Official Media Thread

[SweptThrone]

Week of August 4, 2025

Rivers and Clearings



This week, I started fleshing out the world a bit by adding rivers and clearings.

    Rivers are obviously rivers.  So far, they're nothing more than a water-colored tile you can step on, but the structure is there.  They carve through the terrain sparingly and when they cross a path in the grass, they create a wooden bridge to get across it.  When encountering a town, they abruptly stop, which I'm not a huge fan of.  Naturally, all of this is just placeholder; the final texture will be animated and the rivers themselves will look cleaner and more natural.
    The other thing you can see in this image is the patch of question mark tiles.  These represent clearings, where various interesting world features will go, such as camps.  They're very common since they're based on the same noise used to make paths, so there will more than likely be a way to either make features sparse in general, or make only good features rare.  This isn't to say that some features will not be good, but you won't be finding good loot at every clearing.

    It's been a while since the last media post mainly because I haven't made anything worth showing off, but also because I've been working on my experimental Garry's Mod servers:  STAG Servers.  These servers close at the end of October, so I'll be switching back to ToF full-time at that point.

[SweptThrone]

Week of July 20, 2026

Points of Interest



Almost a whole year.  Woohoo!

    This simple screenshot shows off the very initial version of Points of Interest.  Currently, I have 22 different PoIs planned which will flesh out the world and give the player interesting things to do and find outside of towns.  These are the next step from the clearings and interesting features shown off in the last media post, but are still not complete; no graveyard has a single grave in it.

    What the hell have I been doing for the past 11 months, coding a grave?  If you haven't been paying attention to my weekly progress reports, I'll try to summarize:
    As mentioned in the previous post, I was working on some experimental Garry's Mod servers.  What I didn't mention, however, was that I extended the event by two months, and the last server in the event was the largest server I ever made.  So large, in fact, that it was actually three servers connected to each other!  There was a lot that had to be done to make this work properly and it didn't even work properly when it came out, so it was the sole object of my focus for about a month.
    A few months later, Garry's Mod took my focus for another month while I released all of the addons I made for the server event, which required sprucing them up a bit and decoupling them from my server so that they'd work on all servers.
    Beyond other projects that took my time, I made two more prototypes for systems that will be in the game.  You can read about them on their pages linked.  The grand majority of all of this "idle" time, however, was spent on optimizing what I'd already made and making it in a way that's less stupid.  At various points in time, props were randomly disappearing, houses were not spawning properly, I was causing memory leaks and infinite loops, and some things were just straight-up not working properly.  I decided it was better to make these fixes and optimizations now before I'm too far beyond a specific feature that I'd have to rewrite core parts of the game when it's further along.
    I still wouldn't say that I'm comfortable with my abilities that this game requires; I've never really used any game engine in this way before, I've never made a major project in C#, and I sure have never made an actual full game.  I'm learning as I go and I'm the only one doing it.  I wouldn't have it any other way, but it means progress can seem really slow sometimes, especially when I have things in the real world that require more time and effort.

Thanks for reading this rather long hardly-a-media post!  If you want to continue to keep up with how progress is coming along, remember to keep an eye on the SweptThrone Code Circular, which has been updated every week for the last six years.

[SweptThrone]

Week of September 14, 2026

Points of Interest 2



This was the first week I've worked on Tale of Flocksworth every day, and I managed to get a fair bit done.

The attached image shows many things:

• Top left:  A graveyard.  The path is "faded" around the edges and each grave has a random texture from a sheet.
  
• Top right:  A Goldenvale camp.  The tent can be opened, closed, and entered, although the interior is not finished.  The flags around the camp are new double-wide, double-tall props.
  
• Bottom left:  A shack.  Currently just a fully random house in the middle of a Poi zone.
  
• Bottom right:  A forest with new double-wide tree textures, which was intended to show off Z-index randomization, but every pair of overlapping trees appears to be overlapping the same way.  At least it's opposite to how they're generated, so you know something's getting done!
  

But I did plenty more, so I'm just gonna shotgun it out in this list in the order I wrote it down:

• Set up an early version of graveyard spawning (shown above).
  
• Set up an even earlier version of shack spawning (shown above).
  
• Fixed a bug where small houses would have an infinite interior width.
  
• Fixed a misplaced door bug caused by fixing the infinite interior bug.
  
• Added a check to prevent Poi pieces from spawning within towns.
  
• Rewrote the way I spawn structures to allow myself to spawn more than houses.
  
• Added tents (shown above) with unique tent doors and placeholder interiors.
  
• Scaled and randomized the Z-index of all entities to allow them to have a random offset to look less uniform when overlapping (shown above).
  
• Rewrote the way I spawn doors to include more materials than house materials.
  
• Rewrote the way I handle props with sprite sheets to allow myself to apply sprites of any sizes to props easily.
  
• Made entity positioning consistent.  Some entities were top-left-based but others were center-based for some reason.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the Z-index of props to calculate incorrectly.
  
• Fixed a memory leak caused by panels not cleaning up their entity prototypes.
  

I intend to continue working daily, as I have a book to fill!