Introduction

Folks – it's that time again. We're back for another blog post… and it's a doozy! We're bringing more variety to the game than ever before and that's what this blog post focuses on. We've been hard at work on the Alpha release of the game and we're very excited to share our progress since our last post. As you can see, the title of this blog post is “Now in Color." We titled the blog this because we feel like we're breathing a lot of color and spice into the game in our most recent builds. We're using the word “color” in a lot of ways. Color is quite literally present in a lot of our new blocks but it's also becoming more present in biomes and caves. Color and variety will play a huge role as we continue to buff our world-generation and improve the aesthetic of the game. In this blog post, we'll give you a look into some of the new things we've been working on and how they fit into the theme of variety.

Fishing

Fishing now has a nice mini-game to go along with it. The mechanic to actually catch a fish is in a much more polished state than before. We're pretty happy with it! Now, you can cast your line into the water, wait for your bobber to go under, and pull up a fish before it breaks away. Rarer fish will stay on the line for a shorter time than more common fish, so you'll need to be fast. We're also working on incorporating the bait and biome system we've previously discussed into our new fishing mechanic.

James has also been working hard at creating many new fish for the game. We designed a lot of them live on Twitch!

As you can see, there are already quite a few fish. Our goal for the Alpha release is to have over 100 different fish to catch in-game. We are well over halfway there! This will provide a unique and fleshed out feel to fishing. Fishing will provide a very fun and even challenging adventure to complete in Nightfall. Can you catch them all? We won't go into much more detail about fishing in this post as we talked a lot about it in the previous entry. Go back and read that here if you want to learn more about fishing!

Sandbox Mode

Sandbox Mode is something that we are in the very early stages of developing. You've probably heard us refer to this a few times already under different names like “Creative Mode" or the “Developer Menu”. These are all the same thing. Right now, the Sandbox Mode inventory essentially functions as a developer menu for us to quickly test things while we work. You'll see this often in screenshots and other media that we post. While this is currently the default mode, this will not be the case in the future. We want Nightfall to primarily be a survival experience where you need to focus on staying alive while playing the game, however, we will have this mode available for people who just want to build or experiment with the engine. This mode will allow you to manipulate the world and gameplay like a canvas or… a sandbox. We are also working on a control panel that will come with this mode. The control panel will allow you to manipulate things like speed, flight, weather, time, no-clip, and other creativity tools. We want you to be able to easily modify the world and your character in this mode.

To reiterate – right now, this mode does not exist. It is combined with the default setting of the game and they will not be separated until we are done with a lot of the intense engine testing we are doing. It is just not a priority at the moment. When we have some time, we will put Sandbox Mode behind a wall so that you will need to manually enable it before creating a world if you would like to use it.

We designed the UI in the GIF for the Sandbox Mode inventory on stream awhile back. While it is now implemented and working as intended, we are going to modify its appearance in the near future. One of the future features is the ability to set favorite blocks or items to have quick access to them in a set tab. This should make creating/saving build palettes in Sandbox Mode very easy and intuitive. We're actually already starting on some redesigns which you can see some early progress on below.

Colored Lights

One of our fantastic developers, K.jpg, as recently been buffing our lighting system. We are preparing to add the rest of our block types into the current lighting/AO engine as well as getting ready for our more finished implementation of a day/night cycle. To do so, we had to separate Lighting and AO and in doing this, K.jpg added multiple channels for lighting. With the existence of multiple lighting channels comes colored lights! I will let him tell you a bit more about how colored lighting works himself…

Previously, our flood-fill light engine had set out two channels for light: sunlight, and light emitted by blocks. One previously-discussed manner in which we extended the classical approach, was to make the light falloffs form round shapes instead of square. This involved increasing the number of light states possible for each block, and handling the more complicated falloff logic with a lookup table. But despite this significant change, an opportunity afforded by the original method remained just as available: Colored Lights. Splitting the block light into individual Red, Green, and Blue channels, we can assign a variety of different colors to different light-emitting blocks.

We could see that all of the colors these blocks emit blended together nicely in the world. However, as this opportunity came to us from the original method, so did one of its shortcomings: Limited support for colors beyond primary and secondary. Only Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta can remain consistent in color as they attenuate from full brightness to darkness. Purple, for example, has more of a blue component than red, so the red channel drops off first. The consequence is a blue outer ring, and a progressive shift in hue on its way there. As we intend to support many of these more nuanced colors, we are actively looking into solutions to bring them all to parity. One idea we're considering is to add an extra bit to mark a channel as half brightness, and only use that bit in conjunction with another channel using full brightness. This way we can enable tertiary colors without sacrificing falloff consistency. This, so far, seems the most promising solution. Here is a mockup of how that would look.

As we are constantly looking for ways to make our game the best that it can be, we also found room for improvement in the way lighting and ambient occlusion are blended over the square block faces. Block faces are each composed of two triangles, which individually blend the game's lighting over their three corners (vertices). When the four light values don't follow a constant slope, the individual triangles can reveal themselves, creating visual preference for one diagonal direction over the other. One fix, described here in the context of ambient occlusion, is to flip the triangles depending on each corner's light value. This works great for AO and block light, but it becomes tricky when dynamic sunlight is mixed in as well. Ordinarily, we would keep the same block mesh throughout the changing day/night cycle, and only change the global sunlight value. There's no need to move any triangles around, except when blocks are added and removed.

Instead of introducing this potentially performance-impacting behavior just to flip a few triangles, we sought out a way to enable bilinear interpolation (bilerp) on each square as a whole, so that it simply wouldn't matter which way the triangles are flipped. Bilinear interpolation isn't directly supported by the shader, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. The interpolation on each triangle can be seen as equivalent to a formula a+bx+cy. To create a bilinear effect, we need a fourth term dxy. By adding one interpolation per channel 0 to d along x, and one common interpolation 0 to 1 along y, we can multiply them together to create the dxy we need. Then we can add it to the constant ramp that defines the a+bx+cy part, to give us the necessary a+bx+cy+dxy. The resulting visual difference is shown below.

Pretty nifty, eh? Thanks K.jpg! We're really excited to have the option for colored light in our engine and have plans to use it in a lot of places. Stay tuned for more lighting updates.

We have a total of 12 lamp blocks that feature a variety of colors. You'll be able to turn these lamps on and off with a simple right-click. You can check out all of the available lamp colors and their icons below. Additionally, we have the capacity to mix and match colors for other uses… and we already are!

Cotton and Cloth

The world is exploding into color quite rapidly. If colored lights were not enough for you, we now have colored cloth blocks as well. There are quite a few things that you can do with cloth too! To start, we've added a new resource to the game – Cotton! Cotton can be attained from cotton bushes, which can be found growing in temperate biomes like Forests and Plains.

Barren cotton bushes will grow cotton over time. When cotton is ready to be harvested, you can simply right click on the bush to pull it off. The bush will eventually re-grow, allowing you to farm the resource. You can even break and relocate the bushes to a more practical location if you would prefer to farm them all in one place. When you break a bush, you will be able to replant it somewhere else and after some time it will begin to grow again. After gathering enough cotton, you can refine the cotton into another resource -- cloth.

Cloth has a variety of uses, one of which is cloth blocks. You can use cloth and cloth blocks to make things like flags, carpets, bandages, and other amenities. It will be an important material throughout the game and setting up a cotton farm might be a good idea. There will also be other means of obtaining cloth if farming is not your style, however, farming it in this manner will be one of the best ways to get large quantities of cloth blocks for building with.

Variant Blocks

If you haven't put it together yet, something we're focusing on at the moment is variety. We want the player to have a lot of options at their disposal, even in the early builds of the game. Providing you with rich environments and a large block palette to build with is a priority for us. In the GIF above, you can see Marble and some of the basic decorative variants that you can make from it using the Carver workstation. Each of these variants also come in slabs, stairs, and slopes. These blocks will be available for you to build with but will also be used in procedurally generated structures in later builds of the game.

As you can see, Marble is not the only block that has received decorative variants. A lot of our stones, including the most common of which pictured above, have been given this treatment. Our goal is to provide variants for most blocks, even ones that are not a stone-type block. By using the Decoration Table or the Carver, you'll be able to create a wide variety of options to use when building your bases, homes, or other creations. While there are many more variant block sets to explore in game already, we'll finish this section of the blog with a close-up at some icons of one more – Slate.

You may have noticed that the “carved” variant is unique for each of the block sets we've shown off so far. Our goal is to have at least one unique variant for each type of stone block. Can you collect and carve all of them?

Cave Formations

Caves have seen some love in recent builds of the game. On par with the theme of this blog post, we really want caves to feel like they are full of life and color. While we don't have anything spawning naturally just yet, you can take a look at a concept designed by hand in the image below. It won't be long before our caves generate like this procedurally and this is something we'll be putting time into in the near future. We've been optimizing the various noises and systems we use for world generation and want them to be very efficient before we go back to exploring the flora and fauna that make up the world. The concept image shows what a possible cave beneath a forest in Nightfall could look like.

Stalactites and stalagmites will find their way into caves soon. We also started to work on some other cave formations, like icicles, and blocks for additional underground biomes like Ice Caves. Like temperate biomes, cold biomes will also see color and variety worked into their generation. We look forward to opening up the world for you to explore the marvels of what the surface and underground have to offer. You can check out icicles in the rendered image below.

New Icon Style

We've updated all the icons to fit the style of our fish icons. They have a much cleaner look and feel now. Check some of them out in this screenshot!

Suggestion Showdown #1

(And SS #2 Announcement)

Recently, we hosted a competition on our Discord called Suggestion Showdown. For this competition, we asked members of our community to submit their suggestions and concepts for a plant that would produce a potion reagent/ingredient. We were blown away by all of your submissions and super impressed by the great art and suggestions that you all produced. The winners of the competition were invited to come on stream with us and help us design their winning concept live!

We let the community vote on one of the winners and also had an executive vote for another that ended up tying. In total, we had three winners for the very first suggestion showdown. Bowser, Gold, and T!

Bowser was the winner of our community vote. He suggested we add a plant called “Blood Warts” to the game. Here was his suggestion…

And here's what we came up with…

I think they turned out pretty nice! When they start to drip, you'll be able to harvest a potion ingredient called Gelatinous Blood!

Gold was one of the winners of the executive vote. He suggested the following…

Gold designed his own concept art as well -- which was awesome!

Here's what we came up with!

We've since renamed his winning submission to Moonglow and worked on it a bit more since the stream. It now utilizes our new lighting mechanics to put off a faint glow. Check it out!

When the flower blossoms under the moonlight, you'll be to harvest both Moonglow Petals and Moonglow Thorns from it. The stress of being plucked will cause it to return to a bud for the rest of the night. When blossoming, the Moonglow flower will put off a faint blue light which will help to illuminate the darkness surrounding it. While there are a few unfinished lighting things in this GIF*, you get the idea.

*The sky is bright due to not setting a dark sky yet, the flower itself glows because it does not work with the lighting engine yet, and the item in hand is tinted due to a bug that has since been fixed.

Our final executive vote winner was, T! Their submission was the following…

The Slagolten Orb was the most recent winning design that we worked on during a stream. We're still tweaking the final design but you can see our progress here!

You'll be able to harvest both Slagolten Fruit and Slagolten Film from these lava loving plants.

I want to take the time here to once again congratulate our winners and thank those of you who participated in this event. We so enjoyed bringing you onto our streams and designing your concepts live with you. I think they all made great additions to the game. It was awesome and we are super excited to do it again. Speaking of… I think it's time to announce the theme for the second Suggestion Showdown.

The theme for Suggestion Showdown #2 is…. BIOMES

Yup! You heard that right. Biomes! Your challenge this time around will be to suggest an entire biome to be added to the game. This time, there will only be ONE winner. The individual with the winning submission will get to come onto a stream with us and design some blocks, flora, and fauna that will exist in their biome. We may end up inviting you for multiple streams. A bit of a disclaimer; Once we pick the winning biome, we may modify the suggestion or the features of it as we work on implementing it into the game. Additionally, it is important to remember that the biome may be updated in the future without consulting the winner. Basically, you plant the seed, we do the rest. If this sounds interesting to you and you want to compete or learn more, head on over to #events in our Discord to submit your entry and read up on all the particulars! You can join the Discord here: https://discord.gg/33C7bVVFBk​

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Trees

Don't get too excited – Trees are not done yet. However, we are hoping to share a whole lot more tree content in the next blog post. In the meantime, here's a little sneak peek GIF at some tree progress.

The stuff that you see in this GIF is very rough, but shows much promise. While there are a lot of things we are and are planning on improving, it is clear that our goal is within reach. Our developer who has mainly been working on trees, Stephen, has been working an 80 hour internship this summer. Unfortunately, that has not left much time for trees. He's back on them now and we will share his progress as we can!

Free Desktop Backgrounds

Here's our new Pre-Alpha Main Menu background as well as another render from this blog post. Feel free to use them for your desktops!

Checking in on Alpha…

We'll be hosting a Stage Event in our Discord in the near future to talk about our plans for the game and Alpha. Join our Discord if you do not want to miss this event. We'll give you a more detailed Alpha Progress update there and in the next blog post.

Discord

https://discord.gg/2BKtNks

Use the link above to head on over to our Discord. This is the absolute BEST way to communicate with myself, any of the Developers, and the community. We have dedicated areas for you to suggest features, give feedback, learn more, and most importantly - ASK QUESTIONS (and get an answer too!) This is the easiest way of supporting us and is totally free! We are so happy to see so many of you already taking advantage of this by joining, talking to each other, suggesting features, and grilling us with questions! It's been great! While we post blogs infrequently – WE ARE VERY ACTIVE HERE! This is the best place to stay up to date with the game!

**I know I mention Discord in every blog post, but seriously, this is a great place to get to know us better! You can earn in-game profile tags, suggest features directly, and we do different things throughout the week for you to participate in like Feedback Friday with more to come in the future! You're missing out if you haven't hopped in yet! ❤️

Twitch

https://twitch.tv/venatus_games​

Our twitch is a great place to watch the development in action! We're typically live at least once a week and more recently multiple times a week! Come tune in and watch us work on the game!

YouTube

Check out our YouTube channel for other pieces of Nightfall's OST. We also plan to post video dev logs there… eventually (hopefully this summer?)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb0eFml5-iRYt6mgG2k2LTw

Click the link above to head over and subscribe so you don't miss future videos!

Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/vgnightfall

While we don't require it by any means, Patreon is a great way to support us directly. You can pledge to monetarily support us monthly here. We do have various tiers of support that each provide unique rewards like special roles on our Discord server, access to even more direct communication with Developers, and of course, eventual early access to the game to help us test. One of the tiers even lets you work with us directly to add a creature to the game! You'll also get bonus development content and an even closer peek into our development process directly through Patreon and Discord when you subscribe! We've already posted a lot of extra content on our Patreon!

Thank you to our current Patreon supporters:

Patreon+ - BOWSER0897

Patreon+ - Ceaturtle

If you don't like Patreon, you can also choose to support us directly with one-time payments through PayPal.

You can donate through PayPal by clicking here.

Thank you to those of you who have chosen to do this in the past or through Patreon.

Twitter

https://twitter.com/venatus_games

Our Twitter is a great way to keep track of weekly updates to Nightfall! We post screenshots, GIFs, videos, art, job positions, and more! Twitter is free to use and an awesome way to stay up to date with all of the Nightfall news! Head on over to the link above and give us a follow to learn more!

(Closing)

Night is Upon Us!

And here we are at the end of another blog post. As we near two years of development working on Nightfall, we're more optimistic than ever about the state of the game. We've seen some serious setbacks between COVID and every day life but that has not stopped us from persevering. While two years may have passed since we've started working on the game, we've probably spent less than half of that actually programming or designing aspects of Nightfall. For those of you who are unfamiliar with us or the game – we do this as a hobby. I think it's pretty incredible how far we've come in how little time we've been able to work on this game. We will continue to pour love into Nightfall in the coming year and look forward to sharing the game with you as soon as we can. Stay tuned in our Discord for more information, events, and the release of the Alpha version. Thank you for supporting us in the way that you do. We are very thankful.

With love,

Jack and the Venatus Team