All right, good morning, everyone.
Well, good morning if you're on My Time Zone, and afternoon if you're in Pepe's.
Welcome to Sandow Podcast 13.
So this is the first type of episode I've done like this before where we've followed
up with a sip after it's passed.
But we have that exactly where we are right now.
What we're doing today is we're following up with the sip that passed some weeks ago.
So Magic Palette, it was the first community sip and it passed with an overwhelming majority
of a 99% yes.
So welcome back Pepe.
I think it's been podcast number three or four now.
So almost in the very beginning.
Now, yeah, we're almost 10 episodes later.
That's awesome.
Keep pushing.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me, Lentz.
Super cool to see things evolve around the Sandow Podcast.
Really cool guests lately.
Tried to watch all of them.
And yeah, things going well.
We push development of Magic Palette as fast as we can because we know everybody wants
to get their hands on our app.
And this is great.
We have completed phase one of our sip and now working on phase two.
And with phase three, we already go live with the beta version that you can register here
on our magic palette.io page or just drop your email there and you get on the list.
And after that, we want to go public soon.
Kind of for everyone out there.
And for those of you who don't recall Pepe from Sandrush, sip number three is, or excuse
me, sip number six is with Magic Palette.
And he's been the lead designer, the person who's pretty much running it as the face of
it all and the Sandrush team.
You know what, let's, a little bit out of order, but that's okay.
In the end, by the way, thank you, Dankoi and Mark.
I see you both in the chat and Alisor, thank you for coming in and watching this.
And I have to have a little bit of technical difficulty here in a second to refresh.
My presentation wants to...
Did you lose my screen?
Yeah, give me some problems.
We will get there.
Yeah, we'll get there.
So the disclaimer is that Pepe and I are not giving financial legal advice.
Nothing we say is to be taken as that.
And you know what, how about we just roll right into it.
But today, the point of today is to demo the magic palette.
So from start to scratch, I'm an amateur at this.
And I'm also, if I were to use magic palette, what would it look like?
What will we do?
And that is the whole point of today.
So for someone who has very little experience in GameMaker and Vox Editor, as a person who
owns land, how do I use magic palette?
Pepe, let's go through it.
What do I do?
Let's do it.
Yeah, that's great.
And I think a lot of people will stand on this thing or are in the same position as
you are.
And they would love to start creating and can wrap their hand around how to get started.
But still, I mean, the tools that the sandbox provides us are quite approachable, I would
say, with Vox Edit and GameMaker.
But then again, for various reasons, when we did productions by our own or especially
in collaboration with other people, and this is often happening in game jams or in full
scale productions for clients and all that, we had a hard time to keep pushing on GameMaker
when it comes to level design.
And therefore, we have developed magic palette.
It was first just a little helper tool that did allow us to come in with a different approach.
The base idea that magic palette gives you at hand as an artist or designer is that you
can design your levels now in voxels and transform them with the help of magic palette into blocks.
So this is where the magic is happening.
It is a bit of a shift when it comes to create your lens and your ideas and levels and games.
But once you get the hang of it, I think it has huge benefits because it allows you to
model design, create your lens in a very different way, and especially in a fast, iterative way
that is non-destructive.
As we know in GameMaker, you work with blocks and you can quite nicely work already with
blocks.
There are not that many tools, sadly, when it comes to the block design.
But when you remove a block or add a block, it's kind of final.
And if you want to shift, for example, a landmass a few blocks to your left, you just need to
rebuild everything and all that type of stuff.
So this is where magic palette has huge benefits if you make your lens first as a minimap.
I think this is what we want to do today.
We just start.
I asked Lancer before we start the stream or planning this episode here.
I'm not sure if it takes us three episodes, but I imagine somewhere around that.
So the goal is in today's episode that we start with a concept, with an idea.
Starting from the pre-production, we call this pre-production, where you flesh out the
whole concept, the design, the moods, the game mechanics.
This is not the focus of today's episode, probably, and will also not be in the further
episode because this is a different part of the design process, in my opinion.
It all goes hand in hand, but we focus on designing and building the level.
So after pre-production, we would build a minimap.
For this, I would use Magica Voxel.
It's one of the free available Voxel tools that is quite powerful.
You can also use Voxel Edit or Cubicle or other Voxel editors for this.
It might make sense to note this here.
Magic Palette is not an editor or a Voxel editor per se.
You can edit some stuff, but it's not meant to replace these tools.
It's also not meant to replace the game mechanics or the asset dressing that you do then later
in Game Maker.
So it's this chain in between your Voxel worlds or Voxel creations and designs and transform
them with the help of Magic Palette to a full-fleshed level design in Game Maker.
So far I've heard step one is we start first with a concept.
So that's kind of like when you asked me, hey, what do you want to start off with?
And I said, I want to do an island.
So is that the concept?
So we already done with step one?
Yes, let's dive in.
I think this is exactly what we do right now.
Every idea starts with a few first sentences or how do you say, a concept.
I have gathered based on your, you shared me, I'm not sure it was here.
Where we left off was we were talking about the design process.
Step one is we start first with a concept.
Step two is build a mini-map.
Step three.
Yes, step three is going, I still can't see the screen.
Can you guys hear us?
Yes.
I can hear you and they can hear you too.
Okay.
Maybe I need to restart as well.
So the next step when we did build the mini-map will be followed up with going to magic palette
with our mini-map and transform this into a block based build.
From there, we have the chance to add custom blocks or things that we want to kind of iterate.
So we go a bit, usually we go back and forth in between our mini-map model and magic palette.
But also soon after we would load our map into GameMaker because there we can test it
straight away and find out how everything is working as intended and if we need to make
changes.
So it's usually a process that is really in the intersection in between these three programs.
So your voxel editor, magic palette in the middle and GameMaker as the final output.
Okay.
Load it into map and GameMaker and then once you load it into GameMaker, it works just
like you would normally would.
You'd have to do the logic in the system and all that.
Exactly.
Then you're at the dressing, you start adding logic and all that.
That makes sense.
Yeah, that's the process usually.
There are various improvements that we already have in the works.
For example, we work on a system where you can play in a very simplified version, but
you can play your level already on your browser so you don't need to go to GameMaker to test
things.
As I said, we don't want to replace GameMaker, but this is, we think, a very helpful feature
that we want to push until we're going live with magic palette.
It reduces these kind of these loading times and all that.
We know things can load quite a bit.
This is one thing.
The other part is that we just improved our voxel importer, for example.
We now have the option to import models that are sliced in various objects and they don't
need to be combined.
This gives more flexibility when working with the minimap, but more of this just in a minute.
As I said, these are just a few.
Maybe I'll show you if you can share your screen again.
Yep, go ahead and share your screen.
I can see it.
Okay, so they can see you.
You can...
So what are we looking at right now?
What is this part?
Good, great.
Right now we're looking at Pinterest.
Yes, exactly.
This will be the concepting phase.
We do a mood board.
We find out what the client wants to have as a mood and idea built on.
You described me something that you would love to have islands, floating islands, this
tropical vibe or at least a very cozy chill vibe for your experience that would be in
the end a farming simulator.
Did I get you right?
It would just be like kind of swim around and be more of an aesthetic sort of thing.
Like looking at the view.
Okay, so all about the scenery, the environment, kind of a really cool place to explore more.
Right, a lot of water though.
A lot of water exploring.
Okay, I see.
We talked about floating islands at some point.
This could be quite a cool concept, I think.
That one down to the left where it says Sao Lui to the right, right next to it.
No, left, left, up, up one, up, up, up, up, that one.
This one?
No, down one.
That one.
That one looks really cool.
It's kind of a pond inside of a, yeah, I see.
I see that's a cool concept.
I like that.
Maybe we can get a larger view.
Okay, so if I were approaching Magic Palette, the first thing I would do is find a concept
that works for me.
So if we choose this one, okay, so what do we do now?
Yeah.
Yeah, now we start up.
This is cool, I like this one.
You like it?
Cool.
Yeah.
So we have a kind of this whole castle, huge castle walls around a city structure or yeah,
whatever and some island inside of this harbor pond or section.
I also like it.
It's quite rough.
It's almost like an oil painting, but the idea is cool and we certainly can work with
this.
So after we nailed our concept or we kind of have a better idea what we are looking
for, we would start one of our box ledgers.
As I said, I'm used to work with magic of oxle.
Give me a second.
It was a magic of oxle.
It's a box editor like box edit is.
It's exactly like box edit.
It's just a more, I would say a bit more powerful because it allows it's something that I just
had here for another tutorial, but let me open a new one.
It's a box editor that is open source.
It's not open source, but it's free.
I'm not sure it's open source.
I wouldn't need to check on that, but it's free.
It's developed by one guy.
He did put a lot of effort into this.
It's quite an amazing piece of software in my opinion.
It has similar things that you can do or work with when it comes to box design or as a box
ledger.
It can be compared to box edit, of course.
It just has a bit more flexibility, I would say, a bit more tools.
And especially it has, for example, something that is called shaders.
I can show you this later down the road because it allows things that are almost impossible
to do by hand or otherwise.
These are kind of small.
My concept art, what do I do next once I have my box edit open?
Yes, exactly.
I have my box edit or in our case, I have my magic box open.
I start a new scene.
And to give us an idea, it's important that we define the top right corner here.
We define the space kind of.
And since each box transforms into a block, we need to kind of work with the dimension
that the sandbox gives us when it comes to land creation.
And as we all know, each land would be 96 by 96 by 128 is the max height.
As you see, this gives us this bounding box that then becomes kind of our maximum volume
that we can work with when it comes to one land.
I just take a color so I get an idea.
How many boxes or blocks?
These are actually, you can see them here when I zoom in.
And this is, yeah, it might be a bit hard to see.
The lines are really thin.
But this is our base dimension for one land.
We of course, and I just mentioned this, we can now stack some or not stack or align some
of them and make, for example, a two by two.
But we always want to stay within these boundaries because once we publish, this will occupy
the space or kind of the amount of land that we can work with.
And a one by one is 96 by 96 by 128?
Yeah, correct.
For this epic design that you did choose, I almost would tend to say it would be cool
to go two by two.
Just as an example, gives us a bit more room.
We can do two by two.
That's fine.
Yeah.
Magical Voxel can support up to three by three if it's not super complicated geometries.
So if you're using Magical Voxel, does that conflict at all with using or needing to meant
anything through or upload anything through VoxEdit?
Well, no.
In the end, it's just that we work with the VoxEdit format.
As you see, we can save here if we want to save the project.
And then you upload it or you can backset it?
Yeah.
Exactly.
You can upload it in VoxEdit, work there.
You can export Vox from VoxEdit, from Cubicle, wherever you are most comfortable with.
And this is the strength that we also bring to the artists and the designers, I think,
with Magic Palette.
It allows you to build and design where you are best at and where you used to work with.
For me, it's Magical Voxel because it's one of the tools that I did choose.
And for me, I haven't even heard of Magical Voxel until you just showed me.
That's totally fine.
And now we dive right in.
So that's perfect.
You will learn quite a few hints and tricks hopefully today.
But this is great.
There are quite some other cool...
I actually started to learn Voxel modeling with Cubicle.
It's another software that you can...
It's on stream available, for example.
It has some cool features as well.
So each modeler has a bit of its own ways to handle things.
That's the only difference, I would say.
And as I said, for example, here we have the opportunity to use shaders, which VoxEdit
doesn't do.
The maximum bounding box in these softwares are usually 256.
And with a 2x2, there's no problem.
We can combine this one and we have a full 2x2 plane here.
So a 2x2 would be a 192x192x128?
128 is always the max height.
This is a bit sad, but this is the limitation that GameMaker gives us.
So we never can exceed the height and do super epic towers.
I mean, it's quite a bit already, as we know, but it's the limitation that we have.
Cool.
Let's take a peek again.
So basically, since we are working with blocks and with blocky shapes, we would do it maybe
not that roundish and more like a bit staggered volume.
So we for sure want on one side, we want to have landmass where we can build a city or
a cool castle or whatever.
Then we have the city walls and the sea.
So let's see, maybe if we keep this as sea level, it makes sense to make the sea with
a bit of a depth, of course.
But I actually think it might make even sense to remove the sea at this point and start
with the land masses.
For this, we just pick a color.
When it comes to working with colors, I loaded here just a random palette.
You can create your own palettes.
You can create, you can use one of the standard palettes.
You have them here.
You even can work, I recently worked with a gray tone palette because in the end, each
palette, each color swatch here in the palette becomes a block.
You will see this in Magic Palette afterwards.
It's not that important what colors you use in your creation process.
The most important thing here is to remember each color becomes another block.
So if you want to diversify your, let's make a sample here again based on the concept drawing.
If we want to have the city wall built out of a brick block, a stone brick block, this
needs to be one color.
The top of the wall, for example, we might want to cover in a bit of different stone
block.
This needs to become a different color.
But the color itself can be assigned or the block can be assigned in Magic Palette afterwards.
So this is, we are quite free when it comes to working with our own, did we load this
one?
With our own colors and ideas and afterwards we tune them or tweak them so they work well.
Okay, let's start blocking out with, I would say, let's say the land masses.
In our case, we need.
So after you've created the two by two in this case, then you start blocking out the
concept art.
Yes, exactly.
I think that that's the usual way when you start with any level design.
I will just start here because I have usually an even more faster approach to do this.
As you see here, we now already have tons of tons of blocks and can go quite detailed,
which is nice.
This isn't even Magic Palette yet.
This is just Magic of Voxel.
Yes, this is just whatever Voxel you do.
This can be Voxel.
Can you do this same thing in Voxel?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
Totally.
Got it.
So, you see, we can carve in quite a few details already here and get us started.
But when it comes to level design, and this is why we call them mini map, I usually start
with even much smaller kind of size and scale it up once I have it blocked out.
So in this case now, we divide our, what was it?
Have we started the mini map yet or is we haven't done that?
Yes, we just build a mini mini map kind of now because this is the fastest way in my
opinion to achieve a concept really, really in no time.
Let's go maybe we need to just divide our 96.
Let's go, I mean 96, maybe 48.
Yeah, let's try 48.
48.
It's not that important right now because we don't go super tall.
So we go whatever.
60.
And I afterwards will scale this up four times and then we once again get the full length.
But the cool thing here is now I work with much, with really just a few wattles, you
know, and can work on creating land masses really fast and also don't go into the danger
or I would say that the problem is if you start big, you can get tempted to go into
details really fast and...
What's the point of creating this smaller one?
The point is that you will be much faster with level creation because if you start with
the large one, as you see here, it's just taking you more time because you need to push
more wattles in the end, you know, and the idea is...
Oh, because you have more of a...
You want to go into more detail.
So then don't...
Yes, yes, exactly.
So you're saying start out with a mini map, don't even start out with creating the two-by-two
yet.
Exactly.
Because we're just concepting kind of in a mini mini map, as you see here, what we want
to build and once we are happy with the basic dimensions, with the proportions, with everything,
we then push it to a larger scale and refine it and build the details on top of it, you
know.
Okay, that was lost to an amateur like me.
Hold on.
So first thing you do, go into your voxel editor and create a mini map, which is...
What were the dimensions?
Depends on your land size, but for now I go super small.
48 by 48 by 60?
Yeah.
Yeah, for example.
That's two.
All right.
So once you're done that, then you do a block out but on a smaller scale so you have less
to put a detail on.
Yes, exactly.
My intention here is to just get us the idea of this concept kind of flashed out or blocked
out, is probably the correct term, as fast as possible.
So from there, we then refine because as mentioned, if I go here, you can see I already want to
start building the wall here and all that, which is nice and neat, but it's a lot of
details that we can already dial in here with just very simple cubes or forms and then refine
it over time.
Okay.
So now you've done...
So you're doing the block out on the mini map first and then scale up?
Yes, exactly.
Got it.
Yeah, that will be the base idea.
So we kind of start here with this idea of having this harbor section and where the ships
needs to sail in, I would say.
We might want to stagger this a bit more, but the base idea is here, I think.
You have a bit of elevated landscape.
So a low resolution block out.
Okay.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's kind of small scale and then we scale up.
I would say this is already...
I'm learning a lot already.
I've never done this before.
That's great.
I mean, as I said, this is coming with working with Magic Pallet because it allows you to
design differently and we think if you get the grasp of it and the hang of it, there's
no going back.
At least in our case, it just makes level design when it comes to a block based game
so much easier and approachable.
And Mark from Sandbox Academy in the chat, Mark, do you also do a mini map block out
like this or do you just go into the big normal one by one sizing?
But keep going, Pep.
I wanted to hear what Mark was doing in the chat.
Yeah, that would be great to hear some other creators how they approach this.
I did hear from other people that they are doing this even without access to Magic Pallet
so that they can concept things.
And I know, for example, from TSB production team that they actually always do this.
Got it.
It's something that really helps a lot to define the base idea and push the concept
further and give everybody something to work with before they start being a game maker.
And I think every artist has its own workflow probably in the end.
This is just something that we think...
Mark says that he goes directly to game maker when terraforming.
Yeah.
And until now, it was the only option.
Until now was the only option.
So this block out with the Boxel editor is because we're going to be using Magic Pallet.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Oh, all right.
Okay.
Got it.
So you see we have a mini mini map.
I mean, let's render this one out quickly.
We have the landmass styled in, I would say.
A bit rough.
It even has this little cave here.
I just did see.
But that's cool.
Maybe we use it later.
And from there, I would say one thing that we could now already add the walls, the city
walls and all that.
I'm not sure if we want to do that because I want to work with shaders and then we need
to select.
That's fine.
The city is optional.
It can be as little as we need it to be.
But I like the idea of having a kind of this enclosed biome in itself or so.
So maybe we make the surrounding edges like a cliff or something if that's easier to do.
Yeah.
No, we actually have quite cool blocks to do super nice medieval city walls.
So I'm happy to try these out.
One thing that I might want to do here because we all want to swim.
And swimming can only happen if we have a bit of depth in our sea.
I would select all my stuff here and push it up.
Raise it up.
OK.
Yeah.
I think that's a good idea.
Raise.
OK.
You know, yeah, I see.
Give a bit of depth.
I think this could be.
Try to give it a lot more depth because I wanted to be able to go swim deep.
Under underwater.
That's cool.
That's good.
Let's do a few caves and all that.
OK, great.
That you can explore.
And we can even because we don't have that much.
Of course, the city walls will add a bit, but we still have plenty of room.
Let's go like this then.
Yeah.
Good.
And we even can already carve out a bit of underwater or make this seem so easy.
OK, I mean, that's that's the goal.
Yeah, that you really can flesh out your ideas as fast as possible.
You know, for example, the I really like the cave idea.
We of course can refine this here in voxels or later in blocks.
As I said, the power here is to move everything really fast.
So for example, if I go everything, I don't need to select and move the whole the whole
land a bit to the side.
You know, it's just like that.
And in Game Maker, this will be impossible.
You know, you just can't.
You need to rebuild everything.
The flexibility that you have here is so much higher when it comes to blocking out.
OK, so maybe maybe let's carve in some more cavities here or whatever.
I mean, we don't need to go into details, but something to explore is always neat.
And yeah, that's good to go.
One thing we for sure want to have is the oil water.
This can be any blue.
Let's see if we can.
So for example, here is a good occasion to use shaders.
There is a shader called flawed here.
Shaders are this code bracket.
Then you can install them.
I actually just uploaded yesterday a tutorial on this.
And we will add many more tutorials similar to what we do here or explain, for example,
height maps and things like that.
So further tools that you as a designer can use to design levels like these in a very
fast and cool way.
The thing is we can flawed this whole scene.
And as we know, for example, once again in Game Maker, working with water and building
underwater blocks or underneath water blocks is quite a pain in the whatever.
So this is a huge time saver here.
And I can show you this quickly.
It's quite simple.
We just choose a color.
There is a brown.
I'm not sure if it's gold.
I have quite a bit of blood.
And we define the height.
In our case, it's above.
We want to have to see level around here.
So that's probably by something like 50.
And you see just out of the box, we have everything.
How did you do that?
Did you create a shader?
Yeah, no, the shader itself you can download on a source online.
And as I said, you can check our YouTube.
So upload.
Yeah, this is one of the of the shaders.
So there are so many cool shaders.
I hope I can show you.
So you got it.
Yeah.
All right.
The cool thing is it floods really everything that was air before.
So it's exactly what we want because I can remove some layers now.
And as you see.
Oh, I see.
The whole thing is like a fill tool.
Yeah, exactly.
Just filled everything.
And I think this is exactly what we want.
OK.
We even could raise it.
Maybe at least one more.
Let it run again.
Yeah, I like that.
Cool.
OK.
Yeah, that's neat, I would say.
Yeah, that looks good.
That looks good.
And from here, we just for now, we make a copy because it's always cool to preserve
your initial design when you want to alter things there again.
But one thing that I would do now probably is already scaling up because we have blocked
out and we are happy with the base dimensions.
And we want to throw in some more details now.
For this, we could go double the size or we already can go full two by two length.
And this would be we don't need shaders now.
We need.
OK.
So this will be two times.
And you see we now have 96.96.
So this will be already a one by one, a full one by one.
So you would scale up as you desire or is there like a?
Yes, exactly.
So as you scale up, then you improve the block out.
Exactly.
Then you dial in more details.
You know, OK, this is this is really up to you how you prefer to work.
It's just one of the suggested workflows that we hear in Sandrush in our studio and work
with.
It's really up to everyone's preferences.
Got it.
And actually, if we go full two by two, we get now and you see now what I meant, you
know, we have the same.
Now, yeah, but it's kind of the full two by two that we started before.
But without without the temptation to do already all these details here, I see we have a very
nice block out, you know, just the box.
That was my intention here.
One thing that I see now, top right corner is the max height is almost maxed out.
We are at one twenty four and we only have one twenty eight.
So we might push everything down just a little bit, just to be sure that we can build walls
and towers and all that.
That would be my suggestions here.
Got it.
OK, we can.
And that's the funny thing here, it cuts off, of course, but that's fine.
And then we just so we have a bit of headroom still.
And but the rest of it is fine, I would say.
It's certainly something we can work with.
And yeah, maybe before everything crashes, it's usually.
But it does crash on you.
No, no, magic of oxal almost never crashes.
But just to be sure, you know, would be a shame if we are if we are in and then need
to start and start again.
But no, we have our space here and that we define.
And from here, I now start not only blocking out, but even more start detailing and also
assigning my colors because the colors become the blocks, you know.
And this is is a process that can start here in the voxel model.
And at some point, I would load it to Magic Palette soon because it gives me an idea where
I need to make, for example, let's let's use this this as an example.
I would choose now I would choose the whole sea because this is good.
I remove it and save it as a separate entity.
And you also see that we have this is the swim, a swimmable area.
You know, we render this out.
You can see this is where your diving experience will happen for now, at least.
We always can adjust and alter this, of course.
The thing is, I want to apply now a gradient shader on our let's call it rocks or terrain
or maybe it's even dirt or I don't know.
It depends a bit on the choice of materials to give us a really nice looking landscape
afterwards in GameMaker.
This can happen.
There are various ways as well.
I apply a paint based data now and use a brush data with a gradient.
And you will see in a minute what this does.
We need for this.
We need to choose a few.
A few colors that the better wild palette actually to work with.
But I mean, we can go colorful as that.
We even have darker.
Yeah, this one.
So we choose a few colors and then apply a shader.
This thing is with shaders.
It can be applied dynamically.
That's quite cool.
So you can have the full box here.
We have a few shades already in and there are different modes.
Or if we start data ring.
Oh, you can see.
So this allows us to add some great color variety.
Yes.
And this is not about the color variety.
This is more about we want to have a block gradient in our land masses.
So as you see, if we would use this one here, we now have the chance to have a really natural
looking terrain.
It looks a bit quirky here right now.
But once we assign blocks, you will see this can look quite nice.
And it gives us depth, which is quite cool.
I might iterate even further.
Yeah, here you can see it best on full scale.
So that's just one of the shaders.
We also can.
Of course, there's a line one.
Yeah, this one just can also be quite cool for canyons, for example.
So if you want to do a sandstone canyon or whatever, you could do something like this.
We'll bring it out quickly.
Higher resolution.
It looks quite colorful now, but as I said, the colors are not that important.
It's just important where they are assigned on the level.
This is far easier and more accessible than I thought it was.
Cool.
That's great to hear, mate.
Yeah, as I said, it's a bit of a rethinking of the whole idea when it comes to start with
your level design.
But it can go fast.
And that's the cool thing.
We can now iterate really, really fast going back and forth.
I kind of like this one.
Not that bad, actually.
I still want to apply the other one.
It gives us quite nice radiance.
And this, for example, this is another option.
I think we used this one.
Yeah.
I actually like the last one.
This one is also quite neat.
Almost like this old school graphic dithering type of pixel.
That looks fun.
And you can imagine if we want to do this effect with blocks in GameMaker, you are in
for the hardest of powers.
Go in and individually do all that.
Exactly.
But if you, because you're using Magic Palette and you do this in a voxel editor of your
choice, you can do that much faster and you can do that in the way you're doing it right
now.
Exactly.
Okay.
Got it.
That's the idea here.
So it's going to make it much easier.
Whereas Mark said that he just goes straight into to terraform within GameMaker.
If they instead choose to do that, can you still use Magic Palette or do you have to
do it this way here?
I mean, we always can go back and forth.
So that's the power of the whole workflow here.
So if they don't want to use a voxel editor to build a minimap, they want to build their
minimap and block out in GameMaker.
Can they still do that and then use Magic Palette?
Actually they can, yeah.
Because they can export from GameMaker.
There you go, Mark.
You can still use it.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's, that's, we, we, we have, or we want to have a much, as much compatibility as possible
with, with any software that you work with, you know.
So whether you try and do it as ease of use in a voxel editor to import into Magic Palette
or GameMaker, you can then import what you built and or block out in GameMaker into Magic
Palette.
So either way.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Either way and going back and forth as well.
And even, I mean, I, I might not have mentioned this and this comes probably in a later episode.
You also can start adding mechanics and dress your, your land with assets and all that in
GameMaker already and still go back, even back to your voxel model here that we have,
iterate full land masses, change things, and then go back again to GameMaker.
Okay.
So that's the idea.
So you really, really have the flexibility to, to change things even at a later design
stage quite drastically if needed, you know.
Got it.
Okay.
I'm going to cool.
Just my little steps here a little bit.
So instead of going straight into VoxEdit, you build in Mini-Mat with inbox edit or GameMaker.
And then when you finish your right now, then we go into finishing your block out, whether
you're doing it VoxEdit or GameMaker.
And then, yes, add your shaders and your gradient and your dither as desired.
Okay.
What happens after you're done?
This looks good.
Let me just assign quickly.
And so then it looks not that quirky.
It's almost a bit too dark, but you get a lot more gradient.
I like the underwater to be as bright as possible that I can still see.
So kind of more.
Okay.
I see the idea.
I know what you mean.
So I don't want the case to be dark.
I'd like then to just be able to see the scenery of everything.
Okay.
So in this case, we probably even go more like sandstone or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that'd be great.
Sandstone.
All my Minecraft people.
That's the only reason why I know what sandstone is.
So here we have...
Nice.
That looks awesome.
I love that.
Looks good.
Yeah.
Cool.
That's awesome.
This is working on a sandstone block set right now.
I hope we can have it ready for the next episode.
Miguel just asked, can Magic Palette...
Will it import all new blocks in the Game Maker block library?
The thing is, and we will see it in a minute, I think we just finished the block set.
We'll walk out and then make short limps into Magic Palette for now because a lot of people
came for this, of course.
And then in the next episode, we go into details and technical details when working with Magic
Palette.
When it comes to custom blocks, we actually right now developing a system where you will
be able to load your own blocks on top of the huge collection that we provide.
We provide right now, it's around 1,400, I think it's almost 500 blocks that we as Sandrush
provide to you as builder for free for now to work with.
So there are many, many, many different blocks to work with.
But we know every project has its own style and idea.
So it's important that we accommodate this.
And therefore, we set up a system where you will be able to load your own custom blocks
and hopefully in the future, even connected with your workspace.
But for this, we need TSB, as you can imagine.
Because...
Yeah, like the API connections and all that stuff.
Exactly.
Well, hey, I have a sip that I'm cute and I'm starting to put together that is to access
the API, or to make the API available.
So, yeah, I'm still putting together the full list of things that people want to see out
of an API.
So Pepe, I'll make that available to you and anyone else who'd like to.
I just have a running list of people way smarter than me who would do the things I want to
see out of an API.
So the sip would basically say for the sandbox team to make an API available via API sandbox.game
or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, we have a lot of stuff that we would love to do.
I haven't done much with that yet, but that's one of my 18 that I want to write.
Perfect.
Okay, so once you're done with that, then you move the water back in.
Okay.
Yeah, of course, we want to water.
And as I said, we now and this is just what's just developed recently on our side.
And now can kill this one, but I keep the mini mini map.
We can work with various bounding boxes or objects.
This is quite powerful and I know also from the TSB production team that they designed
their maps like this because it gives you much more flexibility later on.
If you have, for example, as here I have my water volume separate and can add and remove
things.
One thing that we are missing right now is maybe a few, let's say towers or the city
wall.
So I just pick one color.
It might be a bit quirky one, but and once again, I really only start blocking out these
things because I can refine them all the time.
I just want to throw in the base dimension to give us an idea how things could work,
how things could look.
And as you see, we can already, of course, carve in details or add more details from
the beginning.
But usually I would advise to go simple or kind of blocky.
And from there we go.
I mean, we even can add a start.
That's fine.
That's simple enough.
Yes, I also would say actually.
I would just do exactly what you have on the right.
This is a big old rectangle.
That's usually also.
I have not colored geo, but no, it is the why is it French?
OK, that's OK.
Yeah, I'm also not.
I mean, I model things quite often, but I'm not super, super the pro here.
This I have a bit of problem with the selection.
Yeah, OK.
So now we can start using them probably to define a bit outer wall or whatever and would
then would then kind of look out the city wall.
Oh, thank you for the raid.
Appreciate that.
Yolk's on you.
Thank you very much for that.
Cool.
Thanks for joining, guys.
Thanks for joining.
If you are just join us, we are demoing the magic palette process at this point because
what you don't what you see here isn't magic palette yet.
What you see is the process by which you would start magic palette.
So I'm a complete amateur.
I asked Pepe to do it from the very, very beginning.
And step one was what was step one.
It was start first with a concept.
So we pick like an island, watery place.
Then two is build your mini map.
And this was all part of the workflow of what Pepe does specifically.
You can skip that as needed.
Oh, my gosh.
That's it.
It's got rated again.
Shakespeare.
Thank you for that.
Wow.
OK.
Yep.
And so step C was build a mini map.
And that was like a low resolution picture of what is you want want to do.
And Pepe decides he wants to do it in VoxEdit editor so that he can import into magic palette
later and skip that and do it straight in GameMaker if you really wanted to.
But because Voxel editor like Magica Voxel or VoxEdit has more powerful features with
gradients and didders, stuff I don't even know.
I just learned this right now, by the way, because that's more powerful stuff like that.
You can just import it into magic palette in a more well defined import.
So right now we are finishing the block out in step three and adding like a little a little
cityscape thing before we try and import into magic palette.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
OK.
Now we're all caught up.
Thank you, everyone, for joining and we are now on finishing the block out.
Yes, exactly.
We want a few watch towers or similar things.
As I said, we go really bare bones or minimalistic here.
We even don't need details yet.
We can refine everything later on.
It might make sense to even do this in the small scale already.
As you can imagine, it would be quite fast to add these and also already define these
towers or watch towers here.
But at some point you want to want to go large scale.
And for example, for the shader that we applied to the terrain here, it makes a lot of sense
to make it in full scale to see the full effect that you will have afterwards.
Thank you again, Shakespeare, for the read.
I appreciate that everyone tuning in.
Yes, that's awesome.
Cool.
So we added watch towers.
Now we're going to add the walls.
Yeah, we add a few walls.
I actually...
And I had him lighten it to sandstone because I don't want to be like dark caves.
This is more to be like a scenic sort of thing where you just kind of wander around and swim.
And that'll be that.
Should be all cozy and friendly.
Hey, escape room artist.
Good to see you.
Hey, hi, mate.
And Tom Vauxhall and Go West.
Hey, Go West.
Hello.
Hallogram.
Here.
Wicked.
Miguel as well.
Mark Baggo.
Yeah, a lot of names I recognize from the community.
They're all eager to see Magic Palette, Pepe.
And want to see what it's doing.
And so without Magic Palette, though, you wouldn't really go in to do this in VoxEdit
or Magic Palette, right?
You wouldn't have any need to do that?
Yeah, you would work in GameMaker, of course.
Yeah.
Okay, you'd work straight in GameMaker.
Okay.
Yeah.
But I explained already a few benefits that we have to do it here.
Yep.
So like I mentioned, he's doing it in Magic of Voxel or you do it in VoxEdit.
Or VoxEdit, I mean, whatever your VoxEdit of choice is so that you can import that high
resolution into Magic Palette.
Okay, so I'm sorry, keep going, Pepe.
Yeah, yeah.
And we're at 27 viewers, by the way.
So there are a lot of people who want to see this.
That's awesome.
Yeah, the city wall is coming along a bit quirky.
And we definitely can dial in a few more details and all that.
But at this point, I really like to keep it simple.
Yes, please.
And you're going to fry my brain.
That's great.
We have the C separated as mentioned before.
And yeah, let's add just maybe one or two more details.
We could consider one thing that of course we want to keep in mind when designing our
levels.
It should be playable and it needs to serve the game or the purpose.
Sometimes it's only a showcase as we have here.
It's not very deep into mechanics probably, but it should be playable.
And for this, I always like to carve out a few paths.
And what I usually also do when it comes to actually, let me check, when designing these
mini maps, it's very helpful to mark your player's journey kind of in the map.
So for example, in this case, I would choose just one another color, a bright color.
Maybe in our case, it makes more sense to use red or whatever.
And mark, for example, where I would love to have my players go.
This sometimes can also be a path that we really paint because we have a lot of blocks
that can accommodate this.
So we have dirt or gravel or things that we can add later on.
And for this, we might use a color and really just start defining where the player's journey
can go through.
This doesn't have to be super fixed or sturdy.
This can be all changed later on, of course.
And also the shaders that you see here can be reapplied if you need to make changes later
on.
We came in a bit early with these detailing things.
Makes modeling a bit harder right now because, for example, if we want to use extrusion-based
modeling, we have a lot of colors here already.
But you get the idea.
So this becomes now my path.
And I would add now a bit of volumes or stairs or whatever I need to make this happen.
And from there, we once again would go into defining, how do you say, buildings, for example,
if we want that.
Buildings can actually be block-based.
They don't need to.
They can also be asset-based, of course.
What we define here is everything that we want to have block-based to be built already
in blocks.
And it can be often combined.
I think this is the most powerful way you can do it.
So use your blocks as base layer.
Or sometimes also press the asset.
Oh, like superimpose the asset over it.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, that's a good idea.
We have, for example, we had a cool experience where we did also walls.
And we did have a base layer of just gray stones or bricks like this in place.
But on top of it, we would add nice, decorated pillars or scaffolding and all that type of
deal.
So you really bring it to life afterwards with your assets.
But we see it's quite large scale already, because you can imagine your player avatar
is like this.
So this is the size that we see here.
Cool.
We're working, by the way, on a 2x2.
So yeah.
We're done with the block out.
Yeah, for now, this is totally fine.
We can refine this.
But I would say we just export what we have right now to get a first glimpse on MagicPalette
now.
All right, here we go.
Big reveal.
Yeah.
Let's save it as Vox.
We can import Vox and other formats right now in MagicPalette.
I will fire up MagicPalette right now.
And we're coming up on an hour and a half.
So I'd say as we get, as we approach the hour, I want to wrap it up into, we'll start first
episode two.
Yes, definitely.
I think we only give a quick glimpse here how things will look.
And then the next episode, we dive deep.
So wait, what did you just do?
You just open it, right?
I just opened MagicPalette.
Okay, you just opened it.
Okay.
So nothing crazy yet.
Open.
So import into MagicPalette is the next step.
All right, continue.
Yes, of course.
We are developing this version daily.
We add a lot of features.
We have just hit our first milestones and now adding more features.
Okay, stop for a second.
So what am I seeing on the top right?
I see land generator, palette builder, block inspector.
And then so that was the splash screen you just showed me.
Yeah, the land generator, we, I mean, we barely can start with this one right now.
It generates actually a prefab land, but every time generates it based on an algorithm.
You have parameters that you can dial in here.
You have styles.
I will show you this in a second.
We start with the dungeon generated.
This is already live and working.
It gives you...
Okay, so if you just wanted to not even do the game maker or box set, you just go into
the magic palette and here are your presets that you already, you and your team developed.
Yeah, based on various...
Oh, so that's the screenshot set that are in the SIP.
Okay.
Yes.
Now I get it.
That's one part of magic palette.
This is for everybody that even don't want to touch voxels kind of.
Got it.
So that like me, where I wouldn't even touch voxels, I just come in and hit this one.
Exactly.
All right.
And now once we are happy with the mini map, with this one here, we create the land.
See, it makes so much more sense now.
All right.
Got it.
And then...
Out of the box, you get your lava dungeon.
And what is the dimensions right now?
Because I see squares.
This is one by one.
This is a one by one.
Okay.
Got it.
Yeah.
So now, for example, make natural, make mixed rooms or even a high density, generate a new
mini map.
Let me check.
And it creates a new one for you.
And each of these is totally unique.
Of course, it's based on kind of building blocks that me and my team did design for you.
But you see that everything is connected and you can start to build your dungeon right
away.
The cool thing on top of here, when it comes to customization, you can now swap the theme.
So going from lava to ice, kind of temple or whatever, or a bit more quirky type of
deal.
I quite like this style here.
We call it deep sea.
So you have these prefab themes that you can apply on top of it, you know, on your map.
But yeah, this would be a playable map right out of the box with just a few clicks, as
you can see.
Yeah, give me a second.
I'm zooming in on the right portion so they can see where you...
Yeah.
Yeah, there you go.
Okay.
So you're kind of selecting your mix.
So almost like a gradient.
Yeah, this is kind of a theme that you apply.
Okay.
You can go pinkish.
Got it.
Okay.
Yeah, makes sense.
And see if different customizations, structure height, structure density, room size, and
landscape size.
Yeah.
This is if you didn't even want to mess with VoxEdit or GameMaker.
Exactly.
These are the presets you can just select right out from...
Wow.
Yeah.
That's so easy.
Even I can do it.
Absolutely.
Everybody should be able to...
Okay, cool.
... share their content to their land.
Okay.
So in our case, we have one and then we can have one.
Yeah, in our case, we have our own model.
Yeah, exactly.
Got it.
And this is where the palette builder comes in.
We have...
This is the sidebar here.
We have the land generator.
So this is...
We just had a glimpse here.
But what we want now is to load our map that we did create before.
Wait, I didn't see that.
Where's the load button?
Top left.
Yeah.
Okay, got it.
So with a little folder icon.
Okay.
Yeah.
So once you saved it, then you can import it via that.
Yeah, we just need a box for now.
Yeah, exactly.
So then you open it.
Then...
Nice.
Now it builds our huge gate.
Okay.
Okay, let's...
One thing that I just noticed, it's something...
It's capping our front portion here.
But you see it's loaded.
Yeah, I see that.
It loads in chunks.
Yeah.
That's fine.
We'll just...
That's fine.
Yeah.
For now, it's fine.
But it has to do something with the orientation.
Okay.
Yeah, we just need to...
So is that like a bug you need to fix or is that we didn't...
No, it's actually intended.
But we might be able to solve this programmatically so that you don't need to care on positioning.
But right now, we should...actually, even if we combine these two, then it should be solved
already.
Let me save again and then we will check if it's solved.
It would be nice to have the full map.
As I said, it's something that you can adjust in your voxel model directly.
But let's load again.
See what we get.
Yes, this looks much better.
I got it.
So that's what we intended.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now we have...okay.
But what we...
Some things are missing, but...
Yeah.
By and large, we have what we need.
Yeah.
As we know...
We're still working on the beta.
It's all right.
Yeah.
We definitely working towards the beta.
So things can get messed up.
Let me load again to be sure that this is...
Yeah, I think something is indeed flipped or something.
Not tragic, but it's a bit weird to see this because I've never had this before.
That's all right.
That's why we do it live.
That's why we demo it.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Okay.
Cool.
So basically...
So now that we've done that, then...
So in the next episode, we can get into what do we do with it once we import it.
Exactly.
How we assign blocks, how we modify our design to be the way that we want to have it built
in GameMaker in the end.
But you can see already here when I zoom in, there are auto-assigned...
Sorry, my mouse wheel is really fast.
It assigns blocks based on my color input that I had coming from my voxel model.
So it automatically added more detail?
It's not more detail.
It's more like each block became now...
Each voxel became now a block.
And for example, we just have now our sea here.
And this will become floating water in GameMaker afterwards.
Got it.
So you're replacing those...
Like the water was blocked?
Yeah, we assign now the blocks here.
This is where Magic Palette comes in.
The voxel becomes the blocks.
So you import it and then each of the shader that you applied, the water shader, you then
replace that with the Magic Palette block water.
So it comes in as placeholders and then you assign and replace the placeholder.
Exactly.
Alright, I get it.
Makes sense.
So you didn't have to make it water, you can make it sand if you wanted to.
Exactly.
That's the cool thing.
This is what I mentioned before.
We can work with any colors here right now because we do later on, we do the assigning
here, you know, and make it look as we want to have it look.
Okay.
So we will pick up with that in episode two, which Pep and I are scheduling for early next
week.
I think we're still deciding on Monday, Tuesday, based on availability between the two of us.
So I will post that out via Twitter when the next day is where we will start assigning
blocks to really use the Power of Magic Palette.
Yes, yes, that's awesome.
Pep, thank you so much, man.
This was great.
I can already see how to use this thing in the process flow of creating an experience.
And just the fact that you showed that you could select a preset, you even have to go
through the block out of VoxEdit and GameMaker.
If I really wanted to and I had no idea how to do that, I could select like the dungeon
preset.
But for those of you who do know all that stuff, you do know how to use GameMaker VoxEdit,
you may now use VoxEdit in order to create a more rich import block out model that you
then import into Magic Palette as you see right now.
And then you can start assigning blocks or you could go the GameMaker route, which is,
you know, the painstaking process of it putting down block, block, block, block, block.
And once you're done with that, then you can import that into Magic Palette.
And now in episode two of our follow up, we will build it out even more.
Yes, that's awesome.
Thank you.
I really appreciate that.
Now, now I know what it looks like.
And I appreciate that.
Does anyone have any questions before we close out?
If you do have questions, please post them because we are about to end for today.
And while we spend a few minutes or a few seconds waiting for questions, I'm going to
look in the sandbox category on Twitch to see if there's anyone that we can raid.
Yeah, it's cool.
Tom Voxel.
Yeah, that's exactly the idea.
You start with your 9696 just as an asset as you would design an asset.
I mean, I worked today in Magica Voxel as you see, because I'm more used to but yeah,
VoxEdit can do exactly the same except the shaders.
This stuff here, VoxEdit can do, for example.
But you still can can modeling wherever you want.
Bring it here.
Apply shaders.
Yeah, it's really up to you guys.
Whatever you feel most comfortable with and in the intersection will be magic palette
where you assign the blocks and make your things look as you want to have them look.
Even import your own blocks or choose from one of the many, many, many, many, many blocks
that we have here.
Yeah.
And Voxel looks like so you're getting a lot of you're getting a lot of kudos, by the way,
from Tom Voxel and Play Games and Alisor and Miguel.
They're all saying congrats, by the way.
This looks great.
And Tom and Miguel recommend that I read Tempest.
So I'm looking at Tempest Studios DFW.
Right.
Free live streaming.
That's got to be it.
Okay.
I'm going to double his viewership.
He already has 25.
That's awesome.
Thank you all for coming here.
We have 20 viewers.
That's a lot of people want to look at magic palette.
We keep it up.
We push it.
Thanks guys.
We're gonna start the raid.
Really cool.
I will send out the tweet for episode two.
And thank you all for thank you all for showing Pepe your support.
Yeah, raid countdown and Pepe, thank you again for your time.
Bye guys.
Thanks for hosting, Lancet.