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Upmarket Mango posted:Okay so basically I'm going to be 21 in December and it's about time I start getting my life in order. If I want to be a video game designer, what sort of college programs should I be looking at? Should I be taking both programming and art classes? I'm pretty lost when it comes to the whole education thing. Linguistics! As for art and poo poo it depends on what kinds of games you want to be making. Indie titles? Draw in English class. Every day. Develop your own style and get really comfortable with it, like "I can draw stuff that is recognizably mine in like a minute." Otherwise yeah you're probably best off taking proper art courses and learning the elements of shading. Still develop your own technique, I started out drawing awful doe-eyed anime crap and ended up with a sort of a natural, if unrefined, storyboard-of-a-picture book style. It has no place among the Next Starcraft 2 Marine Armor Design, but it works for... well, cartoony storybook stuff, haha.  An actual sprite frame. Is that ganja? I don't know, you tell me. I might not be the best source to answer, but even though my progress on my own stuff is very slow, I can honestly say that the best thing I could've done (and did) was just develop a really wide skill set. My programming's absolutely my weakest part, but poo poo, it works, and that's what matters unless you wanna work at like Obsidian or some other pro ice place. University's for picking up a little bit of everything, and you're 21, that's what, maybe your junior year if you went right out of high school? Plenty of time to get really good at one or two things, and get a background in a third. Stay away from Creative Writing, though, and just read tons of books, dogg. That's the best creative writing course you could ever give yourself. Totally serious about the linguistics part, too: it won't necessarily give you the math or logic tools for programming, but it'll give you a good syntactical and analytical skillset. Get a historical linguistics course if you can, but those are usually 400-level. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Sep 15, 2012 |
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Sep 15, 2012 02:40
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Upmarket Mango posted:Mostly the one man indie studio, but being the "idea guy" at a major studio would be cool too. I was under the assumption that designers did a bit of everything, whether that be coding/modeling/whatever and just doing what needs to be done and helping out where they can while also guiding a game in it's development from just an idea to a finished product. Nah, it's cool. We all wanted to be a golden god ideas guy at one point. I wished I could be an ideas guy who wrote dialog trees and full scripts like Shigesato Itoi, but I realized I had none of the clout of that brilliant man, $0 to hire people with, a potential income of $3/day after gas and taxes and decided if I wanted a house, I had to build it with my own hands. It should be more clear in the OP--not a shot at you, Mug, you a bro--: you wanna be a one man army, you gotta learn or teach yourself how to do the work of an army. You wanna be an ideas guy, you gotta have the funds to hire that army to do the work for you.
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Sep 15, 2012 03:26
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Well, it took something like twelve hours, but I finished my breath attack spritesheet. It used to be a 4-frame set of ~215x75px images, and I only had Fire drawn with nothing else, but now I made the full set. I expanded it to a 16-frame animation with a general 4-to-8-frame loop with other moving bits to break up the regularity--you can see the little flames bursting off from the horizontal part of the fire (the small flames at the "ball" were already there). The HUD is greatly improved as well. I added in an Actraiser 2-style border to the HP pips and brightened them up to increase their visibility. I also put in an indicator next to the fire bar that shows you that yes, this is definitely where you see how much fire you have left, and also to indicate the element currently in use. I had symbols drawn that were going to be in the middle of the flame, but I went with a color scheme setup instead. My bro who actually knows art (unlike me) suggested that the simpler the interface is, the better. I also got the Ice Breath to work properly:   It doesn't do damage, but reduces the alpha on RG and y'know kinda video game logic-obviously makes it so you can stand on them until they defrost.  I'm kind of proud of the Acid Breath. It does work as intended and applies armor reduction, but mostly I'm happy with how the sprite cycle turned out, it even has tiny little toxic skull bubbles that pop up for about 2/10 of a second. I did kinda gather a lot of that inspiration from FF6's Poison spell.  Thunder Breath, too, I'm not sure how I'm gonna differentiate it in-game aside from the standard "does more damage to certain enemies." +1 damage over Fire Breath seems to favor it overmuch. It has little arcs of yellow thunder to break up the purple and teal bits.  My favorite by far, though, is the I was surprised at how easy it was to add the status effects into the code, but I guess that speaks of how close my code was to this state where I could just spend like two hours tossing in a few variables and changing things around before it just completely worked as intended. With that, the Front Mission Gun Hazard-inspired "it gets stronger the more you use it" power-up system, the metroidvania power-boosting treasures, and the breath mechanics all work as intended. I think I can say I'm finally in the Alpha phase of this poo poo. I'll try post a video of this stuff at a later date, the footage I captured these screenshots from is like 3 fuckin' gigs because I'm bad at capture software. Twelve muthafuckin' hours for a lovely tiny spritesheet, and here I thought spriting would be the easy part haha. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Sep 15, 2012 |
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Sep 15, 2012 20:44
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Some bratty kids who think that an SNES is a grandpa's toy might find it jarring, but I like the hard colors and edges. It reminds me of Out of this World. Did you have that in mind when you were making it?
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Sep 16, 2012 17:52
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Aliginge posted:Bear in mind being at university is a shitload different than college*. Even just moving away from family and bunking down in halls of residence with dudes from all over the country is a totally different experience and if embraced, a social explosion (Some tend to lock themselves in their room, their loss). I saw people who used to commute from home to Uni and they always themselves felt like social outsiders. So kinda similar to community college in America, then? How are the instructors in UK College, generally? In the US, they can range from fuckin' garbage in suburbia to amazing in the boonies because good teachers head out there to get away from all the poo poo. My experience in community college before real university taught me the different between a Bad Teacher and an rear end in a top hat Teacher. I had the roughest, toughest, meanest motherfucker for a 100-level CS course ever who graded like we were going for a master's degree, but god drat, the method she taught gave me a fantastic basis for understanding other poo poo that wasn't covered in the class. This guy's right, you wanna get out and experience the university curriculum--I consider "university life" part of that, honestly--before you say "nah I don't like school any more, I'm gonna teach myself." The more learning techniques and teaching styles you expose yourself to (and you get exposed to a lot of them in the uni level, some of 'em good, some of 'em abhorrently bad), the easier it will be to learn subjects by yourself in the future. But I'll stop at that because this thread is heading into "dear dr. ian i don't like college i don't like people" territory and out of "I am making a nintendo look at this" Actually, you know what, that's not a bad idea, I like the sound of Spritesheet Sunday, I'd be down for posting a piece of what I'd been working on that week. To keep myself on track for the thread, I'll put up the full right-facing iteration of one of those breath loops I was so proud of yesterday.  yeah, that is 3440px long, I was kinda cuttin' it close and I just learned the other day that XNA doesn't like sprites longer or taller than 4098px As for the slow-on-hit suggestion, thanks. I got to thinking, though, and it'll be a little more work but I'll probably add an effect to Fire too, I'll probably make the Bolt Breath stun mechanical enemies and make the Fire Breath damage-over-time to enemies wearing non-metal clothes. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Sep 16, 2012 |
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Sep 16, 2012 21:49
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seiken posted:I don't understand, are exams in the states way easier or something? Here in the UK it's usually something like 70% for an A and to fail you gotta get under 50% or even 40%. drat, that's a generous A. In the states, it's 10% increments, so <90 = B, <80 = C, etc. Less than a 60% is a failing grade, but yeah, that program he was trying to get into is some poo poo if they don't want him at ~85%. Just like how it sounds to be in the EU, for-profit private institutes that aren't big name ivy league deals are probably just scammers with PhDs. Public universities are the way to go fo' sho'.
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Sep 17, 2012 02:22
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Hey guys, I could use a suggestion for a good numeric font, just 0-9. I want Doulos SIL but nobody has it, I'm thinking Arial 'cause everyone has it, and I've been suggested to Georgia and am currently trying it. It's okay, maybe a little too stylized. It's only gonna be used for numbers, y'all seen my aesthetic so you can kinda figure what would match or not.Lord Humongus posted:Hey guys, after some time I changed the "lighting" in my game, does this look better? I assume you're gonna also junk things that aren't being drawn when they're off-screen too? After running through rooms for about half a minute, that poo poo dragged like a motherfucker.
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Sep 20, 2012 05:19
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Obsurveyor posted:So why not just include it with the game? It looks like it's open source. Oh, okay, it's as easy as loading other resources into the project. I was worried players would have to have it installed in their computer's font database rather than just in the right place in the game folder.
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Sep 20, 2012 18:49
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SPRITESHEET SUNDAY 2 Today I'll put up a full spritesheet for an angry sheep.  It doesn't actually damage you in the game and its only purpose is to keep you from getting a treasure it's standing right on top of. I'm especially proud of how it always looks like it's glaring at the player character (unless you're standing directly above it). It was also supposed to just kinda lazily chew the grass, but changing frames every 0.1s makes it look like it's feasting angrily, which is perhaps even better for its purposes. The first stage is pretty much finished, I just need to put in the actual treasures and write the code for when you pick them up. It'd be great if I could go at the rate of like a level a week, but I know myself best and it probably won't even be twice that timeframe, haha.
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Sep 24, 2012 00:56
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Now I've never claimed programming to be my strong point--just good enough to get things working without the universe imploding-- but I've been checking my task manager with my game open and have gathered the following data: On an i5 quad core, it usually runs at <1% (displays as 00) CPU and peaks at around 3% between stages before falling back to <1. This, I'm cool with this, I must be doing something right, haha. It's the memory consumption I'm worried about : whenever I go to a new stage, it seems like it's loading all the PNG data into RAM, if that's even how it works. This seems to be a pretty static value and only increases at very noticeably set times (i.e. transitioning between stages and the world map). Even though the PNG data falls out of use, it looks like the RAM doesn't get flushed and it hovers around ~250-300MB, increasing by about 4-10kb every time you go back to a screen you've already been to, and proportionally to a screen's data size the first time you go to it while the program is running. At the size rate of the screens that I'm using, it'll probably come out to be about 1GB if everything gets loaded. I mean this isn't really a problem in this age of "16GB of top-quality-brand top-speed RAM costs $120," but conceptually I don't really like this. Is there a way to flush your memory usage in XNA? And if there is, is that even a good idea?
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Sep 24, 2012 21:04
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Now, what I assume you're probably doing is pre-loading your graphics with a factory class of some kind, and instantiating your game objects something like this: Oh yeah, I been doin' it the "right way" the whole time. "If it's all the same factory class reference, it won't dispose of things even if they don't 'exist' anymore as long as the factory class instance still does" is exactly the problem I'm having, I call everything with the one spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice) and figured it would dispose of whatever was no longer needed as it became irrelevant in the code, but as you describe, that's not the case. Well, chalk that one up to "the unprotected course notes I took from some UK professor's site to learn C#/XNA from didn't really go into that." But I guess that's probably to be expected from a programming teacher who doesn't even bother/know how to electronically protect their uploaded teaching materials. Cool, that actually kinda makes sense, thanks. I think I might be able to maneuver with that somehow, barring some catastrophic logic rules problem haha.
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Sep 24, 2012 22:09
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Oh, naw, thank you so much for the offer but it's cool, that won't be necessary. I have no reservations about sharing my crap code--it's nowhere near revolutionary and according to my bro in the DE, I'm using pretty much the exact same ground/wall detection as Sonic 1--but I'm 99% certain I got my poo poo sorted. It's ungraceful, but I can at least revert to my old memory-eating, if working, state if it starts fuckin' things up in the long run.
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Sep 25, 2012 00:31
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Mug posted:Can I get some opinions on how I plan to handle save/resume in my game and if anyone thinks this is good/bad ideas? I think the hard part about manual mid-mission saves is that you'd have to store and recall pretty much every variable. That could be a real pain, especially considering how many different active elements there seem to be at any given time in your game.
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Sep 29, 2012 09:33
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Mug posted:edit: Maybe I should get in on this screenshotsaturday business. Here you guys go, have a thing to look at: Not that I'd ask someone to bother with it, of course; from all reports, homegrown netcode is a fuckin' monster. As for Screenshot Saturday, yeah, I could get behind that poo poo too.  I added in a "plink" that appears when your attacks would otherwise do 0 damage to an enemy. It lasts for about 2/5s and repeats every 1s. If you look closely, there's a treasure underneath the monster.  Killing it yields said treasure, which is y'know Metroidvania-style, pick it up once and you get the bonus permanently. This is the prompt method I decided to go with, which also lets me put a little story in there too.  As the prompt says in tiiiiiiiny letters, picking that up increases your HP, which can be seen in the top-left corner how one of the pips is yellow instead of red now. also dragon smoking weed at the campfire "goalpost"--and yes, there is an alternate "end stage" sprite for underwater areas... which still use a(n extinguished) campfire
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Sep 30, 2012 04:20
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Mug posted:Are your backgrounds/stages generated using tile-sets? Because it really looks like one huge hand-drawn canvas, so the illusion is wonderful if so. As far as the glove/boot goes, nah, that's just me doing the "fake depth" you'd see in old SNES games. Basically the foreground parts on the sprite are the normal color and the distant parts are darker, I figured it would help distinguish what's closer to the player on a 2D plane is all.
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Sep 30, 2012 05:37
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the chaos engine posted:I did this for screenshotsaturday: Well, I applaud you. Because it's been getting used in genres and games otherwise where it's aesthetically inappropriate, it's starting to go the way of the zombie in my opinion. I mean, I still see a few things where the pixel art is relevant to the genre, or meshes well with the rest of the art or whatever, but I'm seeing a lot of situations where developers excuse no-effort pixel men Doing The Mario, as it were (that four-frame walking animation that only appears in side-scrollers where it goes neutral-front leg out rear leg back-neutral-front leg back rear leg out), as "retro" and call it a day. Of course, I say this on SPRITESHEET SUNDAY where one of my sample sprites is on a four-frame cycle extended to sixteen to accomodate the rest of the spritesheet (of course not shown here) and make it blink every 1.6s instead of every .4s.  It's also the first and probably only one of two palette-swap monsters that are gonna be in Dragon Game (the brown shield one is just a blocker with 1 damage reduction and is meant solely to synergize with other obstacles, but the latter shoots fire out of his mail slot).
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Sep 30, 2012 19:40
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Mug posted:I draw the way I do in my game because I don't know how to do anything else. I think my game looks nice enough so far, personally. Oh nah, yours is one of the games that the style fits the genre (and by genre I of course mean like "visual genre," which as Nition says is that isometric view). Like I said: I see that and I think Shadowrun, so I mean I obviously think it's a match. But if I had a dollar for every time I saw a 2D side scroller that's gratuitously "retro" where they slap together some lazy 12x24 dudes and think they're in the clear because they've seen a historical shotgun market appeal, I'd have more money than the Ouya made. Hell, that little lock sprite you posted a couple weeks ago has as many frames of animation as some of their player characters, haha. Me, I'm like you in art style that I'm only going with what I know. Beyond using an RPGMaker field sprite body template, I actually have no idea how to do good pixel-sprites. I have, however, been doing this sort of hand-drawn poo poo for years now because I find it easier to write when I make crappy little illustrations while trying to put together picture book manuscripts. Shoot, the aesthetic I'm using is essentially "picture book storyboard" paired with my background in broadcast television. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 03:33
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Svampson posted:The fog method it uses is more suited for stuff with more gentle slopes, and not 90 degree walls. I'd probably benefit from rolling my own LoS system in the long run anyway since I'd like something that works directly with my tilemap system and tiles. Tryin' to think of an analogue... did that uh Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game do "LoS squares?" I think so it did if I'm doing bad at explaining.
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Oct 1, 2012 18:54
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Svampson posted:Here is a WIP for the LoS, definitely not as pretty Man, you kiddin'? That looks a billion times better. Remember that it's not the individual animation that counts, but how it works with everything else you've got.
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Oct 1, 2012 23:50
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Ularg posted:I also think I should start a 30 day challenge for myself to make a song a day for a month. What do you guys think? If you just wanna do this to exercise the aural "muscles," then I mean that's cool, I do poo poo like writing LPs to stay in condition myself, but I've never been satisfied with anything I forced out. I been trying my hand at storytelling for over a decade in a non-professional capacity, and I've never once had a good idea on demand.
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Oct 3, 2012 03:53
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Maluco Marinero posted:Yeah. Waiting for your muse to hit is just procrastination disguised as wishful thinking. Work hard, clear out distractions and just keep at it and you'll naturally fall into the zone. You will always have a lot of work to throw away because it's poo poo, so you may as well get started rather than think you'll get it bang on the first time. Oh yeah I mean you can bang poo poo out for the exercise but it's that one in a million idea that you actually end up liking. Everything else is just practice and I've stopped expecting anything usable to come out of it. You could make yourself write a story every day and they'll all be garbage; there are better ways you can practice your art than "do it for yourself because you make yourself do it." That just feels like walking up and down a hill and makes you hate it. I can't think of a musical analogue, but surely there's a more productive and applied alternative to "I'm gonna force myself to bang poo poo out in Garage Band that I'll highlight all-apple+del-empty trash once my month is up." Fur20 fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Oct 3, 2012 |
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Oct 3, 2012 06:02
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Ularg posted:Maybe just banging songs out is the wrong way I described it. I was wanting to start with simply taking ideas from any shows I'm watching or games I'm playing to inspire a song. For example I've been playing Faster Than Light and I wanted to try out a sort of Symphonic John Williams / Chiptunes theme just to see if it would work and to play around with it. I've wasted so many hours of my life on poo poo non-practice with the cold start method. Garbage in, garbage out: I always felt so crappy sitting there forcing myself to do something I didn't want to that whatever I ended up writing was just as crappy. No improvement in that. Now, it's either LPs or I'll just work on an existing idea I have written down--most of those are crap too, but at least I have somewhere to start from.
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Oct 3, 2012 06:36
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Mug posted:Six month of development; this is where I'm at Did you... hahaha did you just hack that guy's !iPod to change the soundtrack?
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Oct 4, 2012 00:32
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Epsilon Plus posted:How do I figure out what engine/SDK/whatever I want to learn to make my game in? GameMaker suddenly appearing on Steam miraculously reminded me that I have a lot of great ideas for games and should probably make them instead of waiting for one of my friends to magically become a competent programmer. The games I want to make are more reliant on menus and buttons than movement and physics. Some folks will tell you that this is a bad idea and your programming is hideous and you shouldn't do anything else until you get that sorted, but nah, gently caress 'em. If your poo poo works, well, your poo poo works dogg, ain't that what you concerned with? Menus and buttons are actually really easy since you don't have to deal with collision detection, basic -y/s gravity, or even scrolling cameras if you're lucky. If you know even a lick of programming, you're looking at a safe, easy, and good place to start dogg. Oh but if by menus and buttons you mean like JRPG--I mean hell dude I'm makin' a game where you play as a weed-smoking dragon in this super bright and colorful crayon world that would probably have a happy-faced sun if I ever drew the sun, that's about as kiddy and juvenile as it gets--say it man, nothin' to be ashamed of. If that's what you mean, though, I will say that, having fully made everything for this game but the save system and the rest of the levels, menu-driven JRPG sounds shittons harder to fully realize than a side-scroller even with collision and what have you. quote:I'm willing to (try to) learn proper programming; I just don't know where to start.  It won't give you the vocabulary or syntax to build much more than a text-driven game, but it makes for a good springboard into understanding more syntax, more vocab, and picking up more languages in general. v I am a very strong advocate for learning your basics from an institute of higher learning. I was opposed to community colleges for a while, but I started in one (later went on to graduate from a state university) and the truth is, they usually have pretty competent teachers (sometimes, amazing gems of teachers you'd expect to find at Oxford or Princeton) and very affordable credit prices if you can spare the time to take them. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Oct 4, 2012 |
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Oct 4, 2012 05:27
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Ularg posted:Perhaps you're right. But I simply couldn't pass pre-calc. ... Hmm, maybe mine had too and I just circumvented it from high school pre-calc. It was a long time ago now though.
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Oct 4, 2012 09:13
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At first I was kinda ambivalent about the office elements you're using, but then I realized that if you could apply that lo-res smooth CG to any "people" models you might use, you'd have a sweet pre-rendered-forms-on-an-N64 aesthetic goin' on like they had in Harvest Moon 64, and that's probably one of the nicest-looking games on that system if you ask me. For my Spritesheet Saturday, this is how the story segments are handled, finally put into use as of like twenty minutes ago. I was thinking pretty Ninja Gaiden-ey in concept. Those scribbles in the back change a bit every .25s to give a crayony illusion. I'm considering erasing their edges to make them smooth roundish shapes instead of white rectangles. I might make a in-engine story dealie too, but I'm thinking scripting them might be more trouble than it's worth.    I'm secretly a linguist by trade, and even if I'm not the biggest fan of Tolkien's post-linguistics work, I can respect his passion for language and fully fleshing out made-up ones. Call me insane if you like, but yes, "mwrrrshwrnlmnghwf" checks out 100% syntactically: mwr (3p male) - rr (preceding NP commits following VP) - shwr (really, totally... emphatical, basically) - nl (preceding ADV modifies following word) - mn (present tense) - gh ("be" verb) - wf (negative) ("He totally isn't")  ... Yeah, I did misspell this one, I put in the -mn- between the -rr-. It's a fake unpronounceable language, gimme a break haha. It's not as bad as it sounds, it only took like an hour to come up with a healthily wide list of relevant grammar rules Fur20 fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Oct 6, 2012 |
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Oct 6, 2012 20:33
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeIibzN9EVU Oh man, I like what I'm seein' here. I'd play it. I'm not sure what kinds of reactions you've gotten on your text boxes thus far if any, but I love your cute picture book-ey characters.
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Oct 7, 2012 06:36
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JESUS. SHITLORD. CHRIST. I am, of course, an incompetent klutz with code and basically glean everything I know from other people. I just spent the last twelve hours learning from some guy's XNA saving-in-XML tutorial and trying to implement it. Not happening! Then I looked at a different tutorial I had in my bookmarks. This guy's blog is just tabled and set up in such a way that it's a pain in the rear end to read, but drat, he's a great teacher. I implemented the alternate save method he was offering and... oh, look at that, got it working 100% in like 30 minutes. One might argue that I just needed a twelve-hour run-up to get my gears spinning right, but I think the moral of the story here is never trust anyone from Hawaii to teach you how to program. I mean, I technically could because I understand the elements of pedagogy, but I wouldn't trust me to teach anyone either: when I say my programming etiquette is the equivalent of a Cro-Magnon at a Victorian function, I mean it. That of course doesn't stop me from, at this point, officially stating that the only thing left to do in Dragon Game is to make the rest of the stages, because the mechanics and system management et al are now entirely complete. That's still like 16 stages and six bosses, but poo poo, it feels good to be done with everything I'm bad at. Now I can procrastinate and not work on sprites and levels instead 
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Oct 7, 2012 09:04
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Fortuitous Bumble posted:What do you people who've made games before do as far as prototyping? I've had some ideas for a strategy game type of thing going around in my head but working out how game mechanics might play out for anything other basic action games seems really intimidating. Well, start super small. You know you need a movement and control system, probably a scrolling camera unless you're doing a one-screen-large board game sort of deal, a way to print/display your dudes, and possibly wall collision depending on your setup (this would be unnecessary if you were making a game that works like Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, since everything would be based on its position in a grid, which would act as your walls by proxy). My earliest prototype was the player character walking and jumping along a big black bar to check if you fell through it or not and to make sure the gravity worked as intended. Then, I had to work out how to make the screen center on and follow the player character. After that, hit detection with enemies. Once you have your core "this technically works like a game," you can start putting in your cosmetic stuff. Of course, there'll be some mechanical things you won't be able to implement or test until you have something cosmetic going already.
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Oct 7, 2012 19:44
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(Kind-of-a-)Spritesheet Sunday! In Dragon Game, when you don't touch anything for five seconds, of course you do an idle animation. In this animation, Dragon starts whistling. These notes pop out of his head and they spell out part of a song. Astute players will figure out the system while everyone else will think Dragon is spitting rainbow musical notes. He only whistles poo poo from Japanese games both obscure an ubiquitous (and Smoke Two Joints. And a Hawaiian drinking song). The full spritesheet is forty-five 51x51 tiles long to accomodate the longest song in his library. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 03:54
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a 16 year old girl posted:I'd suggest changing the font and the colors, the current combination reminds me of demotivational posters and it doesn't really fit the visual style of the rest of the graphics. Changing the black background to something like white or more of a cream color (like the dragon) might look better, even if you don't choose to frame the image somehow. Centered text might also work better than right aligned text with an indent after every line break. As far as the black background goes, now, this might be really, really bad practice (I honestly wouldn't know), but it's basically the application's default backdrop--you know, the one that's traditionally Cornflower Blue, but I just changed it to 0/0/0 Black. There are a bunch of to-black transitions (especially between screens and between picture boxes) and it was easier and more resource-efficient than putting a black matte over the background. It would also look really weird to go from like a cream coconut brown to black between every picture, while the picture and text fading to 0/0/0 then coming back up to full visibility looks more natural from my TV production point of view. Like I mentioned, I had in mind stuff like Ninja Gaiden and Yoshi's Island where you have a box with an image on the top half of the screen with the text on black on the bottom half. quote:The typeface is also a little classical in contrast to the game's style and you don't have large blocks of text so a serif font isn't really necessery for legibility either. Children generally read words by reading them letter for letter, which is why a sans-serif font (which has a simpler letter form) is easier for them to read. Truth told I'm only specifically using Doulos SIL for the sentimental connection, it's not like I'm actually using Unicode characters haha. Fortuitous Bumble posted:I started setting up some test ideas in Processing but I found myself wasting too much time on creating classes and drawing bubble diagrams and poo poo so now I'm experimenting with game mechanics in excel and sheets of graph paper, maybe it will go a bit faster I mean, I'll quote myself: "move y px for 100ms move -y px for 100ms move x px opposite of facing direction for 200ms" I seriously thought this poo poo counted in ms rather than updates per second Fur20 fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 19:20
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Shalinor posted:Fading to black because that's your background color more or less breaks the illusion. You could change the background color to match the on-screen content, you could cross-fade between pages (put one behind the other, fade the front one out, make the pages cover the entire screen) to hide it, etc. Well I could demo that. I'll try a sort of a pagey texture and then put hand-drawn stuff over it instead of scanned-and-colored, or maybe just the standalone pages themselves sized to fit the window and see how that works. You're right, I'm forgetting my essentials. I have enough physical pages to support that, at which point the only concern is file size if I go with this method. Tch, now you got me considering how to do a page-flip animation. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 19:41
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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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Before: After:   I dunno, any better? I decided to go fully hand-drawn with a flipping animation between pages as opposed to a cross-fade or to-black as it was originally. The text fades between blocks and switches to the next once it hits 0 opacity in the case of "new text, same page," and fades between pages too. And yeah, the wizard is supposed to look like he isn't looking at anything. That's his, y'know, that's his thing. Font size too big maybe? I'm sorta of that mind. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Oct 12, 2012 |
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Oct 12, 2012 02:22
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Different story now, I completely changed the visual approach so typeface is now fair game. I do have really good handwriting, I could try like just outright letters-by-hand it and see how that goes, but I'm worried that might look a little too homegrown, haha. Any suggestions how to get that in? All that comes to mind is molded transparent PNGs.
Fur20 fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Oct 12, 2012 |
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Oct 12, 2012 04:30
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Terraria is, in my opinion, absolutely a primarily-multiplayer indie game. But what it sounds like you're describing is a primarily-PvP game. The zero sum game niche is filled with both huge and highly-accessible big name titles, so it's not so much that you'll have a playerbase to evaporate but that you'll be fighting giants to even get a playerbase in the first place. These games have incredible longevity because pretty much so long as they have a community (and/or pros playing it), the game's challenge dynamic is constantly growing and changing. You make a PvP game, understand you're fighting Starcraft, League, Call of Duty, etc. The co-op non-zero-sum niche, on the other hand, is pretty empty because it has a regular turnover "garbage collection" rate: all players eventually experience burnout since a non-zero-sum game necessitates PvE content that'll ultimately get stale for anyone, even me, and they'll yearn for the next fun co-op title. It's why folks are so excited over Torchlight 2, Borderlands, Terraria, and Castle Crashers, and why they're looking forward to Starbound and other games of that ilk. That's my take on it, at least.
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Oct 12, 2012 05:41
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Maluco Marinero posted:Yeah, this. There are some awesome compositions in kids books out there once you end up actually having a reason to read them. Oh yeah, you guys are preachin' to the choir. I fuckin' love picture books, even if my foul language advertises otherwise. I got a different font going, probably better-sized, looks a lot more natural, and I'll see how that works out once I boot in OSX and throw stuff together there. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Oct 13, 2012 |
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Oct 13, 2012 04:00
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DeathBySpoon posted:I'm aiming to make this game be a kind of Persona / Pokemon hybrid, where all of the collectible party members are robots. You fuse them by mashing their parts together and the resulting robot will have a moveset that takes elements from both source bots. You'll also be able to build robots from scratch using crafting elements and blueprints. I like the idea of putting together your own robots from parts, but if you wanted to go all the way with that idea, maybe go more Front Mission/Armored Core instead of requiring players to use blueprints? In those games you have your battle mechs and you can put together any combination of Legs, Torso, Head, R/L Arm, Engines, and sometimes accessory stuff like SAMs or Backpacks. Each part contributed to the mech's capabilities: you had tank treads with great mobility and weight support but they couldn't climb ledges versus light legs that couldn't support much weight and didn't move nearly as far but had more terrain options and better evasion; melee tonfa-arms versus like machine gun or rocket launcher arms (which I guess you could appropriate flavor-wise into, say, "this is a Tesla Coil arm" or "these flak gun arms fire cryogenic rounds" or whatever); heads with CPUs that increased certain types of damage, sometimes by itself and at others greater bonuses at the expense of penalties; torsos that functioned as your main HP source; engines dictated your "power" cap and you couldn't use a combination of parts that went over it; etc. I dunno, maybe even like give individual parts resistances and weaknesses, add 'em up after the whole robot is built, and use that to determine its final weak points. That's whole other layers of balance you'd have to calculate, though. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Oct 13, 2012 |
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Oct 13, 2012 19:30
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 Hopefully this is a better font. Dafont was cool, but I just couldn't settle on one I really liked. I ended up just cooking my own from my handwriting, even if it does remind me of Sand. I figured if I'm hand-drawing it, my font might as well be hand-written by me too. EDIT: whoops, typo, gotta go back and fix that motherfucker, haha Fur20 fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Oct 13, 2012 |
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Oct 13, 2012 23:16
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SlightlyMadman posted:After I played FTL I found myself really enjoying it, but disliking the linear gameplay and short length of the games. I thought it would be much better as an open sandbox like Elite, so that's what I'm making. This might just be me liking easy games, but I think roguelikes work because they're short. Long, player-invested open-world games like, say, Fallout, would suffer from player burnout if they were that "one chance and you're dead" system. It would suck to get close to the "retire point" of a massive game only to get screwed by a couple really unfavorable random events. I can't tell if you're planning on making it permadeath, but I'm kind of assuming you are since you're invoking FTL. If you aren't and I'm just misinterpreting, well, hey that's cool, I'd totally play a huge, procedurally-generated open world space exploration game with a savegame safety net. Actually, you know what save system I would dig in a game like that? A "one player save, one autosave" system. The autosave is so you can't lose tons of progress from a crash, but the single player save would be kinda like, y'know, if you savestate in a SNES-era space shooter. If you screw up your state and end up cornered, that's that, but the only person you can blame is yourself rather than the RNG. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Oct 14, 2012 |
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Oct 14, 2012 20:42
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