Forging Ahead
It is the first project, to make it to an official status, and therefore is the birth of the branding, as it also enticed me to make more voxel graphics from then on.
With this project it also birthed the concept of making multiplayer games in general, as we tried out fishnet and liked the idea of being able to make co-op games.
It started out with Bobsi making both graphics and basic multiplayer functionality, as he had worked with it a lot longer than I had at the time.
So to the beginnings I made pick up physics, simple crafting and quickly turned to making voxel models after seeing how the program was being used.
The Gameplay
Forging Ahead is a game in a setting of an rpg but with the twist that you are the npc.
The two main mechanics are shopkeeping and crafting, shopkeeping is both the part of putting the crafted item up for sale where it has a base price depending on the market, you can increase or decrease this price and it will vary your chances of the item getting taken and set up for bartering.
Now bartering these prices will of course have a chance for a sale to go through, or it may not depending on how much you barter for, and as you barter you might get more money but less reputation.
Reputation will make a variance in customers, some high bidders and low bidders depending on how high your reputation is.
The other part is crafting, you buy reagents, they are used in different processes where the different processes has varying outcomes both when it comes to rarity of the crafted item, but also the pricing of said item.
Networking
The networking part of Forging Ahead firstly took place as fishnet, and through iteration after iteration remained the same using fishnet. Though now it is being revamped into using Purrnet as that seemed more suitable for the project.
The co-op part about the game is that shopkeeping needs interaction as well as the crafting, so the ideal scenario would be someone working the production and the second managing the store, as these roles are quite simple right now, it is planned in the future to have more capabilities such as ordering reagents or doing outside missions.
This will allow multiple players to be active at once.
Performance
Performance is an interesting one when it comes to Forging Ahead as it was the first project to introduce voxels models.
The voxel models and objects produced by MagicaVoxel has faces on all sides of each voxel, making it way less performant that what one could imagine.
So to solve this issue running the .vox models created in MagicaVoxel through another program called VoxelShop we achieved more performant models in general, and it also came with a seperate texture sprite instead of having one for all models.
It definitely looks more clean in MagicaVoxel (the dark background) but the outcome of VoxelShop more than halves faces and conjoins them in the process making them way more “affordable” to have as assets.
Uniqueness
As it’s hard to make shopkeeping not alike others, there are several factors at play when it comes to making Forging Ahead unique. The fact that it’s solely physics based, it’s multiplayer and there is a lot of interactivity in smaller details such as decoration.
This game is definitely made to be casual and slow-paced, only makes it different in the regard it’s a game you’re supposed to return to multiple times and isn’t playthrough based where you have to dedicate a lot of time on it.
One honourable mention would be that it’s still an RPG so you get better rarities later as well as more tools and bigger shops with progression.
