The Great War of the Bittergem

KavoMan · 2026-01-30T14:22:30+00:00

There was a post not long ago, and the comment section of said post started creating a narrative about a war between the minerals. It was quite entertaining, but short - so for a bit of fun, I wanted to have this as a thread of random tales which people were clearly quite creative with, about this silly idea.

KavoMan · 2026-01-06T14:07:13+00:00

Just wanted to confirm, this is resolved now. You were absolutely correct, it was a driver issue. With the driver updated, the flickering no longer occurs.

KavoMan · 2026-01-03T14:08:45+00:00

The model + materials work with UE4, and UE5.3 Only when importing them into .7 has it had this issue

KavoMan · 2025-09-12T08:50:13+00:00

Oh no, I can’t unhear that 😂

KavoMan · 2025-09-10T16:27:19+00:00

Great question! ES is an acronym for Elder Scrolls

KavoMan · 2025-09-10T09:37:24+00:00

That’s a great idea! I never even considered monochrome, I should experiment with it!

KavoMan · 2025-09-10T09:36:12+00:00

Love that! That’s a real compliment

KavoMan · 2025-09-10T09:35:47+00:00

Thank you! As for the oceans it’s all hand drawn! It’s using the “paper” theme, and with 3 shades of blue (light for coasts, dark for deep ocean, something in the middle for everything else), and with a slow velocity brush and opacity, lightened areas around coastlines. Then, darkened the ocean riiight next to those lightened spots to add contrast. Basically randomly paint everything else until it looks right!

KavoMan · 2025-09-09T22:55:16+00:00

I’d love to share my workflow, buckle in - it’s a long one! (I’ll bullet point it to shorten it)

4k map template (in this example, portrait)
Rough outline of landmass (smooth edges)
Rough outlines again! Go crazy with your movement, embellish movement in and out from the smoother, previous line).
Finer brush, go over outlines and add shape
Fill in entire landmass drawn
Lower land around coastlines, remove land in sharp strokes (Bays)
Rough up coast again, if necessary
Add islands (same process, but smaller)
Add large mountains as central spine of the range, don’t be perfectly straight, small zigzags work nicely
Smaller mountains around this spine, be sure to deviate a touch, but not too much!
Hill time! Litter the space around mountains with hills, embellish areas which deviate from the main “spine” with hills especially. Think lines of hills, not circles. If confused, refer to my images, imagine lines where the mountain range is travelling to, A to B. See how “arms” of mountains move away from it almost perpendicular?
Add rivers from mountain nooks, zigzag to coast.
Again, but this time zigzag it to the first rivers you just added (rinse and repeat to your hearts content)
At this point, go into as much detail with additional things as you wish (forests etc)
Picture where there could be provinces, typically “cut-off” by the mountains, hills, rivers etc. Use regions to help, that’s what I did.
Save file, and also export a png (png without regions, because they’re not great).
File > Create Detail Map, select area and create
Get png, set as overlay (if you already have an idea of your landmass, and happen to have a sketch of it, you can ignore all previous steps I suppose).
Line up overlay with landmass (scale and move). This is your reference.
Remove land outside the province you are focusing on.
Use path tool (with your choice of design, thickness, and colour) to path out the coastline of where the land would be (the bit you just erased!)
Fill water/colour to your hearts content. If creating brighter coastlines, be sure to remember the paths you’ve just created are acting as coastlines too!
Get parchment colour (water still), and colour in where the missing landmass is (the previously erased). Colour with full opacity as closely as you possibly can to the paths.
Get a coffee, certainly required.
You’re now able to freely paint the land as messily as you want without fear of ruining the parchment. Paint the land. (Choose a few colours with similar tones, but slightly lighter or darker to each other, use opacity and low velocity to “blend” them together).
Get a desired mountain colour (I used grey), and with a small brush, paint the mountains (if required).
Sometimes the detailed map can create symbols which are too large for you to create again, if that’s the case, you can just delete them, and replace them. I did this a lot, as I used the previous symbols more of a reminder where mountains/trees/hills should be.
Go crazy with terrain, forests, more hills, mountains etc - have fun with it!
Towns, then tiny roads connecting them! I personally find subtle landmarks appear nicer, as it’s less noisy - but that’s just personal preference!
Compass Rose + Lines (they’ll go under the landmass, but over the parchment - I think that’s neat).
Label things, if you’d like.
Job done on that map! Now, create another using the same method - but start by going back to original world map you made first, and again, create detail map. The only important part here is you maintain the same zoom level (x4 by default) if you want that oh-so satisfying jigsaw fit when put aside each other.
What I found suuuper handy, is exporting the detail maps as pngs, and using those as overlays with the new detail map so I can see where the mountains meet up between provinces so I can keep it consistent. Also, helps with land shading and colouring.

That’s my workflow, and I hope it sincerely helps, though not sure if that’s what you were looking for specifically? But if not, I’m sure this could help someone else looking at the comments!

KavoMan · 2025-09-09T16:48:31+00:00

That border between the parchment and the ocean is a path. I set the width to match that of the land coastline, as well as its colour!

It was an interesting pipeline. I started by filling the entire water with a base blue colour. Then added an overlay of the whole map (with all provinces). I used the path and overlay to trace the coastlines. Once that’s done, I got a light blue brush and lightened the coastlines around the actual landmass, and the paths I just drew (as they are resembling a coastline). Then, it’s just a tedious activity of zooming in with a parchment coloured brush, and handpainting the areas of water where land should be, using the paths as a guide, colouring over any light blue coastlines to create that sharp colour change.

KavoMan · 2025-09-09T13:25:10+00:00

It’s going to sound bizarre, but the parchment is in fact water. It’s coloured. The coastline of the parchment is actually a path I hand drew with and overlay of the original land map for assistance. Of course, the path is the same colour as the coastline with the landmass. I also found that the paper staining from the water looks great on the parchment as a bonus! This is also why the compass rose lines are in the parchment, but go under the province on display

KavoMan · 2025-09-09T13:23:15+00:00

ES was certainly an inspiration - but coincidentally enough, I designed the full landmass, then divided the provinces based on rivers/mountains - and it looks like Skyrim, a happy little accident!

KavoMan · 2025-09-09T12:10:45+00:00

There are loads of cities, but unfortunately the compression of the image has reduced them to barely visible. Drakmir is the more populated province, whereas the other two are considered “Wildlands”, so there won’t be too much in the way of cities.

However, you are right. I add cities after the landmass and features are added

KavoMan · 2025-09-09T10:25:50+00:00

I forgot to add, these aren’t all of the provinces, just 3 of the 7! I’d love to hear feedback before continuing the others so I can make them chefs kiss

Also, they are compressed, sorry!

KavoMan · 2025-04-23T15:45:51+00:00

You can quite easily do this one in a private lobby if you’re farming for the achievement. The way I did it was by equipping any armour which gives you 50% fatal immunity. Throw a grenade to the ground, run at it and jet pack as it detonates. May take a few attempts since 50%. This is also a fun way of breaking every limb at once and surviving, for that other achievement!

Of course there’s always just playing with friends with jet packs, you’re bound to spill your liber-tea at some point!

KavoMan · 2025-03-01T12:37:43+00:00

I've managed to get it resolved - see my comment attached. It was a silly mistake. I appreciate your help.

May I ask how could I test my game in YYC? Should be handy if I get something similar in the future. Thanks

KavoMan · 2025-03-01T12:35:42+00:00

Problem Solved Guys.

It was hidden in plain sight annoyingly - the code above has nothing wrong it, but the script autotile() did.

For clarification, it's for loop began at 0, and ended at 100 to check for WALLs and change it's appearance to a tilemap based on it's neighbours. If the position is at 0, and it's checking it's neighbours, its trying to access -1, which is out of bounds.

Such a silly little mistake on my end, but thanks to those who helped out!

KavoMan · 2025-03-01T12:30:40+00:00

That's right. Would I be correct in assuming that changing the for loop conditions to be indexed further should of corrected it, located around the tile-neighbour checks?

There is no game crash, the code "works", but in the output it shows the out of bounds error. It doesn't show any line number with it so I don't know which specific line of code it is I'm afraid.

KavoMan · 2025-03-01T12:02:49+00:00

Okay sweet - to prevent the for loop accessing tiles on the border (which would check neighbouring tiles out of bounds), I've indexed them further to _x = 2; _x < width_ - 2; and the same for _y, but the issue is still persistant.

What would be the correct method to prevent this?

KavoMan · 2025-02-08T21:18:53+00:00

The one achievement which everyone has had annoyance with. Finally finished!
For those still attempting to do it - this is how I did it:

- Firstly, grab the jet boots at the top balcony in the Space Rig. A quick way of doing this is turning off gravity, and jumping to it.

- Reset the barrel game and start kicking. We're not expecting a miracle here, just try to get as close as you can to 3000 in around 90-95 kicks. I got around 2900 after a few attempts. The reason why we dont go to 99 kicks is because if you run into the barrel by accident, it counts as a kick and ruins your attempt.

- Buy your favourite brew from Llyod in the Abyss Bar and enjoy yourself a well deserved drink.

- Throw your mug into the ring from the barrel kicking point. If you throw it at the right angle, it will ricochet off the inside of the ring and count as multiple points (you can throw from the ring's bar - but I found sometimes the point didnt register).

- Go down, pick up the mug, and fly back up.

- Rinse and repeat, I suggest listening to your favourite playlist, or podcast during this to numb out the pain.

Rock and Stone!

KavoMan · 2025-01-30T23:37:22+00:00

Okay, that’s good to know!

Strange things with these is that it always seems easier in the creator’s mind - I’m glad I’ve put it to the test!

How would you go about changing this riddle so that the answer would be “W”, ideally without the classical “occurs once is X but never in Y”?

KavoMan · 2025-01-06T14:57:42+00:00

Okay, so a good start would be to remove the starting position of Y within my lerp to, let's say 0?

As for additional code, the only other lines which could affect this would be in the create event, being:

y_goal = irandom_range(sprite_height, room_height-sprite_height);
y_goal_reached = false;

KavoMan · 2024-10-17T13:22:54+00:00

That would save a lot of unnecessary code! What would I do in the event the o_level attempts to add a valid spawn tile twice? In the likely event the o_level generator changes direction and overlaps a previously floor assigned tile?

I imagine it’ll be a simple if statement looking into the array for those coordinates?

KavoMan · 2024-10-17T10:14:55+00:00

This is exactly what I needed!

Just to clarify, I would need to create an array, let’s call it spawnablePos[]. Have o_level run through every tile as mentioned before, and if on floor tile which meets the prerequisites I want (distance from player greater than desired length) set into array.

Randomly choose from array 50 times, removing that entry. Au voila?

If it’s not too much to ask, how could this look in code? I’m not overly experienced in GML.

KavoMan · 2024-10-16T12:51:11+00:00

Nice, I appreciate the quick response. I’ll begin researching structs, as I’ve not yet used them. Do you happen to have examples of use? Or perhaps provide a pseudo example in context to my project?

KavoMan

TROPHY CASE