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Orzo posted:Hey, just wanted to let everyone know that Indie Game: The Movie is now available on Netflix instant. Seems like something a lot of people here would enjoy. I thought this was a great film. It really captured the struggle and stress of making a game; especially if you're betting your livelihood on it like those guys were. Even my girlfriend enjoyed it and she's never played a game in her life.
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Oct 9, 2012 07:53
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Speaking of game jams, one of the Vlambeer guys just announced gently caress THIS JAM, a week-long online jam next month where you have to make a game in a genre you either utterly hate or are in complete ignorance of. The results should be interesting!
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Oct 9, 2012 07:59
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Great thread, there are many projects here I will be following closely. All I find myself playing lately are indie games. Keep up the great work guys. I myself am working on a game called Kleaveland. I'm trying to combine the creativity of a game like minecraft, with the loot progression and adventure style of diablo or zelda style game. I've got a thread here for more information: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3505062 Recent video of Kleaveland, added shadow mapping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y46QE80xe3M Rather than using an existing engine like Unity, I decided to learn how to create a game engine from scratch. Holy hell I didn't realise how long it would take! I've been working heavily on this project for a year now. I'm pleased with my results so far and I'm totally addicted to it and want nothing more than to see it through to a full game. Even if I never make a cent from this game, I consider it a worthwhile experience. I get the feeling I'm in similar company here? Before jumping into this massive project, I made a few small iPhone games to learn the basics. My favourite of these is Juice Belts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5atKKQAMdU). I feel I took the gameplay of Juice Belts in a unique direction and was pleased with the visual presentation, but I was never happy with the sound effects. I also had a go at making the music for the trailer myself, but didn't include any in the game itself. Go figure.  Because you're all making such cool games, here are 5 free copies of Juice Belts for whoever wants them:37JPJLJYNT7A R76W73T97MYK XMAL3YL3J7AA 3W96MRK7XTMR KRPWNHX3HAFP
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Oct 9, 2012 15:41
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Unormal posted:I basically write my Unity stuff in pure C# with very little in-editor game building. Once you understand the engine, the world's your oyster from C#. Are there some getting-started resources for this style of Unity development? This is kind of my preference and having tutorials or documentation written from the point of view of using an opaque tool environment's always discouraged me from trying a new engine. (I know its a personal flaw, but there it is.)
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Oct 9, 2012 16:17
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I'd be interested in some information on that as well- every Unity tutorial I've tried to use has boiled down to "Ok, to add a Character to the scene, drag and drop the TutorialCharacter object from the included folder and press play."
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Oct 9, 2012 16:51
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Base Emitter posted:Are there some getting-started resources for this style of Unity development? This is kind of my preference and having tutorials or documentation written from the point of view of using an opaque tool environment's always discouraged me from trying a new engine. (I know its a personal flaw, but there it is.) Use this, it seriously is the bees knees: http://struct.ca/futile/ I came to Unity without a clue of how to use it and using Futile had a playable version of a pretty complex game within a week or two. eeenmachine fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Oct 9, 2012 |
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Oct 9, 2012 17:17
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Base Emitter posted:Are there some getting-started resources for this style of Unity development? This is kind of my preference and having tutorials or documentation written from the point of view of using an opaque tool environment's always discouraged me from trying a new engine. (I know its a personal flaw, but there it is.) Not that I really found; there's a lot of small, OK tutorials that you could just find by searching. I just got ex2D for spriting work and started hammering out small games/gamelets till I figured it out. I didn't even know it was really possible, so you've got a leg up on me by knowing it is  My pattern is (basically) to just start with a camera object and a "controller" object and put my main game logic on a script attached to that controller object, and create everything else in code, starting from that controller script. I use ex2D and FingureGestures which are nice code-friendly lightweight 2D and touch friendly libraries you can find on the asset store. iTween is also a pretty cool tool for "juicing" apps. http://itween.pixelplacement.com/index.php I had to hack on iTween a little to get it integrated with ex2D components, but it's very slick once it's going. Unity is well worth the effort of picking up, in my opinion. Unormal fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Oct 9, 2012 |
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Oct 9, 2012 17:23
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eeenmachine posted:Use this, it seriously is the bees knees: http://struct.ca/futile/ Does the hour-long tutorial cover everything I need to know to use it, assuming I'm comfortable and familiar with Flixel / XNA / component-based programming? I went through the ten minute set-up video and then promptly forgot to come back to sit through the one that actually tells me how to use the thing. It's a little bit terrifying to work with something that has no documentation!
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Oct 9, 2012 17:52
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RoboCicero posted:Does the hour-long tutorial cover everything I need to know to use it, assuming I'm comfortable and familiar with Flixel / XNA / component-based programming? I went through the ten minute set-up video and then promptly forgot to come back to sit through the one that actually tells me how to use the thing. The example project is really all the documentation you need (it is a pretty lightweight but powerful framework), it is pretty brain dead simple to use. The longer video explains everything in detail I think.
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Oct 9, 2012 17:56
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eeenmachine posted:Use this, it seriously is the bees knees: http://struct.ca/futile/ I've been playing with this and while it's fine for, like, displaying sprites on a screen and letting you tap buttons, it has NOTHING else in it. There's no physics, there's only the slightest hint of collision detection (if a single bounding box collision method I only found by searching /r/futile counts), and there's almost no public libraries and next-to-no tutorials for it. If you want to use a minimal 2D game engine and are fine with your game being limited to PC platforms, stick to an engine with more support, a bigger community, and better libraries like Flixel, Love, or even XNA if C# is really your jam*. And if you need iOS support, maybe look into Cocos 2D - I don't have first hand experience with it, but I've heard a lot of success stories about it. * XNA may actually be just as minimal as Futile is when it comes to 2D games; I don't have any experience with it. I can guarantee it has far more tutorials and documentation, though. I don't want to sound super negative about Futile, it's a super new engine and I'd love for it to grow and become the standard for 2D development in Unity - I like being able to code in C# and be multiplatform! On the other hand, it's just not at the level these other engines are at yet.
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Oct 9, 2012 17:55
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abraham linksys posted:I've been playing with this and while it's fine for, like, displaying sprites on a screen and letting you tap buttons, it has NOTHING else in it. There's no physics, there's only the slightest hint of collision detection (if a single bounding box collision method I only found by searching /r/futile counts), and there's almost no public libraries and next-to-no tutorials for it. Futile is certainly not a game ENGINE, just a 2d rendering framework. You can integrate other things (physics libs) with it yourself if you need them. Like I said, I had a top down action game up and running with framed animations, sound, collision, Tiled map level loading, and more in about 2 weeks. We've used cocos the past 2 years or so, and it is great on iOS but really isn't THAT portable (we just ported Pocket Planes from iOS to Mac with some significant headaches).
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Oct 9, 2012 18:00
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That's a fair assessment. I think it's similar to Love in that regard, but Love has just had much more development time and has more libraries, examples, and tutorials. I'd like to hear more about how you integrated tiled map loading in Futile; did you roll your own TMX reader?
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Oct 9, 2012 18:03
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abraham linksys posted:That's a fair assessment. I think it's similar to Love in that regard, but Love has just had much more development time and has more libraries, examples, and tutorials. I just load the json that Tiled exports using the MiniJSON lib included in Futile, and modified the FSprite to make a map tile class that adjusts its UV coords to the right tile in the tileset. It was also cake to load in all the metadata you can define in Tiled object layers, things like spawn points and collision boxes. I got all that working in the span of 2 days or so, and I'm not a particularly great programmer. I do find C# much faster to work in than Obj-C, and that is coming from years of Obj-C experience.
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Oct 9, 2012 18:07
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Just to argue the other side - anyone that's getting frustrated with Unity's UI-driven design path, and is thinking about going pure-code... It's worth trying to get over the hump wrt. Unity's development UI, hierarchy view, inspector, etc. It took me probably 6 months of questionable interfaces to get there, but once you've forced the kool-aid down and managed not to vomit, it allows for visually-driven and design-driven development in a way few other engines can match. UDK's the only one that even comes close in that respect. I'm not suggesting you give everything a custom Editor script or anything, but there's a lot of power there.
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Oct 9, 2012 18:19
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Shalinor posted:Just to argue the other side - anyone that's getting frustrated with Unity's UI-driven design path, and is thinking about going pure-code... Yeah, for any 3D or moderately complex game I'm sure the editor provides a lot of value. For simple casual 2D games I'm still not convinced it ends up saving you any time.
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Oct 9, 2012 18:36
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eeenmachine posted:Yeah, for any 3D or moderately complex game I'm sure the editor provides a lot of value. For simple casual 2D games I'm still not convinced it ends up saving you any time. It will also get in your way if you're doing heavily procedural stuff. I'm finding it useful only because my "chunks" are pretty big and detailed, and have stuff going on inside of them. If I were just spawning AI dudes and some trees, or if it were a Minecrafty thingy, it'd be pointless to involve the inspector.
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Oct 9, 2012 20:57
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The one thing I don't like about the inspector is how there can be confusion between what you've changed in the inspector and what's in the code. Like if you define code:Of course you can leave things out of the inspector entirely if you want to, but I sometimes feel like it'd be better if modifying a variable in script automatically updated it in the inspector as well. Just thinking about that though, you could have the save script in multiple objects with different variable values, so that might not be such a good idea. What I do is, if I want something in the inspector, I define it without a value so I have to use the inspector (C# internally initialises everything to defaults anyway, if you're worried about that): code:code:
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Oct 9, 2012 21:26
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Nition posted:And if I need something public but I don't want it to show up in the inspector, I use the flag: Another way of avoiding that is giving the variable in question an accessor (in C#). The inspector won't parse them / will hide them from the user, even if the innards are a simple (if !=) assignment. EDIT: Futile really does look pretty cool. Had forgotten how AS3'y it was. I wonder how long it'll be until we see the Flixel community move over. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Oct 9, 2012 |
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Oct 9, 2012 22:04
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eeenmachine posted:Use this, it seriously is the bees knees: http://struct.ca/futile/ Everything I've heard about Futile makes it sound really compelling. The developer, Matt Rix, is also a former AS3 dev so hopefully I should be able to pick it up really quickly with my flash skills that are currently slowly becoming obsolete. I'm going to be disciplined and finish Zybourne Clock first but I have such a boner for getting into Unity right now.
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Oct 9, 2012 22:04
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Orzo posted:Hey, just wanted to let everyone know that Indie Game: The Movie is now available on Netflix instant. Seems like something a lot of people here would enjoy. That was an enjoyable watch. Think I know enough about programming with other projects now that I'll start making my own game like I always wanted to, just need to get of my rear end and do it I guess.
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Oct 10, 2012 06:41
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Had one of those fun moments last night where my framerate slowed to a crawl and I had no idea why, and was forced to systematically undo the last 10 or so things I'd done, while slowly beginning to panic at the thought that the game might 'just be broken.' Feels really good when you solve the problem though!!
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Oct 10, 2012 14:40
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Man, dumb week of work, but now my C# code-centric Unity3d UI manager is (sorta) done! Many screens of UI with simple in-code definition, with automatic re-layout, scaling, juicy bouncy buttons and cross view fades.  
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Oct 11, 2012 04:22
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Haha, creating a window and button based interface is some of the ugliest code in EVERY project I've worked on.
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Oct 11, 2012 04:30
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Mug posted:Haha, creating a window and button based interface is some of the ugliest code in EVERY project I've worked on. I loving hate it, sadly it's like 98% of making games, and I like to just eat my veggies first, so to speak.
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Oct 11, 2012 04:31
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Mug posted:Haha, creating a window and button based interface is some of the ugliest code in EVERY project I've worked on. It always is. There's just no way for it be elegant. It's all just boring "initialize this element with these properties, put it at X and Y" repeated over and over several dozen times.
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Oct 11, 2012 04:33
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That stuff I never have a problem with, it's writing event management code that I always write slightly different everytime and everytime I do it a little bit better but always run into some problem down the line. It's such horseshit.
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Oct 11, 2012 04:36
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Mug posted:Haha, creating a window and button based interface is some of the ugliest code in EVERY project I've worked on. It's really horseshit even when working in something like MMF. I always used to think there was some kind of magical method I was missing for it, but, nope, it's literally just moving a whole bunch of poo poo around. 
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Oct 11, 2012 04:38
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The Cheshire Cat posted:It always is. There's just no way for it be elegant. It's all just boring "initialize this element with these properties, put it at X and Y" repeated over and over several dozen times. That gives me an idea--instead of writing a designer, you could probably do something neat by using the WinForms designer and then exporting the control locations/images/anchors etc to your own custom data format. Then you don't have to write all of the tedious aspects of a designer (dragging/resizing/etc).
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Oct 11, 2012 04:50
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In NGUI land, I just drop down some boxes and give them collision volumes, and boom, it just works. Highly recommended, for anyone not going the code-only route. It has a widget-driven system that's ideal for making generic juice compnents, and it comes with a few to get you started. I even made an NGUI extension that adds an animated "..." to the end of any label. I... have no idea where else I'll use it, but needed it for the loading screen, and figured what the heck.
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Oct 11, 2012 05:23
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... poo poo, that's what scrollable menus supposed to look like? Or are those like clickable menus rather than button-press-naviagated ones? Jeez, mine look nothing like that, they're basically a bunch of int-based locations hidden behind sprites. I do like your houses, it's kind of invocative of that Dofus game from how many years ago. Lego Trees, I dunno if those fit so much, but I like your other visual elements for sure.
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Oct 11, 2012 05:40
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The White Dragon posted:... poo poo, that's what scrollable menus supposed to look like? Or are those like clickable menus rather than button-press-naviagated ones? Jeez, mine look nothing like that, they're basically a bunch of int-based locations hidden behind sprites. Well, you can see there, for one scrollable set of selections I create a panel (which is just a generic scrollable container) and add children to it. So when the panel scrolls it drags all those buttons around with it. The rest are mostly just anchored buttons (anchored so that when the screen resizes/flips, the layout engine knows what their position is relative to) around the edges with an offset. Obviously the graphics are still a work in progress e: For a bigger project I'd definitely use some sort of GUI-designer driven approach; but I've got a pretty finite amount of screens and I'm the only developer, so there ya go. This is essentially "data driven" for me, since there's no-one else producing content I have to consume, so C#/xml markup/etc makes no difference to me, whereas it would if I had a multi-developer/designer workflow going on. Unormal fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 05:54
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A note that might be of interest to some: Kickstarter is allowing projects in the UK from the end of the month. I'm half tempted to put Zybourne Clock up on there as a semi-joke.
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Oct 11, 2012 10:43
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 Does this little animation convey "Switching off" / [reverse] "Switching on" to you guys well enough? The animation plays and all the lights on the device it's hovering over either die or come to life.
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Oct 11, 2012 11:45
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Mug posted:
Red as on and green as off are generally the reverse of what US players would expect, I don't know about other areas. That part may be counterintuitive. Also, you might want one more animation step of a centered switch in full yellow, to smooth it out just a little. Looks like that might be a dramatic jump to anybody who's paying close attention. Depends on how slow you're playing the animation, I guess.
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Oct 11, 2012 12:30
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Green is on and red is off in that animation. It's the same direction as the light switches in my house. Are American light switches the other way?
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Oct 11, 2012 13:02
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No, you're right. Green is on and red is off. Much like green light go red light stop. Anyway, I can't seem to focus on Python as I did with Javascript. I'm not sure if it's because of the language, or because I went from watching movies that were interesting me on TV (doing Javascript), or watching Game of Thrones while trying to learn Python.
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Oct 11, 2012 13:17
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It looks fine to my USA eyes, but it'd be easier to say in animated form.
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Oct 11, 2012 13:18
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Every lightswitch I've seen that wasn't connected to another lightswitch, and every electronic device with an I/O switch has had 'off' be when the bottom of the switch is pushed in and the top of the switch pushed in when 'on'. (toggle based switches are toggle up: on, toggle down: off) Switches that are slide based look like your light switch example, but it's the inside of the switch that is usually colored green and red. If it was colored on the outside (and I can't recall seeing one that is) it would indeed look like your example.
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Oct 11, 2012 13:20
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I picture doctor Frankenstein throwing a huge switch yelling "It's Alive!" and he pulls it down, so I'm basing my pull-down = on design on that image in my head. Looks a bit better now, I think. edit: It took about two loving hours of minute adjustments, but FINALLY my little bouncing arrows actually correctly line up with the items they're pointing to.  Making the on-screen pixels line up with your in-game isometric field can be really really finicky. Mug fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 13:24
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Mug posted:Green is on and red is off in that animation. It's the same direction as the light switches in my house. Are American light switches the other way? I severely misread what you posted, and had it completely backwards in my head. Generally, American light switches that I've seen use the bottom point as off, and the top as on. But our traffic lights (which this seems to mimic quite nicely) have green on the bottom and red on the top like yours, so I think it makes sense now, as long as the player gets a clear example of off being red with no other switch around for potential confusion, the first time you encounter a switch.
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Oct 11, 2012 13:42
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