NEP Dev Update #3: The title screen

This post is part of a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel. I'm going to challenge myself to regularly post one of these every Friday. We'll see how that goes. =P

Here's the new main title screen!

I'm no artist, so the design is very minimal, but I think it looks pretty clean and attractive. The GUI gets right to the point with the choices. You can either start a new game (in one of the game modes shown) or join someone else's game.

You can exit too... but who would want to do that?

For now, there's only one game mode -- Build. That's basically a world editor that happens to support multiplayer editing. It's not meant to be the main game, but I did that part first because it's insanely useful for testing the game and its underlying engine. I'm planning other modes too, and I'll be able to show more of those Soon^TM. Here's a quick overview of the modes planned so far:

• Dig: Build a mining operation profitable enough to satisfy your corporate overlords.
• Explore: No rules. No objectives. No winning or losing. Just play with the toys in your sandbox.
• Build: Quickly build the world you want using efficient tools.

And modders rejoice! The modding API lets modders add completely new game modes to the list.

Player characters

After picking a game mode (or choosing to join another game), you get zoomed off to the characters screen. Pick one of your characters to play.

The characters, like everything in this game, are built by players. Here's the character creation screen:

There are currently only two ways to build your character: Picking a body type and picking a hair type. Again, I'm no artist, so the options here are sparse. But fear not, the modding API lets mods add more options! Mods can create new animated sprite assets for the underlying game engine and plug them right into the character building screen.

Want a character that looks like it was created by an artist instead of a programmer?

Get a mod! (Or wait until I make enough money to hire an artist. =P)

Want a character that reflects your own identity, but the game developer didn't think to include those options?

Get a mod!

Want to look like a fearsome beast?

Get a mod!

Want to look like a cute cuddly bunny?

Get a mod!

Use your imagination to decide how you want your character to look, and then go build it! The point of this game is to build things, and that means more than just blocks in the world. Wherever I can, I'll try to make interesting tools to build with, and then try to place as few restrictions as possible so you can do whatever you want with them.

Onwards to glory!

After picking a character, you get to pick a world.

The worlds are procedurally generated using lots of fun math and something called fractal simplex noise.

The generation process is randomized, but deterministic (Technically, it's only pseudo-randomized). That means you can choose a "seed" and you'll get a fun random world. But every other world you generate with that same seed will be the same too. A "seed" is just a piece of text like Bob's your uncle. That way, if you generate a world that's interesting, you can share its seed with your friends and they can play it too.

That's another goal of this game: sharing. After you've built your cool thing and you want to share it with your friends, I want to make sure you have tools that make sharing easy. World seeds are one way of doing that. Eventually, I want to add tools that allow you to export an entire world into a single file to make it easy to send them around the internet. Of course, the world import tools will be there too.

Oh, and yes the modding API allows mods to add new world types. Noticing a theme here?

To friends or not to friends?

After you've decided on a world, the game will ask you if you want to play by yourself, or with friends:

Pick the first option, and a single-player game immediately launches. Maybe all your friends are busy eatting dinner or something...

Pick the second option, and you'll be greeted with one last screen to help you tell your friends how to join your multiplayer game:

Click "Start game!" and then you're playing!

Whooooosh!

One last thing I forgot to mention. The title screens all have fun wooshy animations. It doesn't come across well in screenshots, so how about this!

Fin

That's it for this week. Next week I think I'll post more about the procedural world generation and stuff for math nerds. =P

Also, I recently added RSS support to the blog! Like it's 2003 all over again!! =D

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