jana and I also recorded a new dev diary, where we talk about the dither effect, additional localisations for the demo, and atmospheric soundscapes (which is why our voices are not always perfectly audible, oops).


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Jana:
I think we love trees, they play a role – at least a very visual one – in nearly all of our games. Why shouldn't a game set in a dungeon not have trees, too? Patrick already made some nice trees for the game and in my level (end content time!) there is an important one as well; it doesn't quite look like it yet. The long and short of it: I'm working on the final level, its new color code, a tree – oh, and on the Dark Dwarves living close to the area. Now excuse me for the boring screenshot that doesn't show anything interesting from the level nor its new color.

Patrick:
I continued to work on the huts a bit more. They are now all a little bit different from the outside and inside and I could really imagine to live there for some time.
The next big thing on my list is the giant fortress of the inhabitants of level 4. I made a lot of concepts and kinda all go a little bit in the direction of Mayan architecture or have some elements of it. Friedrich wanted a bit more brutalistic style so I still try to find a way between those two architecture styles. At the moment the walls are more like giant chalk stones that are crafted of one singe piece. The columns and balustrades will be similar to it, more big pieces instead of smaller pieces like in the previous levels, but I still want to incorporate some Mayan elements. That's next what I have to figure out with the texture and the 3D geometry.

More dev logs from Mops & Mobs!

Apologies for not posting here more often - we really should get back to that. The truth is that we do not get much feedback here, so most of our game updates are currently posted on Discord, where we reach our small community directly, on the Steam forum and on IndieDB. But yeah, Discord, Steam and IndieDB are owned by other people, and this blog is actually ours. And it's also very long-lived now, which is pretty cool and it would be sad to let it die just because of convenience.

For a few months now we post weekly updates of Mops & Mobs. The basic idea was to let each team member (Jana, Patrick and myself) write a few sentences of what they achieved the last week and then collect that, add a screenshot, and post this small dev log on the game's Steam forum. As Jana created an IndieDB page for Mops & Mobs, it also made sense to use the articles section there for this (with the additional benefit of having a site to host the screenshots). And finally, just posting the updates on Discord was a no-brainer anyway. But of course feeding three different platforms is already a bit exhausting, and I'm not automating this in any way, so I didn't even think of this blog.

Still, a little update here is in order. This is what the latest entry of our dev log looks like (yes, it actually spans two weeks, because life got a bit into the way).

Dev log for the weeks from 26-05-25:

Friedrich:
So this is another two-week devlog entry, because we had some off-time for a few days (no laptops during the weekend :O), and in the second week I got pretty sick. Still, I did some stuff. I gray-boxed the fourth level and did some more quest plans for it. Right now I try to make these plans more concrete, which somehow is more difficult than ever, probably because my own standards raised during the process. Other than that I added small bits to the levels, wrote dialogs, added a quest, and fixed a few bugs. One big change to our project was switching the extension of our dialog files - don't laugh, this was much more involved than it sounds, and it was necessary because I got very annoyed how Godot would always reformat the JSON dialogs and pollute our commits this way … Finally, I made sure that the demo will soon have an additional localisation. I hope next week I'll be back on track.

Jana:
In preparation of gamescom I sent out some material for our group exhibition, followed by the pitch deck for potential publishers. Fingers crossed we eventually draw attention to a cool supportive publishing team.
The other big task was planning: I'm working on the character arcs for two of our main monsters, Wyrmheimer the dragon and Odette the lich knight, while also creating a character with Friedrich (writing) and Johannes (art) who you'll meet in the later chapters. And who has quite the story AND look AND involvement – so agreeing on a look is quite the challenge.

Patrick:
The only thing I made (modelled and textured) the first week was a mysterious stele. You need it to get into … a special room. That's all I can say. I was a bit down that week so I was going to make some 3D stuff at the weekend. Do you like digging through walls? If yes, then I made the perfect thing for you in the second week … a super heavy drilling machine! It rumbles, it puffs, and it'll soon be blazing its way into the depths of the dungeon… known as Level 4. :D I've also started working on this particular level. Friedrich created some cool level block-out for me, which I now have to fill in with nice looking 3D models.

Let's see if I can cater our official blog with the weekly dev log too. Would be nice. Oh, and there's a second AND third video now, with the fourth one coming soon:


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That's a lot of Mops & Mobs to digest, I guess. If this is TL;DR for you, just be assured that we're still working on the game, that we're still motivated, and that we hope to finish it this year. Which might be a tad too optimistic.

We started a dev log for Mops & Mobs

Mops & Mobs is growing - the demo, and the dungeon behind it. Much of that growth has happened in the shadows so far. Now it’s time to open the dungeon hallways: with our first dev log, we take you into the depths of development. How it all began, what changed along the way, and where the dungeon is heading: Welcome to the dungeon!


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Ray-caster – an experiment

I participated in a Kajam, which is an regular-ish game jam hosted on alakajam.com with different hosts. If you remember classic Ludum Dare, this is the equivalent to a Mini Ludum Dare, where hard rules like ‘everything must be from scratch’ or the weekend time-frame are much more relaxed. The theme of this particular Kajam, running the whole January 2021 and hosted by toasty, was “make a game based on ray casting”, and one could interpret this any way possible, but of course the basic idea is to get your hands dirty and actually try to create a ray-caster. If you don’t know what that is, the most prominent example for a ray-caster is Wolfenstein3D from 1991, back when there was no 3D hardware for PCs.

Wolfenstein3D, by id Software

My entry for the jam became a ray-casting engine with a very rudimentary level editor, or a sandbox if you’re generous. I had some gameplay ideas, but as I could not work fulltime on the project, and most of my experiments didn’t result in anything playable, the state for now is that there’s just no game. Yet for me, creating a ray-caster, based on tutorials on lodev.org, was a feat in itself, so I still wanted to submit it. With only one weekend left I decided to make it a “playful” level editor - meaning the editing (placing walls, changing textures, resizing the rooms, etc.) happens inside the “game” in first-person perspective. While this is actually not really an efficient way to create a level, it definitely makes it a bit more interesting and fun.

Textured walls, the first highlight

I utilized haxe, Kha and zui for this project. The first two I already tried for another software rendering project - the “Ray Tracing in a weekend” version I did 2 years ago. So I knew Kha could be used to just draw some pixels (probably grossly under-using this framework), and I like how it supports virtually every platform. The latter was a life-saver for me because the web version turned out to be not ‘compatible’ with my input method (as locking the mouse cursor always is a risk in browsers). But the Windows build turned out fine, after I had to fix a surprising bug which switched the textures’ red and blue channels. Zui, the go-to solution for tool GUIs for Kha, was relatively easy to understand (after quite some tinkering with the elements), but unfortunately it doesn’t feel as powerful and flexible as the Immediate GUI I know from Unity. Still, it was much better than nothing, and helped me to add edit functionality quite easily.

Final (jam) version of my ray-caster, with editor

Features of my ray-casting “engine” are, for now:

  •  textured walls, floors and ceilings
  • 3(!) block layers (bottom, center, top)
  • sprites (for the center layer only)
  • more or less correct display of infinite wrapping levels
  • collision with walls

It also supports different wall textures for each block side, but this feature isn't shown in this prototype unfortunately, because I had no time to add an editor mode for this. As I have a lot of overdrawing (mostly thanks to the top and bottom block layers) the performance is worse than it could be, and with infinite wrapping levels fps get low very fast as soon as you have a bit more sprites visible at once. Still, it’s good enough for me, because I do not target DOS machines like some of the more impressive entries of the Kajam do.


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Most pictures (textures for the walls, and five of the seven sprites) were pulled from textures.com. This is also only rudimentary, as there is no game; but I expected to use photos for the environment from the beginning anyway, for whatever game I would do; I am still inspired by Ultima Underworld II in this regard.

Ultima Underworld II, by Looking Glass Studios

While my use-case for the engine is not necessarily a dungeon crawler, I definitely would like to repurpose it for another jam game in the future. The biggest feature missing right now is level saving and loading, which I should add in any case. Other than that, the gameplay will probably decide what the direction is going to be.

If you want to try the Alakajam version of rc-test (I didn't have any use for a better name), don’t forget to read the control instructions on the entry page. And check out voxel’s excellent RAYKA!

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