[Game] Voxelgarden II

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[Game] Voxelgarden II

by v-rob » Post

About

Voxelgarden II is a game I forked off of Voxelgarden (Duh!) and added on to. At first, I had a definite direction I wanted this game to go, but I dumped it because I realized that it would provide less gameplay than Minetest Game. So instead, I added features that I personally like and tried to integrate them in as well as possible.

I don't expect anyone to post anything, as this is just another random game. I just created this because I wanted something that I liked. Like Casimir said in the Voxelgarden thread: "It is nothing special, it is just a basic voxel game done different."
Spoiler
  • Magic and experience system. This has very little using it, and I plan to add more in the future. Also, there is no way to level up without using creative mode or giveme as of now.
  • Primitive tools. Only stone and wood tools exist.
  • No bones. When you die, you keep all your stuff and don't mar your beautiful world with dead bodies.
  • Items drop after you dig a node. Walk over them or punch them to pick them up.
  • No fire or TNT. They're just annoying and the ramifications outweigh the benefits.
  • Hudbars. These look better than normal hearts, in my opinion. Plus, you can tell how much health, experience, and mana you have easily, because mana and experience change every time you level up.
  • A crafting guide. It's a book that you get for free at the beginning of the game. It looks somewhat like your creative inventory.
  • Furniture. There are quite a few pieces of wooden furniture, as well as a bartering table (From the currency mod)
  • Weather. Light, medium, and heavy rain, as well as snow and a new type of weather called motes. Note: Lightning doesn't set things on fire because there is no fire.
Warning! The weather mod uses high amounts of entities! It will slow down older/slower systems a lot. Delete this mod if you're having any trouble.

Besides these additions, I updated outdated things in Voxelgarden, such as the old inventory (Replaced with sfinv, but keeps a similar inventory layout), A bad crafting guide (Replaced with JP's, uses the layout of the inventory), the screwdriver, and farming. I also replaced stairsplus with the default stairs. They include inner and outer corners as well.
Spoiler
  • Casimir, for making the original Voxelgarden;
  • Wuzzy, for the Mana, Mirror of Returning, Teletool, Schemedit, and Hudbars mods and for his prompting other people to have crafting guides in their games, or else I wouldn't have one;
  • JP, for making the crafting guide I edited for this game;
  • Nathan.S, for the autostore mod;
  • VanessaE for the furniture nodeboxes from HomeDecor;
  • jordan4ibanez for the drops mod;
  • The author of the currency mod, whoever it may be (The forum link is down), for the bartering table;
  • Sokomine, for the furniture shelf nodebox and formspec;
  • xeranas, for the weather_pack mod;
  • sofar, for the lightning mod;
  • D00MED, for the idea of motes from Legend of Minetest and the textures, as well as the fruit mod;
  • Duane, for the cherry leaves textures from squaresville_c;
  • The collection of people working on Minetest Game because this game wouldn't exist without them;
  • celeron55, the core developers, and contributors to Minetest because this wouldn't exist without them either;
  • And anyone else I forgot to mention that did or made something that indirectly helped this game to exist.

Screenshots

Spoiler
Image

Beautiful forest landscape

Image

A hut in a jungle

Image

A magical snowy day

Image

Of course berries grow on trees...

Image

A house in the desert

Image

A warm summer day filled with motes

Image

Some furniture, potions, and other items

License

Code: LGPL 2.1 or later
Media: CC BY-SA

Download

GitHub: https://github.com/v-rob/Voxelgarden-II
Zip: https://github.com/v-rob/Voxelgarden-II ... master.zip

Have fun!
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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by texmex » Post

Looks good, v-rob. I've thought of building upon Voxelgarden myself at times, so it's good to see it live on.

Just curious, what was the gist of the "definite direction" you first had in mind?

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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by texmex » Post

A few thoughts:
- Put breath bar somewhere else so that there's no odd space where it hides
- Why a stone pickaxe as initial stuff? It allows for bypassing wooden tools completely.
- Are there any dangers, perhaps at night?
- Some homedecor items looks quite non-voxel and out of place.
- I'm struck by how similar this beefed up version of Voxelgarden is to my current game efforts, looking at the low-tech and even the player stepheight solution.

Image

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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by v-rob » Post

texmex wrote:A few thoughts:
- Put breath bar somewhere else so that there's no odd space where it hides
- Why a stone pickaxe as initial stuff? It allows for bypassing wooden tools completely.
- Are there any dangers, perhaps at night?
- Some homedecor items looks quite non-voxel and out of place.
- I'm struck by how similar this beefed up version of Voxelgarden is to my current game efforts, looking at the low-tech and even the player stepheight solution.

Image
- I'm not certain how to organize HUD elements properly. I'll try to fix it again.
- I don't remember why I did that. I probably had a reason, but I forgot :). I want to find a solution that forces the player to get a full set of wooden tools before stone since wooden tools are all but useless.
- Unfortunately, no. This was part of the original game plan that got ditched because I don't know any good dangers. Mobs are the obvious choice, but there are so many mobs mods, and I don't know what to pick. I've tried mobs_redo, but I didn't have much luck. It does seem strange to have spears, bows, and arrows with no mobs.
- Actually, furniture was made especially for ruins. Not ruins that are just a pile of rubble, but mostly intact ruins. But, since I don't know how to spawn ruins very well and the villages mod is rather buggy in a few ways, ruins never got implemented and thus furniture wasn't removed.
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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by texmex » Post

v-rob wrote:- I'm not certain how to organize HUD elements properly. I'll try to fix it again.
One solution for the hudbars would be to put them as a stack in the bottom left, with breath on the top or bottom.
v-rob wrote:- Actually, furniture was made especially for ruins. Not ruins that are just a pile of rubble, but mostly intact ruins. But, since I don't know how to spawn ruins very well and the villages mod is rather buggy in a few ways, ruins never got implemented and thus furniture wasn't removed.
I've had quite good results with decorations as schematic spawning method, try using spawn_by and num_spawn_by extensively.

One more issue is that trees with multiple nodes as base often spawn on the ground, not in it (on hills for example). A solution to that can be to use place_offset_y = -1 in those tree decoration definitions.

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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by azekill_DIABLO » Post

This game seems charming :D
Gone, but not dead. Contact me on discord: azekill_DIABLO#6565
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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by twoelk » Post

iirc Dan Duncombe made the currency mod for VanessaE's old dreambuilder Survival server. He actually made or forked quite a few mods while active on that server. The first barter tables in minetest history stood in front of his shop at spawn. :-P

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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by texmex » Post

Are you maintaining this game, v-rob?

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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by v-rob » Post

texmex wrote:Are you maintaining this game, v-rob?
Well, I haven't touched it for a while for two reasons: A) I forgot about it :-) and B) I had a lack of good ideas on how to not make this feel like a replica of MT Game. Actually, A was caused by B, and because of A, I forgot about working on B, so it was a cycle in which no work was done. So thanks for bringing this up again.

Of course, I am much better at programming than I was before, so I can implement many more ideas than what I had before.

Anyway, I have some (meaning a lot) ideas that I'll put down here that I've either had from the start or just came up with today and yesterday while thinking about it again.
  • This game has always meant to be minimalistic and realistic and not have a huge number of blocks and items and such. Technology in the game is supposed to be limited.
    -
  • It was supposed to have a story that I scrapped, and I didn't come up with a new one. But the story is supposed to take place in a medieval world where a large war had taken place a few hundred years before, and the world hadn't recovered very well.
    -
  • Ruins were supposed to be an integral part of the gameplay, but I never figured out how to spawn them, and I didn't know exactly how I should design them.
    -
  • Books were meant to be found in ruins which were either simple stories, contained crafting recipes, or had history about the past of the world.
    -
  • Different biomes had different civilizations with different traditions, architecture, literature, religions, and other such things, making different parts of the world have different feels to them.
    -
  • Small, underdeveloped villages were supposed to exist, with ruins in or around them, remnants of the past world, all scattered far apart from each other in the world.
    -
  • People were meant to live in these villages, with unique names and looks . There would be complex interactions with these people, like responding to what they say with a set of responses, some simple trading, and other things.
    -
  • Mining, building, and things like that are meant to be secondary elements of gameplay, whereas living in the world with other people is the main focus. I want to have an ability to form friendships with villagers, or even enemies if you are too rude to them.
    -
  • There are meant to be many stats, like hunger, thirst, health, mana, stamina, and sleep are meant to be important things that must be worried about. Things like hunger must be dealt with by farming, trading, or buying food. Mana would slowly restore itself in sunlight. Stamina would be lost while sprinting and slowly when walking. Sitting and laying would help stamina recover quicker. If stamina, sleep, hunger, or thirst are too low, you might faint or die. I think that I will remove experience, as I have no real use for it or way to gain it properly.
    -
  • A bit of magic would be included in the game with small magical objects and the ability to enchant things like, say, an arrow, or a spear.
    -
  • You would have a name that is entered at the beginning of the game (different from your username for a server, more like a real in-game name) as well as a race that you belong to to make it more like you are a part of the world.
    -
  • Mobs would have to exist of course, but this is rather a delicate situation. I don't want to just grab any mobs mod because they wouldn't fit. I don't want generic cows, dirt monsters, and that sort of thing. I want it to feel integrated into the world, not just like something that's there randomly. I don't know how best to proceed from here.
    -
  • A fancy, appealing HUD. It's rather mundane as it is now, so I'd like to improve it. For that matter, I also want to make formspecs nicer looking. I don't want them to be like the de facto style that games like Pixture have (not to say that Pixture is bad in using that style), but something that fits the theme of this game better.
    -
  • More advanced crafting. I don't like the current, little reward system of place something in a grid. I want it to feel like you're actually making something. On that note, I also don't want a crafting guide; instead, crafts are found in books or from villagers, which can then be recorded in a special crafting book personalized to each player if that player so wishes.
    -
  • I want to have some background music packaged into the game that can be disabled, but provide something calm and nice to listen to while playing. I also want a nice soundset for other things that fits in with the Voxelgarden theme.
    -
  • Biomes that are tuned to be spread into groups, e.g. deserts in the north, jungles to the northeast (not necessarily the exact directions), but this might be a bit hard to do. Also, I want a way for the biomes to slowly blend into each other, with jungles slowly getting thinner near the edges, and the deserts less dry by the edges.
    -
  • Crawling using the new settable collision box would be cool, as well as more realistic swimming. For that matter, oceans would have more plantlife in them, from tropical aquatic plants to deep sea ones.
That's about all I can think of right now. I need to collect my thoughts and get to work on it sometime. The real problem will be integrating this stuff together and making it a game with a good, lasting gameplay. If anyone wants to help sometime with some things, I'd be more than happy for the help.

Part of the reason for this game is to create a game that feels fun to play in survival and will receive very few updates that will ever break or majorly change worlds, requiring people to restart from scratch (one of the reasons I almost never build anything in Minetest Game for fear that I won't get the best things from the next update).

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, and as an answer for your question, no, I wasn't really maintaining the game before, but I probably will start on it again with some major changes, and probably a complete rewrite of the code from scratch. So, you can probably expect some updates on this soon.
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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by texmex » Post

Lol, I see. A quite interesting wall of text I have to say! Lots of great ideas. I especially like that you in a way have thought of the so called game loop and that it’s not the usual shtick but in this case more focused on forming relationships and travelling. I’d recommend you keep that vision, because it’s what will make your game stand out.

From my own experiments in MT game creation I recognize the blessing and the curse of knowing the capabilities of the engine beforehand. It’s like that knowledge unlocks great ideas on what can be created for the game on the one hand, but perhaps equally the very same knowledge locks your ideas in the usual MC/MT concepts. The most interesting work achieved in this community is the kind that does not limit itself to the MC/MT conventions imo, so keep all weird ideas.

I will follow this development though I got to ask: why not join forces with Casimir in developing the Voxelgarden concept? Perhaps the visions are too far apart, but in that case you should come up with an original title imo. :)

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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by v-rob » Post

An original title is important, I do agree. I never came up with one because the game currently doesn't amount to much difference in comparison to the original Voxelgarden, so I saw no reason to change it at the time.

I would quite willingly join forces with Casimir or anyone who wants to help. Big projects are (almost) always better when more people work on them.
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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by texmex » Post

Understandable. And being the minimalist game that Voxelgarden I see its potential as a project foundation.

Same here. The problem that emerges is similar to that of MTG: how to collaboratively build a coherent game experience without a clear vision and with a pretty granular backlog? And if that backlog is compiled, will we all agree on the course of action? This problem may of course be overcome with a lot of communication, I’m just laying it out as I see it. =]
Last edited by texmex on Sun Feb 17, 2019 18:58, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: [Game] Voxelgarden II

by Sokomine » Post

V-rob: Your plan for the game seem quite big. Your ideas are very intresting and in many areas on par with what I'd like to see in a game. My mg_villages mod is a step in that direction. And even though it's just one step it's already quite a lot of work and complexity. Perhaps you ought to use existing mods where possible. There are some nice mob mods with villagers out there. BrandonReeses AdventureTest game is probably the one that has progressed most into the direction of story/villagers to interact with. It's a pity that that game currently doesn't get any more development.

Learning crafts from mobs would also be great. I still dream of sending the player around, from village to village, with the player adding one receipe in each village to his book with craft receipes.
A list of my mods can be found here.

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