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Pladdicus posted:Actually a very lucrative and possibly ideal market for newbies looking to break into game making would be websites like kongregate.com and other flash style portals. I don't have a lot of details on it for a write up to gon the OP but from what I've gleaned it's a very simple low-level way to get your feet wet in the industry and it can be quite lucrative for programmers who don't know how to create good assets but have really original or fun ideas. So, this is certainly an option, but don't get visions of piles of filthy lucre. Because of how many people are submitting games these days, the payout per game has really gone down. It would be a difficult market to make a living in, at this point, so think of it more like a fun way to snag some beer money. (I believe some still do just fine, but most I know of got there by building their own site and market)
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Sep 14, 2012 14:43
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Mug posted:Now we need to talk about Sound effects. I'm keen on having my music dude do the sound too. Should be a beautiful result. There... might? be another one, or bfxr might be the newest. Regardless, they're great tools for getting usable sound effects quickly (for anything retro, at least).
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Sep 14, 2012 15:50
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Furret Basket posted:Basically I don't want to rip him off and I don't know what to offer him. Any idea of even the vague numbers I should be talking?
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Sep 14, 2012 20:06
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seiken posted:Hey cool, thanks for the new thread.
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Sep 15, 2012 00:59
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Mug posted:loving hell, trying to draw a black border around a not-square window had me loving stumped for ages. (figuring out how to make the way-off-screen part of the line still feel present was the tricky part)
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Sep 15, 2012 16:59
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ambushsabre posted:Did you do some real life "research"? That's the best part of game design, when you can go do crazy stuff for the sake of the game. My entire life has prepared me for writing this system 
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Sep 15, 2012 17:01
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floofyscorp posted:Yes. With an impressive enough portfolio, it doesn't really matter if you went to school at all. That said... My understanding is, that is much easier with a degree. Like, much much easier. So between that, and you seeming to want out of school for unclear reasons, I'd probably say you need to buckle down and just do it. If you can't hack that, then I don't see you doing any better with self-motivating yourself into making a kickass portfolio.
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Sep 16, 2012 19:51
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Aliginge posted:I saw people who used to commute from home to Uni and they always themselves felt like social outsiders. The life of an "alternative" student: it basically sucks. BUT! You have your own apartment, and your own life, and you've assumedly got your life figured out, when almost no one else around you does. Advantage: alternative student.
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Sep 16, 2012 23:44
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What's your framerate? Doing a mouse that feels good, without 60fps, is quite hard. Can you not turn on hardware cursor, though? Not entirely sure what you're building the game in.
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Sep 17, 2012 14:44
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Mug posted:edit: I can pull 60fps, but I think the hardware mouse usually polls and updates at like 120hz or more so it just doesn't quite cut it. Your idea of a sort of in-game cursor is solid, though. It'll probably just add to the retro feel, and nicely hides the problem. EDIT: I suppose it's been 10 years since I tried a non-hardware mouse, 60fps or no, so it is entirely possible that modern sensibilities have taken us beyond where those were kosher. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Sep 17, 2012 |
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Sep 17, 2012 15:02
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Presented without comment: My Little Pony GameJam
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Sep 19, 2012 21:52
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Vermain posted:With that in mind, what is the best thing to look at/best techniques to use to help myself improve with regards to these aspects? It doesn't have to be pixel art. In fact, you might do better if it isn't - pixel art is all the rage these days, and you'll draw comparisons to all the big names in the craft. I stumbled on an art style I can manage that involves constructing things out of very large irregular boxes, for instance. It's pretty unique, and looks pretty good. I was inspired by The Real Texas, which was in turn probably inspired at least in part by Minecraft and the resurgence of blocky games. Then there's Cube World, inspired by 3D Dot Game Heroes, which takes the blocky style in an entirely different, beautiful direction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=729VkxC4Z6E ... not that you need to go cubes, but point is - you needn't go pixel art either. Unless you're going to dedicate time to becoming a fully fledged artist in your own right (which isn't time spent making games), instead figure out a style you can nail naturally, as-is. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Sep 19, 2012 |
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Sep 19, 2012 22:25
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Mug posted:Don't try to stop people copying your game. You'll never profit from trying to do that in this environment we're in. That is, unless you elect to forgo multiple platforms, but I guarantee you'll get more sales by supporting all the platforms you can than you will via any attempt at converting pirates. EDIT: Unless you mean something very, very, very basic. Like a manually entered key, that isn't online-verified, that they enter during boot that locks the game down. That will create user friction, so I wouldn't recommend it, but... you can do that with a simple hash. Give the user an alphanumeric string, they enter it, and you convert each character to a byte. Add them all within a byte (which means it will wrap a bunch of times), you end up with a number. That's the hash code. The idea is that any key you hand out always results in that hash code. Any string that doesn't, won't work. Stupidly easy to crack, but not so easy that a friend can just casually share their copy. If you want just enough to prevent casual sharing of a game, that'd be what I would recommend, but - it's still pretty silly, in this day and age. You actually want those people to share the game, since you have no marketing muscle of note on your own. EDIT2: Though this wouldn't prevent them from sharing the CD key too; You could make some vague comments about registering their names / DON'T REUSE THE KEY, but they would be toothless. The only way to prevent that is with online registration. Please don't require an internet connection, just because you want DRM. You've seen the kind of negative press that gets the big names - now imagine all that ire focused on a tiny indie like yourself. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Sep 21, 2012 |
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Sep 21, 2012 03:04
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GetWellGamers posted:So, out of curiosity, anyone ever submitted a game to the IGF, student or pro? ... mind, though, that it was an extremely rough prototype, and I would lay odds that we were one of the entries that the judges didn't even bother playing. It has since undergone a massive transformation into a product of a scope that I might actually be able to finish. We snagged a professional voice actor for the protagonist, though, and her narration in the video got us a lot of compliments 
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Sep 22, 2012 21:08
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GetWellGamers posted:Well, okay, can you go into it a bit? I mean, do you just submit and it flies off into the void? Do you gt any kind of feedback on its status before february, or what? The actual build submission is done via FTP. You're given a specific folder to upload to. You can continue to upload builds after your initial, though you need to be sure to explain which build is the newest one in your instructions. Got any questions, email them - they're pretty responsive. There's a substantial window after the contest closes to when the judges actually get around to trying your build, so plan on continuing to develop on it and add bug fixes as you go. The other gotcha is that they've slightly changed the submission rules this year. I believe there's something about not allowing games that are already on the market, or maybe it was they only want games that will be ready for market within the next year?
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Sep 22, 2012 21:53
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Mug posted:Making a game has forced me to go from knowing zero trigonometry to being able to draw circles, lines at radial angles, and now elipses (aka explosions!). Seriously, though. Looks freaking awesome. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Sep 23, 2012 |
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Sep 23, 2012 00:49
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ambushsabre posted:marker'ing professionals
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Sep 23, 2012 19:30
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... in all seriousness, there is growing burnout on pixel art. I don't know if it's reached beyond the hipster crowd yet, and it doesn't apply so much to stylized pixel art (ie. Paul Robertson, Sword and Sworcery, etc), but genero-JRPG pixel art people and hard-tiled worlds are increasingly a done thing again. If retro-cool tracks with gamer age, I suppose the next wave will be extremely low polygon count people. Which I guess means my block people are going to be super awesome here soon. I was retro-cool before it was cool.  EDIT: I do not mean to slag on pixel artists, at all, mind you. Pixel art is awesome. This is just what I've observed in people responding to indie games over the last year or two. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 00:12
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Svampson posted:Still super early in development!
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Oct 1, 2012 14:35
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DuFfY posted:If your world consists of axis aligned walls, I figured it would not be too much work to generate a simpler fog mesh yourself with nice hard edges rather than the grid based mesh that is currently being generated.
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Oct 1, 2012 16:47
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It goes both ways, though. Starting off with an idea and letting that dictate your engine can result in feature creep, or in ludonarrative dissonance when you start cramming the gameplay in a direction not well supported by the engine. I tend to favor the engine approach as a result. I usually start with an idea and rough design, and set to designing an engine for such - but when the engine starts to veer off, and shows me some awesome gameplay? I'll rework the design to fit what the engine is becoming, rather than trying to kick the engine to fit my preconceived notions of what the game was supposed to be. Simple example - I started out making a procedural runner. Normally, this means a fixed run speed, and your moves are really just animations that don't move your character at all. Sliding is just running with a different collision box, etc. Instead, I started playing with anim-based acceleration, and found you could do some really cool stuff if the speed was NOT fixed. Changes the dynamic completely. That lead me to figuring out how to handle obstructions that you couldn't just despawn upon hitting the player, and so on, and now it feels more like a platformer than a runner. The slide in particular screams Mega Man X.
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Oct 2, 2012 17:06
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Juc66 posted:Making an engine from scratch is such a waste of time in my opinion. ... but I'm inclined to agree, if your goal is just to make a game. Even if making your project in Unity or equivalent saves you no time, you can immediately post the result on the web for instant feedback, release it to Mac/PC/Linux without extra work, etc. That said, there's also the argument that custom tech leads to different games. I seriously doubt Mug's game would look as distinct as it does if he'd built it in Unity, and it might not be as "clean". Unity gives you, for instance, physics by default - which hangs a lot of people up, and they start adding physics puzzles or physically-active characters for no reason. EDIT: basically, "it depends" Shalinor fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Oct 5, 2012 |
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Oct 5, 2012 15:10
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the chaos engine posted:Ah, saturday and the screenshots it brings. Also, those are totally strawberry floating islands. EDIT: VV "Delicious Triangles" would be an awesome game name. Also, this really does look great - don't take my strawberry comment as any kind of slight. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Oct 7, 2012 |
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Oct 6, 2012 23:37
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Orzo posted:Silly question: there's no harm in using temp art from copyrighted sources for the development phase of a game, is there? And if the development process is going to be blogged and displays said content? Hunting your entire 100,000 count asset base for rogue borrowed assets, and knowing it means a lawsuit if you miss any, is really not fun.
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Oct 7, 2012 17:01
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Spritesheets? Uh... how about moving boxes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN0PRdfThNQ
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Oct 7, 2012 21:34
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The White Dragon posted:I could try an alternate, more artsy font, but I wanna make sure it's clear and legible. Picture books are my passion and I spend a lot of time reading them, and I've found that Times or some variant of it is actually the favored font in the genre, from Dr. Seuss to William Steig to, like, Holly Keller. You tend to see non-standard fonts in graphic novels and comic books more than hardcovers and paperbacks, really. 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.
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Oct 8, 2012 19:29
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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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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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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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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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Mug posted:edit: I've never thought of accounting for colourblind people, don't video card drivers have accessibility options at a level below the API? In your case, I'd probably add the universal off / on symbols (a circle and a line, broken vs open circuit). That fixes the problem for everyone, and lets you keep your UI bubbles consistently monochrome. EDIT: The Cheshire Cat posted:The main place I saw this falling apart was that if you're using something like Unity I'm assuming they probably already have their own UI classes that may not exactly match the WinForms stuff so the constructors would all be wrong. Although, you could just extend the Unity classes and set up the constructors the way you need them as a kind of interface between the WinForms designer and Unity, or whatever engine you're actually using. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 15:22
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The White Dragon posted: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.
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Oct 12, 2012 15:37
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Polo-Rican posted:I'd argue that you don't need the icons at all if you're going to have text alongside them... a simple bullet might work better (I mean a literary bullet, not a gun bullet). That is to say: I like the pictures, even if I can't quite make out what's going on in some of them, so move on. A lot of the games of that era had similar UI elements. There'd be a button with a known function but goofy graphic, so I'd make up a stupid story about what the graphic was. X-Com, for instance, was horrible/awesome for that, and Syndicate had it going on too. I think Populus did as well.
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Oct 15, 2012 20:56
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SlightlyMadman posted:Yeah, I could certainly have a few different backdrops presented, but we'd be talking 128x128 pixels at the most, since I'm working in ASCII mode. I think a lot could be conveyed in that space though, and if I decide to get an artist involved on the project later I'd definitely add that sort of thing. To see this done right (including the aforementioned graphics), I highly, highly suggest you snag a copy of King of Dragon Pass for research purposes. It's on iOS devices now, PC, etc - an old, but great, game. It also shows how you can procedurally tweak largely static encounters to be different every time. THAT, done sparingly, could definitely add to the flavor. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Oct 17, 2012 |
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Oct 17, 2012 01:09
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SlightlyMadman posted:Thanks, I was just going to ask if anyone knew of a good modern text adventure game, since I honestly haven't played one since the 90s. I think you're right that encounters should take place in a single location for simplicity, in fact, that would let me use the same system for space encounters as for away missions. I might be trying a little too hard to put something "original" into the game, but if it really ends up not being fun, I'll have no problems removing it from the game.
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Oct 17, 2012 05:24
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Lord Humongus posted:I wanna see if I can be succesful in reproducing the same quality rooms. Does this also remind you guys of low poly horror? Does it look good for what it is?
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Oct 18, 2012 16:17
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Lord Humongus posted:Does this look better? Also, great look. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Oct 18, 2012 |
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Oct 18, 2012 18:38
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Thirding Unity. It is a fantastic engine, and I have no regrets with building my codebase up around it. I like "if it works, ship it" - but I hate messy code. So I almost inevitably remove blatant hacks and pepper comments everywhere before I'm done with a system. I've gotten used to inefficient one-off code (and you kind of need to, to get anything done quickly as an indie), but it drat well better at least look good. I do at least mark all my bugs and limitations with @fixme, to try and limit future landmines. ... and everyone in this thread should be using version control  It is easy to set git up with bitbucket, totally free (for the small teams we're all on), and then boom. Backups, forking, branching, and a full per-file history for those "poo poo, I need just this file to look like it did 2 months ago" times.
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Oct 19, 2012 14:30
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Polo-Rican posted:Oh, you can't have walls that meet at a Y-intersection? Well okay... if that's really how you want your 'game' to 'work'... ... but it's a lot better because of that, so hey.
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Oct 19, 2012 15:11
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HelixFox posted:Legitimately playing a bunch of cool games as "research" is the best. Also any money spent on consoles, computers, game magazines, online subscriptions, etc. So awesome.
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Oct 19, 2012 19:22
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