The Wonj

Devlog 3: a body for everyone, trees that differ, and boulders

Another full day on the voxel RPG. People got a real figure, the forests got variety and company, bodies started bumping into each other properly, and the Object Creator got a new coat of paint.

A body for everyone

The player and the wanderers were plain boxes with eyes. Now every person wears the same base figure: skin, a blue tunic, brown boots and two eyes, built from voxels much finer than the world's blocks. It isn't animated yet, so for now it glides along the ground as the box did, and underneath it still collides as that box.

The player, seen from behind in a blue tunic and brown boots, stands on grassy terraces among wanderers wearing the same figure; one faces the camera with two dark eyes. A pale fan in front of the player shows a swing, with oaks, pines and sandy hills behind.

Trees that differ

Last time, objects learned to roll their own variations, but the oak and pine didn't use it yet. Now they do. Each tree rolls its own trunk, how far its upper trunk slides, and how its bands of leaves turn and mirror, so no two trees in the world are quite the same. There are also fewer of them than before, which opens the forests up.

Boulders, and grass that's switched off

Rounded, mossy limestone boulders now sit scattered through the land, set down into the ground, and a tree won't grow where a boulder already stands. Walk-through grass was built too, fine tufts tinted to match the ground beneath, but it's switched off for now.

The player faces the camera on a grassy rise, with three rounded grey limestone boulders sunk into the ground around them and an oak growing beyond the nearest, under a hazy sky with pines on far hills.

Small cliffs also got a little taller, so even the smallest ones read as cliffs.

Bodies that push back

Bodies are now solid to each other. They stop flush, can stand on each other's heads, and push each other around by weight, so a line of bodies shoved into a wall stops at the wall. How hard a hit knocks something back now depends on what kind of thing it is.

Swings now land through a hit area in front of the swinger, and a hit now freezes the target for a split second, which gives each blow a bit of weight.

Seen from behind, the player swings at a wanderer beside them: a pale fan shows the swing, the wanderer flashes white from the hit, and a health bar floats over its head.

Two new commands help with testing: /spawn puts a wanderer just ahead to fight, and /hitboxes shows what can be hit in green and live swings in red.

The player stands on a grassy slope with a crowd of wanderers spread across the terraces and sand around them, a mossy boulder in the distance, and the chat at bottom left listing several /spawn commands, each answered Spawned a wanderer.

The Object Creator's new look

The Object Creator now has docked side panels and a top bar on one warm dark surface around the 3D view, with a single yellow accent for whatever is selected. Each layer now holds its own voxels, so painting and erasing only touch the selected layer, and the keyboard moves a layer around a voxel at a time.

Objects are also saved as plain text now, laid out as a picture of each slice, so they can be read and written outside the editor. Every build turns them into a compact form for the game.

No more sparkles

Last time, neighbouring faces were merged into larger rectangles to draw less. That made thin sparkles appear along some edges, so it's been taken back out: every block face is its own square again, and the edges are clean.

The wireframe view: the land drawn as green lines, every block face its own square split into two triangles, with the player and a wanderer outlined in their own colours and trees and sand in the distance.