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ambushsabre posted:[x-post between the two game dev threads] edit: I'm Very Dumb Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Sep 23, 2012 |
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Sep 23, 2012 22:06
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Kunzelman posted:Ladies and gentlemen, the powers of sarcasm! You're probably right, but with goons, you seriously never know.
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Sep 23, 2012 22:48
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Lord Humongus posted:Hey guys, so I tried to make a way for the darkness to despawn and spawn at the right times, but I think it might look a bit bad? It looks weird because the light / dark tiles are a bit big. How hard would it be to increase the tile count? If they were about a quarter of the size I think it would look fine.
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Sep 24, 2012 18:42
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Lord Humongus posted:I don't know what to do about it. I've tried everything so it doesnt lag. The darkness blocks are just actors that change when the light object hits them, I don't know if there's any other possible way to have dark/light in the stencyl engine. It's becoming frustrating. I work in flash — not the stencyl engine though — and am pretty good at thinking of terrible ways to hack things in. If I wanted to make a really, really quick lighting system without getting into complex math, this is how I'd do it:  I'd make a movieclip that's a series of 10 or 20 or 30 black dots in a line (represented here by orange dots in a line... whoops), then duplicate and rotate that movieclip a bunch of times until I'd made a cone of vision. Then, on each frame, I'd use a for loop to iterate down each line, from the inside to the outside, testing for collision with walls and objects. If a dot collides, then dots further down that line display. Then have another for loop that does this for each vision line. f you applied Flash's blur filter to the whole vision cone you could have a fairly slick-looking thing. The light blue oval thing I drew that surrounds the player is a single graphical object, a constant field of darkness that rotates with the mouse. Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Sep 27, 2012 |
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Sep 27, 2012 14:51
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Big cleanup day today! Previously, lasers and torpedos were totally different classes, but now all projectiles are a single "bullet" class with different sprites, speeds, and accelerations. The lasers used to be just be a line that was instantaneously drawn between the ship and the target, but I couldn't get them to feel "fun" that way, so I replaced them with Star Wars-like bullet lasers. The fun factor is greatly improved, now they can share collision code with torpedos (it was more complicated before when they were lines rather than moving objects). Also having a lot of fun with explosions:  My explosions don't really screencap well, but I'm really really happy with how they look in motion! (The ship design is old, by the way, it's been redesigned and looks way better now.) Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Sep 30, 2012 |
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Sep 29, 2012 23:59
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I don't have "spritesheets" because I'm a weirdo who makes games like a weirdo, but here's a facedump: It's funny we're talking about pixel art... this game was originally going to be done in an 8-bit style, but after a few months' work I decided to dump everything and ditch the style. I'm glad I did, because it's definitely out of vogue now, and the new art looks so much better. You can see these three crewmembers in their original 8-bit style here (haven't touched this site in ages, I really need to replace it with something else): http://icarusproudbottom.com/
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Sep 30, 2012 21:13
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Mug posted:does anyone actually look at my game so far and really think "Ugh, pixel art indie game"?. No, your game looks Extremely Sick. People react negatively to a game when it looks lazy. Nobody complained that FEZ was pixelish, and nobody will complain about yours. edit: Although I have been noticing a troubling trend of goon hostility towards indie games as a whole, but that's probably just goons being goons. Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 04:00
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Literally incredible. Took me a tick to realize it wasn't a 3d model.Mug posted:Do many of you guys actually follow a linear kind of "prototype/pre-alpha" -> alpha -> beta -> release path with the games you make?
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Oct 3, 2012 15:34
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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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Mug posted:
Where do you live? In the US, "up" is almost always "on." The colors work, though I'd make the green more bright and glowy so that it's obvious at a glance that it's on. 
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Oct 11, 2012 14:13
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As a sidenote, I guess this is the public reveal of the ship name!
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Oct 14, 2012 20:53
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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).
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Oct 15, 2012 20:47
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SlightlyMadman posted:I'm not planning on even thinking about this until I've got the rest of the game complete, but how insane or obnoxious would it be to have a procedurally generated text adventure minigame inside a space combat sim?... The idea is interesting in theory but in practice I think it would seem jarring and, worse, lazy. It could work, but I wouldn't go pure text — I'd have the text, as you've written, below a window with the scenario presented graphically (like King's Quest). Assuming you're going to have sprites for crew members, it would be weird not to use them in these segments and instead make the user focus on text. Using your sample scenario as an example — if your game has crew sprites, all you'd need to represent that scenario would be one 'crashed ship' sprite and one icy ground tile. Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Oct 16, 2012 |
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Oct 16, 2012 21:26
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SlightlyMadman posted:The problem with FTL-style multiple-choice encounters is that after the first time you see one, you don't even read it any more, and end up just picking the option you know is best. At that point, why even bother giving the player choices? Just roll the dice and tell them what happens. It's not really interactive at all except in that it gives the novice player bad choices to accidentally make. I agree with your assessment here but I think that's just a problem with the way FTL does things. The text adventure idea is intriguing, and would probably solve the problem, but there are other ways to solve the problem that could be less jarring. The exact opposite approach might work equally well, if not better - have no text at all, just a pure graphical representation of what your crew sees, and you have to choose what to do. That way reading isn't part of the equation at all, the player has to look at what's happening and try to decide what to do. Like a mini Nethack instance or something. Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Oct 17, 2012 |
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Oct 17, 2012 02:39
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Shalinor posted:These look like big black squares to me. I see a spot of light in the top one shapes like a footprint, and that's it. Agreed, I can't see anything in these at all. If you can, you're probably using a weird monitor that's calibrated badly.
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Oct 18, 2012 16:26
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Mug posted:So my brother looks at my game and says "Oh, you can't have T-intersections in the walls?" and I say "No... well... it's just graphics, the walls are just cubes really. I could draw them". 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'... Passive-aggressive feedback — getting results since the Dawn of Time.
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Oct 19, 2012 15:07
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The CRT filter rules, it makes the game not look like Flash, which is hard to do!
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Oct 22, 2012 15:48
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Wow, got a lot done tonight in a relatively short amount of time. Firstly, added a new gameplay mechanic - now you can adjust the "harmonics" of your shields. The mechanic is pretty simple - if your shield color matches the color of the enemy fire, you take dramatically less damage. But changing your shield harmonics takes Mark22 (the guy who also handles weapons) 15 seconds or so, so in the heat of battle it might not be worth the time! The shield effect looks really cool in motion (a shimmering spherical grid) but doesn't screencap well, d'oh!!  Secondly, and more importantly, I tied every game action to a timer.  Nothing happens instantaneously in this game - you issue an order to a crewmember, he works for a set amount of time, and then it happens. Certain things take only a few seconds (changing speeds, rotating the ship) while other things can take 20 or so seconds (adjusting laser and shield harmonics). Each crew member has his own timer, so you're not just sitting there - while Mark22 is adjusting the laser harmonics, you can tell Digby to fly around, scan objects with Jerry, etc. In the screenshot above, Digby is almost finished setting a new course for the ship. I had written code for the timer before, but until tonight I hadn't actually tied to the timer to game events, everything was happening instantly. I'm really happy with how well this piece is coded, all you do is pass an integer (amount of time, in seconds) and an action to the timer and the game handles the rest.
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Oct 23, 2012 04:02
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SlightlyMadman posted:Cool, I'm using a similar shield mechanic in my game, but with a single scale of Energy<->Matter instead of a three-factor blend. Are you doing anything to make the different spectrums enhance different gameplay aspects, so for instance a certain color of shields would work better with various other configurations? My notion is that energy weapons will focus on disabling systems, but matter weapons will focus on fires, plasma leaks, and ultimately total destruction of the ship. So certain ships will tend to specialize in one type of weapon or another, meaning ships expecting to have trouble with those ships will probably do the same with their shields. Ah, no, my system is really overly simple - if your shield matches the enemy laser color you take way less damage and that's it. You can also tune your lasers in the exact way — generally only worth it if an enemy's shield matches your laser. My screenshot is a little misleading, those three bars actually represent the power currently allocated to Weapons, Engines, and Shields, not the rgb value of your shields or something. I need to label them. (edit: urg, I just now realized that the bar that represents shields is blue, but you can tune your shields to be other colors. Hmm.) Your system sounds great since your game is more tactical — mine will feel more like an adventure game (I don't want to say "lucasarts" since the word comes with such lofty expectations). Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Oct 23, 2012 |
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Oct 23, 2012 14:46
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You are the master of gradients. Did you go to art school? Your color sense is really good.
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Oct 27, 2012 17:41
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Getting a bit done while hurricane death rages outside. All of the work I've been doing lately has been boring behind-the-scenes stuff that doesn't screenshot well, like making sure missles inherit their targets correctly. I created a system for cancelling orders - if you click any crew member while they're completing one of your orders, a "cancel" button pops up and you can stop them. This opens the door to some neat gameplay situations, such as having to cancel a proton torpedo launch because you find out an enemy is actually an ally, or having to halt course corrections because of deadly obstacles appearing in your path.
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Oct 29, 2012 21:06
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Yeah, I'd say you're much better off just learning canvas stuff and "real" html5. That poo poo's the future. This 'every computer science nerd on earth making his own javascript library from scratch' phase has got to be on its way out.
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Oct 30, 2012 18:08
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Is Blender the goon recommended free / open source 3d modelling tool? Our game is 2d but Apple Jax wants to make a 3d model of the spaceship. Could be awesome for some Mass Effect style loading screens. Also would be useful just for having a better visual sense of the ship as a 3d object.
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Oct 31, 2012 18:56
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Wow, got a lot done tonight. Totally rewrote the way bullets work, again. Now an outsider looking at my code might think I'm sane! I finally added real collision between bullets and objects (before, bullets were technically colliding with the 'target' cursor, not objects themselves). Now bullets actually hit stuff and explode based on the object's radius, push stuff around based on the object's mass, and deal damage based on the ship's power levels! Shooting is close to finished! The only thing I still have to implement is modifying damage based on the laser color versus the enemy's shield color, if the enemy has shields up. The only think worth a screencap: I finally replaced the placeholder art for the player ship with the real art. Looks so much better. New ship:  Old ship:
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Nov 5, 2012 05:06
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It could be a trillion things but it's probably the debugger itself causing the slowdown. You're gonna want to look into this issue ASAP because 1,500 frames per second is not acceptable.
Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Nov 5, 2012 |
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Nov 5, 2012 18:26
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Shalinor posted:Edmund McMillen did a post-mortem on Isaac, and it is fantastic. Very worth reading, for anyone trying to push genre boundaries. As someone making a huge game in Flash, Yes, I can relate to this. Whoops!!! At least I'm using FlashDevelop and AS3. I can't imagine making a full game in as2, which is barely a cohesive programming language at all.
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Nov 29, 2012 17:01
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I'm bad at fraps, but here's a quick gameplay demonstration of Icarus Proudbottom: Starship Captain. View at 720p fullscreen for a rough approximation of how the game actually looks. I'm thinking of renaming it Watch Cartoon Characters Push Buttons: The Game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkJ2Vws5eK8 The video is three short parts (haven't purchased Fraps yet so I'm working with the 30-second limit): 1) clicking all the guys 2) player targets an asteroid, adjusts ship angle and speed, maximizes power to weapons, then blows it up with a torpedo. 3) Player shoots an asteroid with a laser beam, then changes the beam frequency to Green and shoots again. Sound is a huge part of the game because the characters speak when they start / finish a command ("ship rotating now, captain!"), so that's obviously a big piece missing in this video. It probably looks overwhelming but I've totally planned out the first level, which is basically a big tutorial. It starts off with Icarus alone on the bridge at the start of a new day, and the other characters join one by one, so you learn piece by piece who does what. Apple Jax has made a much better-looking bridge (less grey and red), and is working on animating Mark22's arms for when you issue a command to him (in the video, you can see that his arms don't hit buttons when he's working yet). I'm working on code to get the tractor beam functional, which is a really tricky task!! Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Dec 3, 2012 |
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Dec 3, 2012 01:10
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Wow, thanks for the positive feedback everyone! I've been looking at that bridge and set of characters for so long that I've really grown blind to it. The few times I've showed it to people "in real life" I've just been like "So to turn the ship you click Digby then click Turn Ship then click the angle, then wait 3 seconds" and the other person is like "whaaaa??..." I'm glad people think the bridge looks good now, because it's going to look a lot better when the game is done (more blinking lights, better colors, characters animating better and talking, all the monitors actually showing ship conditions, etc).DeepQantas posted:Wasn't Icarus Proudbottom that poo poo propelled dude flying at 100 miles per hour? This is how the first game ended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhP9uZshQhI&t=282s Officially, Starship Captain takes place around ten years later, although I'll be leaving what happens in those ten years purposely ambiguous.
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Dec 3, 2012 15:22
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I'll probably compile a second version that's double-wide, for people that have two monitors. I'd love to make a version that runs in two totally separate windows, but at the moment I have no idea how to do that. Haven't looked into it though, so maybe it's possible. It's not the kind of game where you need to keep an eye on space at all times anyways, though — There's going to be a lot more scanning, planning, and puzzling than there will be ship-to-ship combat. And not to say that the game will be easy, but your ship will be able to take a few big hits before it blows up.
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Dec 3, 2012 21:19
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Shalinor posted:Could you just add a pull-down style button somewhere that deploys a screen view of the outside world?... Oh, well, whoops, I just realized that I never mentioned that you can switch between bridge and space view at any time with the space bar. Not sure if you guys think there's literally no mechanism at the moment to view space. There's no transition yet, it just pops back and forth.
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Dec 4, 2012 02:37
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Vankwish posted:Alright, here you go. Looks awesome. My only feedback so far would be to make the enemy ships some color that contrasts with the environment. Spotting black and red enemies in a black and red maze is tricky. At the moment the enemies' health bars pop out a lot more than the enemies themselves, which doesn't seem ideal. Otherwise, looks awesome.
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Dec 4, 2012 15:27
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Nition posted:Unity Javascript's not too bad. The one thing I really don't like is how they kind of hacked on type casting, so whereas in c# you write Vector3 newPos, in Javascript you write var newPos : Vector3 which is kind of weird. You'd have an aneurysm if you saw my source code, which is all stuff like var movieClip:MovieClip = Movieclip(root.movieclip) as MovieClip
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Dec 5, 2012 15:10
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Cirrial posted:Hi guys, stop me if this has already been answered, but I've been spending the last few years mostly unmotivated and churning out games using Flash and Flixel for the Ludum Dare 48 hour game dev jams. I've seen a lot of people recommending Futile for Unity, and I have been thinking how nice it would be to finally free myself from these shackles to Adobe I've been wearing for a little longer than I would have liked. For anyone familiar with Flixel and Futile, how do these frameworks measure up (if they can even be directly compared)? Don't even worry about how they measure up, just start learning Unity now. That's like saying "I've been eating cat poop but want to start eating beef, how do the two measure up?" Just upgrade!! Here's some motivation (look at point 3): http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/182380/postmortem_mcmillen_and_himsls_.php?page=3
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Dec 5, 2012 20:24
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Nition posted:I just implemented rotating parts on the build screen, which means now I can build a car POWERED ONLY BY GUNS. I loved the vehicle building in Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts but hated the dodgy physics and really boring missions. A combat-oriented game with similar building mechanics sounds great. But I find it hard to focus on your video because Whoa major youtube redesign...
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Dec 7, 2012 15:27
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Nition posted:Everything looks great IMO except the house at six seconds. The rest of it has a blocky charm but the house is just... blocky. Agreed. I'd cut the house from the trailer or pretty it up with some of your signature trees or something. Maybe a path leading to the front door? Also, does it need to be sitting on that weird platform with the ramp in front? I think it will blend a lot better if you drop it to ground level.
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Dec 11, 2012 20:54
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I Finally loving Did It, Korusan. K-san, if I ever meet you in real life, I'm going to have to murder you for that last level. The game had its share of problems, but I can say without irony that it is a better game than Assassin's Creed 3.
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Dec 12, 2012 02:17
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Tita Gasman, platforming game goon Korusan made... a few months ago he was posting a lot about it in the thread.
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Dec 12, 2012 02:26
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You can add my game's facebook page, but I'm not really doing much with it at the moment. Thanks Mug!! https://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus-Proudbottom-Starship-Captain/414267391979354 In other news, not much screenshot-worthy, but I just got scanning working - click an asteroid, scan it, and in a few seconds Jerry talks about the object. Super satisfying to have this working, as it's a huge part of gameplay.
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Dec 23, 2012 00:03
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Well here's something for screenshot saturday. Previously, the title of my game was set in a Star Trek font. An unofficial Star Trek font, sure, but still a font that was pretty much a 1:1 rip of the text from the original series. I've wanted to change it for a while to lessen the chance of running into legal trouble once/if we start asking for money. So I redid it today and love the way it looks! The new text still feels Star Trek-like, but it's totally different enough to prevent any legal trouble, plus fits the feel of the game better - less serious, more cartoony. 
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Dec 23, 2012 00:57
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 04:49 |
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timeandtide posted:As a fiction writer, I'd really like to experiment making a few simple text games, but I have 0% programming knowledge. Are there any recommended programs/methods to start out with? (I'm hoping there's an RPG Maker style program for this.) Thought about HTML? You could absolutely make a text game with nothing more than the simplest elements of HTML if you simply had each room a different HTML page that you linked to. Even a simple inventory could be handled this way, as long as the player only holds one item at a time. Html has always supported images, of course, and HTML5 supports sounds. If you needed an inventory with more functionality, a little bit of JavaScript could handle it, but that would considerably bump up the learning curve. And, of of course, learning some HTML is good skill for anyone to have nowadays, way more so than learning some obscure text adventure making program.
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Dec 23, 2012 16:10
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