Pneumagination Embossing Plans

Hello! First post in a while. I moved my PC to Linux and had many issues getting my site back working again.

So far I’ve set up the Pneu forums at forums.the64thgamer.com, where now the proper devlogs are gonna go. I’m still gonna have rambly plans and such go here for now. Stuff I want people to dicuss and comment on can go there but stuff that’s far out and just throwing ideas will go here.

As for the game I’ve been getting multiplayer started, noise generation has been improved, an in-game manual now works, ect. Sucky thing is that FastNoise2 is an external library that doesn’t compile with the game so I’m having to build a custom version of godot that has a proper module for it. There is thankfully a module someone already made for FastNoise2 but I think I did the compile wrong and possibly lots of features I’m using aren’t there.

Embossing

Alright so first plans. For the sake of adding complexity to decoration while still limiting the block palette and number of blocks, I’m gonna be having a crafting table that will “emboss” two textures together into a new texture with a specific mask applied. In the world this will be clearly seen with ores. In Minecraft there’s iron ore and then an iron block. With how materials are seperate from blocks in this game I don’t want “ugly” materials filling people’s inventory. Nobody is gonna use an “iron ore” type material to build, and just hold onto it for crafting. If every material can also be placed I wanna make sure they’re worth placing.

So, iron ore or whatever ores I decide to do are gonna be an embossed compound of stone and iron materials. The mask between them will look like ore behind the stone. I’ll have some sort of de-embossing crafter to split materials too.

With this embosser players will have all sorts of masks they can apply between two materials. Most notably I’m gonna do all letters and numbers. This lets players have either material be any color they want for every letter, but they still can only use the blocks and masks provided to them. Other types of masks will probably be terrain related that I’ll use in the world, such as like a mask for cracks or fading between two biomes with like a dither pattern mask.

Paint

Next is that paint used to dye props will be crafted from a dye and lead. Its lead paint. Cause its 1979 in the game, lead paint. You craft lead paint.

An idea for crafting the paint is just that you can just craft the lead with any other material to get a matching color. Grass gives green lead paint, dirt gives brown lead paint, ect. It lets there be a way to dump “useless” materials into atleast a pleasing color you can stockpile. It also focuses acquiring paint into just finding the lead itself, instead of needing to search around just for specific dyes. Searching around will still probably happen for more exotic colors like purple and some blues, but as more materials get added to the game it’ll be easier to get them more reasonably.

I think a crucial thing about pixel-art in pneu is that you can build with those tiny 1x1x1 brushes. This makes pixel art take up way less space and takes much less resources. People can now build pixel art into the walls of their builds and such or just have a tiny block of land full of it. Having paint be more accessible will encourage people to spend time making art in their world.

Mining & Sap

Currently mining has players break individual brushes by hand in the world. While this is neat to break such tiny pieces, it becomes annoying at scale for clearing out any land. Current plans are that breaking with hands will do this, but breaking with a tool will break the entire “block” of brushes. I’m gonna be use the sap idea mentioned before to stitch together the terrain, but have it set to not actually drop any sap items.

A very useful way to implement this is to actually allow connected items to hold a loot table. If a player connects 10 brushes together with sap and breaks it, it won’t check each block and drop 1 sap, it’ll access the first connected brush’s loot table and drop 10 sap. This would allow me to have connected structures give unique items, such as breaking a tree giving sticks or apples and such. This can apply to any generated structure then and allow me to hide fun items without placing down any storage prop physically in a location. Also for any reason if there becomes multiple different types of sap for different purposes, it won’t need to change the formatting of connected brushes.

I wonder if there’s any use in exposing this property to the player? This would in theory allow any creation to become a storage chest that’s either accessible with this property or by breaking. Maybe this could be a late game item useful for allowing players to loot structures while still preserving the brushes, but also has this upside for creating custom maps I suppose.

If I were to implement this I’d definitely want it to become a node that players can have trigger when its mined and the loot is emptied. I’m most likely gonna have a hidden node layer in the game for world generated structures so that I can set up traps and stuff for these sort of things.

Misc

Some misc ideas. One thing is to actually not let you join servers on the title screen, but through your worlds. I wouldn’t restrict this to late game or anything but atleast enough to get your first weapons and be familiar with things. It’d be like a teleporter device where you type in the IP as the place to go.

The idea would be to allow players to bring their items to another world, and leave with other items. I wanna make sure however that nobody gets their stuff stolen, nobody feels like they’re cheating if they join a place that gives them super OP stuff they don’t want, and that servers running specific settings can remove items they don’t want players using.

This can be resolved with two options. Upon a player returning from a server to their world, they will have a prompt to either return with the gear they originally had, or replace it with their new inventory from the server. If they pick server items it’ll disable achievements for that world.

For the server side, whatever item I have players create to let others join their world will also have some sort of toggle to either clear their inventories or let whatever in. Same scenario of letting in other items disabling achievements.

I’ll also have options in the menu for forcing players to never be able to use an option that disables achievements to prevent accidents, and another for disabling disabling achievements lol. That way people who wanna keep their world 100% pure don’t have to worry, and players who don’t think their friends items are harming anything can still have their achievements on their world (which would probably be me, I like getting achievements for real but I also would wanna be able to sometimes take items from other servers without losing progress).

Idea for a ladder system is a game where its just a material you can climb at any angle. Material will be “Rock Wall” like those climbing ones. To craft it will be like, stone, wood, resin (or sap), and maybe concrete. Needs to be some simple materials for accessibility but something in there to require some extra work like the resin or concrete. I think it’d just be fun that players have to place these colorful rock climbing walls in their world. Maybe the default is like rainbow or natural colors for the holds, and then you can dye it to get all one color.

Maybe with the embossing system instead of combining materials you will have “masked materials” that you can just click on a brush to apply it? Like maybe the Rock Wall is just the texture of the holds so you can place the holds on any surface and not be restricted with whatever texture I put behind it!

Could be a better solution. Was already worrying about how I would represent in an item slot both materials, the mask, and have it be cohesive. Now I’d just have one material and a mask to represent. Okay yeah I think this is better. This means for mining ores when you break the block it’d drop the stone material and the ore + mask seperately.

Just the only complication systematically is that the mask system works for all standard materials, but stuff like the Rock Wall is just always stuck as a masked texture, you can’t remove the mask cause it’d be useless mechanically. I think that’s fine.

Save Files

Alright so currently I’m working on the save system right now. One of my main things with this system is I won’t allow any part of the game to delete a save file. I think I lost tons and tons of great save files in games because I was too much of a neat freak and only wanted my currently played worlds displayed on the title screen. To prevent this from happening to me and others, I’m gonna have an “archive” button that just hides away the world from the main screen that you can bring back at any time.

To encourage not deleting, I’m also not gonna display the total file size the worlds take up, and do display how long you’ve been playing them. I’m also gonna have a history section at some point that’ll go over the history of your worlds and which achievements were gained in each. I don’t think games indulge enough in players that play a game for a long long time, so giving them a stats page makes their journey since the start more impactful and worth continuing.