Dandelion Void News

[p]Before our game director Brian began Dandelion Void – and even before he made the Project Zomboid mod Save Our Station – he made maps. Specifically, maps for a free Half-Life 2 mod called Gary’s Mod, before it became a full-fledged game! If you’ve wandered the sands of rp_wuste or RP’d in Hometown 2000 (shamelessly derivative of Hometown 1999 by F.Kalkman, but hey, he was a teenager!), you may already be familiar with Brian’s work.[/p][p][/p][p]This creativity was enabled by the Hammer World Editor, a high-quality tool for creating BSP levels. Nearly three decades later, we are now coming full circle by making our own mapping tool. Enter the Sickle World Editor.[/p][p][/p][p]Before we begin, we would like to note that this is a highly work in progress feature, even more so than the other content you've seen on this blog. While we are proud of the progress we have made, this post is more about our process and philosophy around tools than It is a demonstration of a final product.[/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]The Sickle World Editor in action[/p][p][/p][p]The Sickle Editor is a tool that we’ve built using Unity as our “front-end.” Dandelion Void is a Unity-based game so it’s helpful to have the mapping tool integrated into our game engine editor suite. With that said, the actual data structure you are authoring is not a Unity scene file, but our own custom map data type. You can see a preview of your map in the Unity Scene viewport, but you won’t be interacting with the hierarchy in the way that Unity devs will be familiar with. [/p][p][/p][p]The Sickle Editor is a “subtractive” tool, meaning that an empty map file can be thought of as a solid cube of material into which you then carve cavities and corridors. Dandelion Void uses a grid system, so you carve these rooms simply by clicking and dragging your cursor across different grid cells. With this interface you can create rooms, hallways, and open spaces quickly and intuitively![/p][p][/p][p]To differentiate the environment, groups of cells belong to “room definitions,” which affect their appearance and gameplay properties. Room definitions are assigned a wall material, a floor material, and a set of tags which determine things like plant growth, loot distribution, and more. Below you can see the green highlight around this room, which has been tagged as a dusty reactor closet.[/p][p][/p][p]Of course, there’s only so far you can go with a bunch of empty rooms – let’s decorate! In the “entities” tab you can find a searchable list of all of the furniture items and other gameplay objects that developers or modders have defined. Similar entities belong to “tab groups” which can be cycled through using Tab or Shift+Tab. This reduces the need for unnecessary clicks when decorating, and is useful for things like these lockers which have both wall and corner pieces. Doors between rooms are also placed using the Entity tool.[/p][p][/p][p]As a game set aboard a multi-level spaceship, verticality is even more important than it would be with an outdoor environment. To cycle between different floor levels, you can simply press the \[ and ] keys. This creates a pleasing “cross section” effect that you can see below![/p][p]Note: this is just for an internal test level, so don’t read too much into the layout or room names![/p][p][/p][p]Now, is it just me, or does the level we’ve made look just a bit too clean? In fact, these sparkling rooms make the Pergola look more like a luxury liner than an abandoned derelict. But not to worry, because this next step happens automatically – when you enter the game, you’ll see that the entire world is automatically covered in ponic stalks, algae, and dust! [/p][p][/p][p]While most people immediately think of procedural generation when they think of survival games, many of the most successful titles in the genre actually use “authored” maps – Subnautica, The Long Dark, Grounded, and Project Zomboid all come to mind. A human-created map allows us to ensure a high quality level throughout, and creates more opportunities to tell the story of The Pergola as a society. [/p][p][/p][p]With that said, variety is the spice of life, so our vegetation system adds a procedural layer to Dandelion Void!  This adds a bit of differentiation between multiple playthroughs, saves us time, and creates an organic-looking result. Authorship is still paramount, of course, and so developers and modders can influence the vegetation and grime systems using the room tags we mentioned earlier. If you want a room to have dust but not algae, grow extra plants, or be totally clean, this can all be accomplished just by adding or subtracting a few keywords![/p][p][/p][p]“Dog-fooding” is short for the idiom “eating your own dog food.” This originates from a pet food executive who was said to eat an entire can of dog food at annual meetings to demonstrate his confidence in the product quality to the shareholders. Gross, but interesting! [/p][p][/p][p]In the context of software development, dogfooding refers to the practice where developers making a tool also use the tool themselves in daily life, creating an extra level of investment in quality. If you work on a messaging client and there’s a major bug, you’ll want to fix it ASAP because it affects your own ability to connect with your coworkers and friends.[/p][p][/p][p]Across our time in the games industry, we’ve frequently encountered internal game development tools which are powerful, but also janky, unintuitive, and prone to bugs. Improving tools is a great investment if you have the time and team capacity, but in many cases it’s hard to make time for it. As deadlines approach, it’s hard to dedicate a week of developer time to improving tools when that week could be spent on features that customers actually get to see.[/p][p][/p][p]But on a modding-first game like Dandelion Void we are shipping our internal tools along with the main build of the game. Ideally hundreds or even thousands of modders will be using this level editing tool, and we want them to have a good experience. With this in mind, we are putting extra love and attention into the developer experience of this tool![/p][p][/p][p]We know you’ll have fun using the Sickle Editor, because we have fun using it. When the tool finally launches alongside the game, it will reflect the polish, bugfixes, and UX improvements forged out of thousands of hours of our own mapping journeys. Good enough for us, good enough for you, and good enough for Fido.[/p][p][/p][p]That’s all for this week’s development log. Join us next time for Part 2, where we’ll discuss our current level design philosophy. In the meantime, what features would you like to see in a map editor for our game?[/p]

[p]Hello, Pergonauts! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void. [/p][p][/p][p]Last Thursday we got a nice write-up in this io9 piece about the long influence of Green Street Production’s Scavenger’s Reign on a slew of video games, including Dandelion Void. Brian also had a chance to talk about some of our literary influences, and we had so much fun that we decided to expand upon them here.[/p][p][/p][p]But before we do, we also have a quick development update! Last week we finished our sprint with an internal playtest with some game industry colleagues. A big part of this build was bugfixes and major usability improvements to our basebuilding / decoration systems, including placing furniture and cleaning grime. We were also able to test the beginnings of our dynamic music system; using FMOD our music now responds to whether you’re standing in vegetation, whether you’re in combat, how near you are to enemies, as well as other factors. It will still be a few weeks before we’re ready to show this off in a dev blog, but we can’t wait for you to hear the spine-tingling sounds of Dandelion Void.[/p][p]The narrative of Dandelion Void draws more from sci-fi novels than it does TV, movies, or other games. Part of this is because the idea of a generation ship – a city-sized, self-contained spaceship on which multiple generations live and die over the course of centuries-long voyage – is well-covered on the page but quite rare in other mediums. To capture the spirit of literary influence, Robin has even penned a few unreleased short stories set in the world of Dandelion Void to serve as “narrative concept art.”
[/p][p]Brian and Robin are voracious sci-fi readers, and a few texts in particular have had an outsized impact on how we think about this project:
[/p][p][/p][p]Non-Stop is set aboard – you guessed it – a derelict generation ship overgrown with plant life! This sci-fi adventure follows a young man from a low-technology hunter-gatherer group who, fed up with the bleakness of life in his settlement, joins an expedition into the jungles of “ponics” and learns the truth about his world. [/p][p]Non-Stop’s influence on Dandelion Void is best illustrated by our shared shorthand “ponic” for the overgrown hydroponic plants. The story creates a powerful sense of mystery about the environment; the reader knows what a ship is and generally has a lot more information than the protagonist, but you get the sense of how confusing everything must be for someone who has only ever known the inside of a metal world.[/p][p][/p][p]Also impressive is the sheer variety of gonzo elements. There are high technology factions, giants who live in the walls, hyper-intelligent civilized rats, and ponic-born changelings who look like humans but wrong. While we don’t intend to adapt these elements literally, we do want to capture the feeling that the Pergola is a huge, dense world full of more mysteries than you might ever be able to unravel.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Paradises Lost follows Hsing and Luis, who are young people from the fifth of seven planned generations aboard the vessel Discovery. In typical Le Guinnian fashion, the novella is a goldmine of little worldbuilding details. The personal domiciles have modular walls that can be rearranged between single units, family households, or entire neighborhoods. Children run around naked in the “kidherd” until age seven to reduce the need for toddler clothing sizes. Hull repair professionals are called “dermatologists,” or “evamen,” and emulate a slightly pathetic proxy of military culture.[/p][p][/p][p]Paradises Lost has some of the best descriptions of the “closed economy” of a generation ship. One of our favorite anecdotes is of a single drill, clumsily lost to the void during an EVA operation, which becomes a children’s horror story tale for decades to come – it’s a multi-century voyage, and they only have so many drills![/p][p][/p][p]Paradises Lost is a rich text for us when it comes to fleshing out the society of the Pergola before the collapse turned it into an overgrown derelict. From a political dimension, it also explores in length what it means to leave our only home in the universe, what we gain and what we lose, and how a generation born in the stars might respond to returning to terrestrial life.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Aurora is one of the most recent high-profile generation ship stories, this time from legendary author Kim Stanely Robinson of the Red Mars trilogy. We’ll start by saying that Brian is still reading this one, so our description will be a little more spoiler-light, but let’s just say that Aurora shows us what happens when everything that can go wrong on a generation ship does go wrong.[/p][p][/p][p]Like Le Guinn (at one point his teacher), Kim Stanley Robinson is a master of building worlds, and one of the few sci-fi authors who also have a robust political education. Both authors are deeply interested in “ambiguous utopias,” and in our opinion there’s no better staging ground for this idea than a generation ship. Fully self-contained, independent of any old world government, a fresh start: these worlds in a bottle are petri dishes for utopian ideas which either flourish, or fail. [/p][p][/p][p]For Robin (and soon to be Brian!) Aurora provides another set of fresh worldbuilding material, and is a thought-provoking thesis for what it means to leave Earth behind. [/p][p]That’s all for this week! We hope that this write-up has given you something interesting to read to pass the time while you wait to play Dandelion Void! If you have any recommendations for books or other media about generation ships, we would love to hear them – sound off in our Discord![/p]

[p]The finish on the walnut desk gleams under the induction lights. The rest of the room is ruined – in some places the carpet squishes with algae, in others entire ponic stalks erupt through the floor – but the desk stands uncannily pristine. With great anticipation you slide out a drawer, and gaze upon a menagerie of tchotchkes from a long-dead era. Welcome to the junk drawer.[/p][p][/p][p]Hello, Pergonauts, and welcome to another Tuesday dev blog![/p][p][/p][p]We have been hard at work on core-level systems which represent huge improvements to Dandelion Void. These improvements include an animation refresh for the uproots (our main plant enemies), as well as integration of the FMOD audio middleware. The latter will allow our audio team to create dynamic music and SFX which react to game variables in real time. We need a little more time to cook before sharing these updates in a dev blog, so stay tuned![/p][p][/p][p]To hold you over in the meantime, this post is the first in a reoccurring series where we present a sampling of inventory items from Dandelion Void with their in-game descriptions.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]That’s all for today! We’d love to hear if you have any ideas for other objects one might find aboard our ship. Until next time, have a great week![/p]

[p]Hello, Pergonauts! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void. [/p][p][/p][p]This week we’re offering a work in progress peek into our character creation system, as well as discussing our philosophy of iterative game design.[/p][p][/p][p]Player created characters are common in survival games, and with our focus on user customization we are no exception! We’ve actually had a modular character system for a while, but this week is the first time it’s been wired up to the main build.[/p][p][/p][p]When testing Dandelion Void, developers now spawn as one of these six presets.[/p][p][/p][p]Dandelion Void has an extremely specific aesthetic. Our textures are full of crunchy pixels that don't get bilinear filtering. Our texel resolution is fairly low, which when combined with the isometric perspective, evokes the look of vintage pre-rendered game graphics. Visually, we draw from the mid-century modern and brutalist movements.[/p][p][/p][p]Character creators are a balancing act. The player should be able to make a unique avatar that they can identify with, but you also don’t want the range of outputs the tool generates to look out of place against the other game elements. A photorealistic human with anatomically perfect proportions would certainly clash with our lo-fi presentation![/p][p][/p][p]Our solution is to render a few character design elements in an extra stylized way. Notice how while the ribs and muscle definition of the characters are fairly detailed, the eyes are just big blocky rectangles and the body hair (see the legs and chests) is drawn in a checkered lattice? These elements “anchor” the created characters within our core visual motifs, so that no matter what body shape, hairstyle, gender presentation, or skin tone the player chooses, their character always looks like it belongs in this game and in this world.[/p][p][/p][p]The next step for this system is to add in a starter wardrobe for these guys, as well as hairstyles beyond “bald” and “mullet.” While the ship launched in the '70s, it's not quite that '70s.[/p][p][/p][p]It might surprise you to learn that we’ve had this character system for months, but only connected it to the main build this week. This is due to the nature of our production process. [/p][p][/p][p]We organize ourselves using a sprint-based “scrum” methodology and a playcentic design process. In simple terms, this means: [/p]

• [p]We plan our development tasks in units of 2-week “sprints”[/p]
• [p]At the start of each sprint we talk about the state of the game, and decide the tasks we want to work on.[/p]
• [p]At the end of each sprint we make a special build of the game and play it together [/p]
• [p]Our goal is simple: each of these sprint builds should be significantly more fun to play than the one before![/p]

[p]The strength of this system is in the frequent playtesting. Every game developer has had the experience of losing months on a feature that sounded good in their head, only for it to flop the first time someone else played with it enabled. The advantage of testing so frequently is that we get immediate feedback about whether or not something is working, and can change our plan accordingly. This rapidity is why some call this framework “agile.”[/p][p][/p][p]At the beginning of a sprint, it's good to start with tasks that represent longer term investments; our junk system described in the last post, for instance, is a unit of new content that took us days to design and implement. Towards the end of the sprint, when we are doing daily group playtests, we pay special attention to easy wins and low hanging fruit; little bugfixes or bits of polish that can be done quickly while giving us a lot of bang for our buck. [/p][p][/p][p]Believe it or not, wiring up the characters was one of those low hanging fruits! You see, Brian actually built the backend of this dynamic human system months ago so that we could show multiple characters in the trailer. It even includes support for sliding between different body shapes and weights.[/p][p][/p][p]But creating the UI “frontend” for authoring a character – all the menus, sliders, camera angles, etc. – is a whole separate task that we haven't been able to justify putting into a sprint, as our current focus is on improving our core gameplay systems and mechanics.[/p][p][/p][p]With that said, we got a little sick of being the same person every time in our playtesting. So we settled on a compromise: the character creation UI can wait for later, but in the meantime, a simple Lua script will spawn the player as one of six random character presets. This was a textbook “easy win”: – all we had to do was wire up a system that already existed, so it just took a couple hours, but it improved our end of sprint build significantly.
[/p][p]We hope this little look into our planning process has been interesting! Please do look forward to a snapshot of the character creation UI in a future post, once it's the right time. We can't wait to see the characters you'll make![/p]

[p]Hello, Pergonauts! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void. [/p][p][/p][p]This week we have a peek into some decorative clutter that you’ll find aboard the Pergola, as well as some exciting team member intros![/p][p]Up to now, if a player looked into a crate, cabinet, or other container, they’d find some assortment of food, water, weapons, etc. These tools and resources are the bread and butter of any survival game, but the starship Pergola is more than just a game level. To depict an environment that real people lived in for generations, we are working on a collection of tchotchkes, junk, and accoutrements to put in our loot tables![/p][p][/p][p]At no point during your play experience will owning a stack of wooden coasters be a life or death matter. They’re just fun! Junk items add flavor, allow us to tell environmental stories, and make the moment of looting a truly crucial item all the more satisfying. Nothing hits like finally finding that machete after a string of pens and combs![/p][p][/p][p]As the game developers it’s possible that some of these items could gain functionality, but for now they’re just a bit of drawer clutter. You can sprinkle them around your base as decorations, hang on to them as keepsakes, or just leave them be![/p][p][/p][p]Now, who made this junk? Dandelion Void began its life as a side project by our game director Brian, and much of the art and functionality you see in the trailer was created by him alone. But as we spin up into full production, our team has also grown![/p][p][/p][p]Dara Descends[/p][p]This set of junk items is one of the first contributions from a new artist on the team, Dara! Dara Insixiengmay (they/them) is a 3D artist and a worker-owner at Manzanita Interactive. Robin and Dara met working on the game Stranger Things VR at Tender Claws; among many other contributions, Dara rigged and animated creatures like the demogorgon, demodog, demobat, and more! For a game like Dandelion Void full of spindly, tentacly, plant creatures, it’s great to have someone who’s already tackled monsters with eight legs, three tails, and a flower-petaled lamprey mouth.[/p][p][/p][p]While Dara’s specialty is rigging and animation, they’re also a strong hard surface modeler and 3D generalist. Working on a set of junk items is a great way to get onboarded to the art style of Dandelion Void, and Dara pumped out what you see above in just a couple days. When not working on games, Dara is also a prolific creator of short films – you can check one out right here![/p][p][/p][p]Robin enters Retrograde[/p][p]You might recognize Robin from the Discord and some of the sign-offs on this blog. Robin LoBuglio (she/her) has been working on the project part-time for years as a producer, designer, and narrative lead. Starting this week, she’s also coming onto the project full-time as a Unity dev![/p][p][/p][p]Robin’s worked in the games industry for a long time, including Virtual Virtual Reality 1 and 2, The Under Presents, Stranger Things VR, and more. She is also the game director for Manzanita’s other game, Lentopet! [/p][p][/p][p]Yaw, Pitch, Roland[/p][p]Roland (he/him) is a senior software engineer with game and software experience across PC, mobile, web, and more! Among many other things, Roland is taking a look at Dandelion Void’s core systems, optimization, and game architecture.[/p][p][/p][p]In addition to his programming chops, Roland also has solo dev experience on an extremely stylish action game that I hope you get to see one day, and is a skilled 2D and 3D artist. Cross-training is a bit of a theme at Manzanita Interactive![/p][p]That’s all for this week! As always, the best way to keep up with the game is to join our Discord. Until next time, may you all embrace the clutter, and let us know what junk you’d like to discover aboard the Pergola![/p]