Excuse the pun - it’s a reference to one of the best life-sim games with a focus on building ever to be developed: The Sims. What does this have to do with Moonfrost? Well, we are very excited to share with you that Build Mode is coming to Moonfrost!
Let’s set the scene… Somewhere in the quaint English countryside resides a long-abandoned Village, home to several crumbling buildings, an empty well, a sad and broken bench. Nearby is a run-down Farm - overgrown, unloved and long-forgotten. But there is beauty to be found, and work to be done!
You’ll start your journey in similar conditions to the image above so, unless you want to live in this rickety old shed forever, it is paramount we offer players the ability to build, customise and progress on their homestead.
Now let’s dive into how all this is possible
So the principle is simple: we want to allow players to build their dream homes as they progress through the game. Sounds easy, right? Well… maybe not so much. The team needed to work out how to do this whilst maintaining our isometric 2D/3D pipeline - and not forgetting Moonfrost is a pixel art game, which adds even more complexity! So we needed to look into our overall game development process to come up with a solution.
Setting the right foundations
One thing we pride ourselves on is building the right way and not the easiest/fastest way. Some may feel we have over-engineered our Build Mode, but we believe offering players a higher level of control and customisation is key; this is why there are over 190 individual building ‘blocks’ already created!
The types of building blocks can be broken down into five main categories: Floors, Walls, Doors, Stairs and Roofs (wait - no windows!? Welcome to Moonfrost: A Prison Sim. Don’t worry, they will be covered in future articles). It may seem a little daunting at first, but our design is to simplify the process for the player as much as possible; as you create your home, the game will pick the right blocks to place depending on how you, the player, wants to ‘draw’ your walls, doors and floors.
Floor Tiles
Let’s start at the bottom, with our floor tiles. These are placed directly on top of grid tiles (the ground) which allows you to easily fit the floor tile onto the ground. It also means it won’t affect the player's movement when crossing from floor tiles to non-floor tiled areas, which can be a really annoying experience in other building modes in some games.
Wall Pieces
Walls A.K.A the main blocks for building. There are 34 wall pieces which all have a unique purpose in the construction of any type of building structure. This can be broken down into five additional sub-categories: base walls, point-cut walls, quarter-cut walls, half walls and corner walls. As you can see from the gif below it almost looks like a puzzle, how each block fits perfectly together. Don’t worry though, you won’t have to select each block type - our system will do it for you! This means you can create your dream home with everything fitted together perfectly - so you won’t get a leak if you don’t align a single block correctly.
Doors
Yeah, you guessed right - the door is also made up of more than one piece… it is actually comprised of three sections: the main door itself, the outer door frame, and the outer wall frame that completes the door to connect to the grid tile system (in other words, to connect it fully to the wall). Players will be able to place doors of your choosing - as long as you have the correct ‘blueprint’ (more on that in a later article).
Stairs
Stairs are pretty important unless you want to live in a bungalow (which you can absolutely do as it’s your choice what your home will look like)! We needed to work out how to build multi-story buildings, which started out as a simple task and then, as most things in game dev, created further issues… The taller an object gets the closer it is to the fixed isometric camera, and in a pixel game this will then affect the pixel scaling and sizing, but that’s a later topic to be discussed.
Our stairs have been designed with a simple snap-on design, allowing us to attach multiple stair sets together, but also has the ability to interact with walls and floor tiles easily.
Roofs
If there was ever a ‘problem child’ for this Build Mode, it was our lovely roofs. It shares a lot of similar traits for issues such as stairs regarding elevation but with one major kicker - pixel art scaling on diagonal shapes are somewhat challenging. We could have a ‘one roof fits all’ but that really wouldn’t be aligned with what we want to do - which is putting the power in the player’s hands! Some examples of these are below.
Summary
The article and particularly the gifs are what it looks like for us as developers - we are still working on a player-facing Build Mode with intuitive menus to make building easy and fun. We wanted to highlight the level of detail for Build Mode, and provide a glimpse into the future feature as we develop.
If you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes blog we’d really appreciate you showing your support by sharing the article with a friend, tweeting about it or even leaving a comment - it helps more than you know! And if we get a positive reception we’ll look into doing more articles like this. Yippee!
Now let’s get back to building Moonfrost. Until next time, friends.
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