The Brikverse

I've been poking at this since 2008 and have just made a web site and forum to support it.

The Brikverse is a plastic construction toy universe.

I am currently making the editor tools.
I will be making a tactics style single player game, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, Fallout Tactics, XCOM, various roguelikes. While there will also be a sandbox style experience, that is not the end goal.

Web site: www.brikverse.com
Forum: http://www.brikverse.com/smf/

You can download the Terrain Demo from the web site.
It runs as a full screen standalone application.

 

Wow; looks like you've put a lot of work into this already. I'm really liking this.
I've always been a huge Lego fan when I was a kid, and now looking forward to my son being old enough so I can re play with Legos and all those great toys.

Do you plan on only building the 'base' blocks? Such as standard squares; rectangles and other basic shapes? Or you planning to expanding it out much similar to the Lego universe with certain peices belonging to a specific theme? Such as space peices, western, underwater, etc..

Also are you doing all the programming and art for this? One man team?

Great work so far, I will be looking forward to future updates.

 

Eventually I'd like to cover many time periods.
But you need to start somewhere so probably medieval first, then work my way up.

So far its all been done by me.
I got quite a bit of art, programming and design experience over the last 4 decades.
At this point its just a matter of time, or money. Of course both are in short supply.

 

I dropped some free code in the Scripting forum.
Its an example of an Entity / Component / Messaging system.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/entity-component-messaging-free-code.413203/

 

I was poking around with Pixlr today, just a little photoshop afterwards.

 

I finished making a new terrain styles system.

I decided I had to make some official terrain styles for Skin and Meat.
Skin has pimples.
Now I need to make landscape parts to replace bushes and trees with short hair and 12 foot tall thick strands of hair.
The stream is now puss.
You have to strip the skin off to make roads.

 

Haha wow, this took an unexpected turn.

I like where this is going. Keep up the great work.

 

Well just playing around really.
But I might need to think about what a meat planet really is.

 

Oh god cant stop laughing!
Thanks Murgilod

 

looks cool, but I would be careful with the lego appearance.

Any lawyer would look at it and consider it a blatant imitation of lego and throw you under a bus.

 

This has been around since 2007:
http://blockland.us/index.html

Watch the top of page gif and...
Watch the video trailer on that page.

 

AFAIK, imitation is legal. In my Tesco there are many "Cola" drinks. They are all brown and taste very similar to Coca Cola. There are at least 50 Minecraft clones which look similar. There are about dozen MMORPGs which look almost like WoW. You can always imitate but you can't infringe IP and trademarks. These are completely separate issues. For ex. you can make a gothic ARPG where you fight Satan but you can't call it Diablo 4.

AFAIK visual style is not IP.

 

well I guess lego dont care then! sweet.

 

Depends on who's visual style it is and whether or not using visual style confuses people into thinking its associated with genuine product.

 

Just playing around with some sand.

 

Oh yeah I love legos. Looks pretty cool so far! And for the kiddies they get the clunky fat lego duploes!! JK JK. I love that scene at the end of the Lego Movie when the Duplos show up.

 

A golf course!
I finished making my Landscape styles (trees) load from a text file, just like Entities and Terrain styles.
I also put an automatic variation on the ground color.

 

After making the golf course terrain, I got bit carried away and made some bullshit golf ball physics.
Looks good so far, almost done with that.
I've included a Driver, 5 Iron, 9 Iron and Wedge. No putters yet.

Driver flight track:


This is at 1/3 scale.
I made everything work at full size, then scaled things down.

 

So I spent about 110 hours in September making a GolfBallController.
It works great. Still have no idea if I want to really go off course and make a full golf game. It would be faster than making the game I want though.

Here is a mock up of a Planet Map.
One 32x32 space Baseplate is the entire planet, at Level 3.
You can zoom in 2 levels from here.

The colors need to change. I was mostly working out how I want the height of the spaces to work for oceans, lowlands, hills, mountains.
There will be little Monopoly style houses to show where cities are.
Each space has 3x3 sub spaces, so I can run rivers and roads.

( the stuff in the upper left was for materials testing )

 

The visuals of this look amazing! The style and colours are very nice.

 

Thanks!
After I got a degree in Architecture I went to art school for 1.5 years for graphic design.
I try to control the saturation of the colors, so it doesn't become a clown show.
I do need to fix that medium blue color though.

 

You should drop the golf thing and go for the original idea instead, sounds a lot more fun ; )

 

Well the bad news is I just got slammed with 4 new jobs in 4 days.
But the good news is I just got 4 news jobs, and I'll have plenty of time to think about what game to work on.

I am really close to having something for the original project to walk around with.
Close means several months if I have a lot of free time, but 4 new jobs means very busy.

 

The yellow boxes are solar systems.
I might put little boxes around them for the planets.
The Suns might be different colors.

 

The very small boxes are unimportant stars.
I increased the color variation and elevation of the galaxy background from 3 to 5.
I made the space that the main stars are in, a bit yellowish.

 

I repaired most of the broken image links, due to Dropbox Dropping the public folder concept.

I wrote this as more a document to myself, but you may find it interesting.
I usually don't do things so formally. I have piles of copier paper I make hand written notes on.
http://www.Brikverse.com/documents/TheBrikverse_Explained.pdf

 

I made 2 normal maps.
One for the terrain.
One for the Landscape items, trees.

Before:



After:

 

Beautiful! Graphics look very polished.

 

Thanks.
I've been working on that lately.
I had forgotten about needing Tangents on meshes to make normal maps work right.
So I needed to write code to copy that into the new meshes.

I looked into converting to Linear / Deferred and following this:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/chingwas-guide-to-lighting-and-post-effects.472265/

But it relies upon using the PostProcessStack, I got it off the Asset store, but it throws 17 error messages onto the console. I Deleted it.

I do have ReflectionProbes set up and that crappy default skybox.

Another problem is the Metallic slot, because I'm using a user made shader, the metallic is broken.
I'm using vertex colors and Unity refuses to make a Standard shader for it.
So I'm stuck with the metallic sliders, not optimal.

 

Finished the Universe Level 7
Although I still need to more irregular galaxy images, only one right now.
The galaxy images look a bit rough because I'm using the 32x32 pixel images I created for data purposes to draw galaxies on Level 6, like the images above.

I might need to redraw them at a higher resolution, one day.

White


Goldish

 

So I have a question.

When zooming in and out between levels, like Universe to Galaxy.
Which sounds better?

ZoomIn, ZoomOut

or

ZoomDown, ZoomUp

I started with thinking In/Out
But I just began making GUI buttons and thinking I would have arrows pointing Up and Down.

 

Definitely in/out. Up down could be confusing to some.

 

Cool stuff!

 

Got further along with Zooming IN/OUT.
So the Universe screen above can zoom down to a galaxy like this below.
I lightened up the look of galaxies.

Zooming in/out works for Level 7 and 6.
Next step is to make Level 5 Solar System and refine how zooming works.

 

I just noticed I showed the exact same galaxy type as before, so here are a few others on Level 6.
Irregular galaxy up front, regular Spiral A and an Elliptical B.
I need to make 10+ more irregulars.

 

What my main menu looks like.
This has been done for a long time but I never posted it before.

Sort of like an LCD screen.

 

That galaxy looks too much like a hurricane...shudders.

 

Don't worry, it doesn't really move anywhere and the space marines will protect you.


Edit:
I just read your blog post. I didn't know you lived in Florida!
Good to hear you got through it ok!

 

Solar Level 5

Max 8 planets per sun.
All 4 sizes shown, no orbit path.
The planets are all the same type for now.



Orbit paths shown and an asteroid belt.

 

A Planet System at Level 4
Moons and an asteriod belt.





Planet Level 3
Just a blank slate at the moment.
There is a huge job of making Biomes/ Height maps / Wetness map etc.
There are 4 planet sizes, 8x8, 16x16, 24x24, 32x32

 

Baby's first perlin noise.
OK yes, the absolute first was totally flat, just like everyone's.




Edit:
A first pass at terrain colors
Tall mountains have snow studs.
Hills are that olive color and yellowgreen is a lowest land level.
Not sure I like these too much. Still have to add biome types over this so it will change later anyway.

 

My first wetness map. Not corrected for altitude or latitude. No snow or icebergs.
This planet doesnt have big mountains though.
The colors are mostly final, wet grass to dry grass. Still not sure about the water.

 

A bit further along.
Bumped up the green grass color.
Made mountains happen more often.
Icebergs!

 

This is about as far as I'm going to take level 3. On to Level 2.
When you click on one of those spaces you can zoom down and see 32x32 spaces of level 2 and surrounding baseplates.

 

I made a painting today!

 

Level 3 with shorter trees, added rivers.


Level 2