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What this thread is:
What this thread is NOT:
Space Reserved Maybe goons and their projects or something, I don't know. As for me, I just got done working on the art/script of Slam Fighter II for SAGDC but all of the development for that game was done by Ziggy Starfucker. Now that I can put Slam Fighter improvements on the back burner, I've turned my sights back to a little dev project of my own that I started in June - a browser-based business/management sim somewhat based on the board game Galaxy Trucker. What I have so far I did over the course of two really long plane fights on my iPhone with the free app JSAnywhere. When I got started I was just looking for a way to kill time but I might try to actually make it good. The way it works is that you have to travel between planets (with branching routes that have varying costs/benefits) buying and selling poo poo but each item's costs go up and down every update tick depending on season of the year and faction events. You also have to keep your ship in good repair - if your ship gets hosed and you don't have enough money to repair it or get a new one you get a game over. Currently no win state. Since I was making it on my phone, the visuals are currently geared towards being viewed on a phone screen. It would be easier for me to do in C# but javascript seems better for sharing. I'm looking forward to continuing work on it while sitting at a desk typing on a keyboard looking at a monitor. I think those three tools are greater contributions to the gaming industry than unity ~feel free to disagree~. Here are some screenshots of the totally radical gameplay!    It is currently impossible to leave port so all you can do is basically play the stock market, but once you can do more than buy, sell, and wait, I'll host what I have. Check out those cutting edge graphics. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Aug 5, 2015 |
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Aug 4, 2015 20:55
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As an addition, I think it's probably safe to say that trying for Voice Acting improvement should also go in the relevant thread in Creative Convention. But not why I posted. Instead, a quick question: Would it be okay to discuss the accessibility of tutorials for potential gamedevs? Not in the sense of "Can I find a tutorial" (Although that's part of it), but in the sense of "Whether a tutorial is good at actually teaching me a thing" I mention it, because it's been a bugbear of mine with GameDev (That, and motivation, as I am most definitely on the "Wall of Shame" for SAGDX after RL distractions discouraged me from finishing in the timeline). Either way, always happy to offer cc, encouragement, and, if I can find them, good tips. 
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Aug 4, 2015 21:17
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I'll add some content when I get home, but I want to say this is a great thread idea and I hope we can keep shilling to a minimum. In fact you might want to consider an OP rule that direct marketing/advertising of completed games and where to get them should be avoided. I don't think it's problematic to mention or explain completed games, but people will do the footwork if they are interested. This could quickly turn into a "NOW AVAILABLE ON iOS. SHARE WITH FRIENDS" and that would be pretty tragic.
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Aug 4, 2015 21:22
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Thanks, gents! OP updated!
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Aug 4, 2015 21:35
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Well, guess a piece of general encouragement and advice, to kick things off. If you think this isn't useful or whatnot, Xibanya, lemme know, and I'll edit-delete. Your First Game Is Going To Suck (But It's Okay) Hi there, folks. Now, I'm a game reviewer who loves game design. I know enough about it to get in trouble, but not enough to finish the kinds of projects I want to (YET). And I am, at least in computer gaming years, an old man (My first game was Rogue on an IBM Terminal. I'm only 33, but I feel 60 when people say "Repton? What the gently caress is a Repton?") And I thought I'd kick off contributions to this thread with a lil' message of encouragement. You will feel, when making your first game, that things are tough. Even though times have changed, first games have always been, and will always remain, that thing you struggled with, and, when completed, you stared at and went "Oh god I'm terrible." My first "proper" game was a text adventure, in BASIC. It was something like 1500 lines of code, and it wouldn't run at first because I'd overloaded the memory with too many items and rooms. It was balls. But, and this is important, it proved to me (And that's who you're gonna have to convince first) that I can make games. I've knocked out games in INFORM, in BASIC, in C++, and now I'm moving on to Unity, where I finally think my brain is going to cash those cheques my mouth has been making. And I wouldn't have gotten even this far if I hadn't learned a few things along the way. Start Simple. Yeah, okay, you're never going to make mad dolla or feel like a gamedev god by making Breakout. But it still teaches you things. You could start with a console text game. You could start with a four "room" twine game. The important thing is that you start simple, and build up from there. I'm always happy to recreate my now long-lost First Projects so people can see what's going on, but it'll boil down to "Ask yourself what you really want to do, Talk to the duck about it for awhile, and then make it." All Tutorials Have A Use, But Not Every Tutorial Is Useful To You. The most intimidating thing, for most starting game devs and programmers, is the dreaded Script/Language Reference Manual. Believe me, this isn't a new thing, the BBC Micro had a 160 or so page book filled, not only with BASIC commands (IF FUNCTION RND TIMER AAAAAAAAAAAA  ), but with Assembler, how functions worked, hardware specs... It's useful, but that use is not to show you how to make anything with it. Unity's Scripting Reference, if anything, seems more intimidating, despite being High Level (IE - It's not working with 1s and 0s, and isn't showing you all the nitty gritty it's doing behind the scenes.)But they do have a use. They're the thing you flick through when you've pinned down what you want to do. Similarly, code examples can be great. They can also be confusing messes that you'll spend hours frustratedly looking over, muttering "Yes, I know that if I type all this, I'll have a whozumawhatsit, but how can I change it to do what I want?!?" It's sort of a bug bear of mine, in that many tutorials can go over a thing, and miss utter basics, because they expect you to know things already. Write Things Down. If you're literally just starting out, I can almost guarantee you do not have a clue how to make Big Awesome Game Idea. However, that doesn't mean that your first game idea is bad. Write things down. Because games, in the end, are ideas. Dwarf Fortress is a series of ideas, one that many game developers want in some form or another (Because many of us watched some variation of Captain N, or the Holodeck episodes of TNG, or the like, and thought "Holy gently caress, this would be really cool"). Some of those ideas are fan work. Don't be ashamed of that. I seriously want to make a world like the Wing Commander, or Ringworld, or Mighty Max of my childhood, because those things inspired me, and helped me become the person I am today. Just Because A Thing Is Old, Doesn't Mean You Can't Learn From It. This one has a little caveat, but we'll get to that in a moment. In one sense, gamedev now is the same as it ever was. So some messages are pretty much timeless. Want a good example? Go check out these books on BBC Basic, from the days of the UK's Computer Literacy Drive. Feel refreshed by doing so. ...Now take a closer look at these books, and see that some things about gamedev do change. For example, Score. Treasure. It was simpler times, although Art Games existed even then, and developers of all stripes had differences in the way they saw these old video games to the way we do. Anyone who's played an ancient game and complained about Artificial Padding and Difficulty Spikes will know what I mean. But some things never change, and the Adventure Programs book, in particular, says something that's stuck by me, all these years. "An Adventure Program is really a kind of database." In a very real sense, that's what all games are. You put inputs in, it checks numbers and letters and stuff and things... Then it reacts. We've gotten to the point where things can react very cleverly, but that doesn't change the fact that, basically, that's what a game is doing. It's checking lists, and going "Huh, I should do this thing now that the player's pushed that button/put that thing near that thing/made a whistling noise into their mic." Playing Games Is Also A Tutorial (Sort of). Games can also teach you things, from the oldest to the newest. Sometimes those lessons are obvious (Don't release a game that you know is buggy as gently caress and/or incomplete, then complain that people Just Don't Get It to cover the fact you done hosed up, for example [SotS2, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Megatraveller: The Zhodani Conspiracy]), but sometimes, they show you different ways of doing things. Heimdall is an RPG, but it doesn't do things like Eye of the Beholder. Eye of the Beholder, meanwhile, doesn't do things quite like Wizardry, and none of them do things quite like The Witcher. Looking at games past and present helps you, and others like you, avoid mistakes for the future. Just be prepared to ask "Why?" a lot, and don't be surprised when a game you loved... Isn't quite as good as you first thought it was. So there you go, some absolutely basic advice and encouragement. I believe in you, because I believed in me. Now, go, friends, and make a thing! That thing, and the lessons you learn from it, are yours, and nobody can take that from you! 
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Aug 4, 2015 22:34
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That was rad, JamieTheD thanks for sharing! I'm reminded of a J. D. Salinger quote - "You’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer." I think that could apply just as easily to vidya, and it looks like you agree. I'd love to do a good overview on how to QA a project but that will have to wait for another day as I suddenly found myself wrapped up in a torrent of business.
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Aug 4, 2015 23:54
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Hooray! Let the good times from the SAGDC carry over into this thread. I had such a great time participating in that, so I'm going to jump in the GameBoy Jam taking place via GameJolt this August. Four colours, 160x144 pixels, minimal experience. What could go wrong?
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Aug 4, 2015 23:55
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My father -- and therefore, I as well -- always calls this "Teddy bear syndrome." Well, I guess actually what we are talking about is slightly different. Teddy bear syndrome is failure to try rubber duck debugging and then you go waste another developer's time explaining it to them and solving your own problem without getting any information out of the other person. Actual thread content: I ducked out of the Wall of Shame for SAGDC because I didn't enter. I came up with ideas and participated in the thread but did not enter. I look forward to seeing more goon-games in progress and maybe even doing something myself.
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Aug 5, 2015 01:55
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I guess this is an appropriate thread for my project I've been making a citybuilder / RTS, using my own engine using the XNA framework. I've learnt a lot about graphics programming, networking, modelling/texturing/rigging, the importance of developing good tools, all that good stuff.  One of the things I'm finding most difficult is actually game design (also difficult: netcode & pathfinding)... Right now I'm trying to iterate a good resource system while keeping it different from existing RTSes. euro-boardgames have been a huge inspiration, as they often have crisp design and very clean mechanics. It's difficult to translate over to a real-time game though, as strategy boardgames typically use turns as a resource, whereas RTS games use time as a resource -- and they don't really work the same way. Having to wait 5 turns to perform an action isn't a big deal because turns go as fast as you want, whereas having to wait 5 minutes to perform an action is just disrespectful to the player. I really want to tone down the time aspect and have a chill RTS where you can take it easy and build sweet looking towns at your own pace. I'm considering releasing a little playable alpha or something, but unfortunately there's not much to do once you've built some buildings and explored the map. Some day, maybe...
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Aug 5, 2015 15:56
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Mata posted:I guess this is an appropriate thread for my project I have an XNA civ builder game sitting on my backburner too and I ran into the same issue and I'm still grappling with whether or not update tics should happen manually or every X000 milliseconds. Mine is quite different though, instead of allowing the player to build stuff all the instances of the "citizen" class have varying needs based on Maslow's Hierarchy. The way I'm doing the ai is that all the needs are on a scale of 0 to 100 and that score is plotted on a logarithmic function whose slope is modified by an internal variable (so that all things being equal citizens will prefer not starving to being warm) and a variable that the player can see -- essentially how much that citizen, personally, values fulfilling that need. Every update tic various needs go up and down (hunger score goes down automatically) and the citizen chooses the action that gives them the highest jump on the Y axis of their aggregate score plotted as a logarithmic function with a max of 100. Actions have pass or fail states and fail states will cause the citizen to prefer that action less. And now the actual gameplay! The player is a priest/shaman in this tribe and has to steer the tribe in the right direction by dictating to them what they should value more. Based on how religious/conformist each citizen is, the player's decrees will nudge the citizen's preference for various actions one way or another. Children inherit a mix of preferences from their parents and severity of environment and assholishness of neighboring tribes is determined sorta-randomly at the start of each new game. (Picked from some presets.) what that means is over time natural selection should cause your tribe to favor various norms - in theory anyway, I haven't managed to get a sufficient number of generations going to see this behave as desired as I'm still looking for the right velocity of mutations between generations and the right balance for the strength of the player character's influence. As you might imagine, working on this has been slow going both because it necessitates creating a shitload of possible actions but also because debugging has been a beast due to all the variables. In one test run things went great until the entire tribe was wiped out because they ended up valuing altruism so much that they helped each other build houses until they all starved to death. Also figuring out good actions to suit the "secure genetic fitness" need, ie make sure your waifu isn't getting any on the side, has been a little tricky! As in real life? 
Xibanya fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Aug 5, 2015 |
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Aug 5, 2015 16:20
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Awesome idea for a thread! I've been thinking about making my own games as a way to showcase my abilities without relying on an outside development team to do so (I'm an actor and I do a lot of VO for video games) so I will be following this thread for sure. This is the only game I've ever worked on in a non-VO capacity, and even there it was just a bit of art. I did the pixel art for the carrot, girl and bunny.  Aside from a simple Twine game a la JamieTheD's post, what are some other good methods for a first-timer to develop a game from start to finish, with no coding knowledge whatsoever? For reference, I have access to a Mac but not a PC , and I have all of the software that game in the recent game dev Humble Bundle. That's about the extent of my existing game development knowledge and resources so I'm, uh...kind of a blank canvas. Edit: Fixed to include a link to the game! blinkeve1826 fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 5, 2015 20:22
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blinkeve1826 posted:Awesome idea for a thread! I've been thinking about making my own games as a way to showcase my abilities without relying on an outside development team to do so (I'm an actor and I do a lot of VO for video games) so I will be following this thread for sure. This is the only game I've ever worked on in a non-VO capacity, and even there it was just a bit of art. I did the pixel art for the carrot, girl and bunny. Well, GameMakerStudio has the option of using no coding, just a Klik'n'Play like "If it hits a thing, do a thing", and Inform 7 (Text Adventures) basically uses specific forms of english as its way of creating things (The Key is an item in the Living Room. The key is described as..."), but funnily enough, I've got something in the works for the thread about tutorialising my current project. What I'd say until the second part of that comes up is: Don't worry about learning coding, or rather, scripting (Because GMS and Unity, both of which have free versions, use scripts), because it's not as hard to learn as you'd think. Most of it is knowing what you want to do before doing it, and a lot of the rest is common sense. Also, I'd love to see that game you worked on, you sort of forgot to include it. Also lovely to see someone who works on their VO gettin' work. I really should be posting in the VO thread, but it's not my primary work goal right now. :P
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Aug 5, 2015 20:39
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So, I'm looking at libtcod to write roguelike. My first problem is that they don't have a build system set up so I can't just integrate it into my usual CMake hierarchy. It's not an autoconf project ( it has hand-written makefiles or some generator that makes readable output ), so there is some hope that I can convert their library over to CMake. Then I might actually try to get them to adopt it. libtcod is an OpenGL-powered 32-bit color console, basically. I guess it's popular in roguelike game jams?
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Aug 5, 2015 21:06
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blinkeve1826 posted:Awesome idea for a thread! I've been thinking about making my own games as a way to showcase my abilities without relying on an outside development team to do so (I'm an actor and I do a lot of VO for video games) so I will be following this thread for sure. This is the only game I've ever worked on in a non-VO capacity, and even there it was just a bit of art. I did the pixel art for the carrot, girl and bunny. Scratch is a good learning tool and it's browser-based so it ought to work on all platforms. What I like about it as opposed to a lot of game-making software is that it gently guides you into thinking like a programmer. The apps you can make on Scratch are somewhat limited, but your first app in Scratch ain't gonna be any feature-rich than your first app in C# or whatever, and the learning curve for Scratch is waaaay less frustrating. What makes it so great is you can translate scratch concepts (like if/else and loops) to whatever "real" programming language you choose to learn after. Even so, Scratch can sometimes seem a little confusing and I'm not fond of their built-in tutorials after a point, so I might put up a Scratch tutorial. OH! And I believe you can upload your bunny and carrot sprite to Scratch and do things with them there, so you could even make A Girl And Her Bunny Gaiden!
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Aug 5, 2015 22:34
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Thanks guys! I will definitely be taking both of your suggestions into account. I totally forgot about Scratch, Xibanya, will totally have to look into that! And thanks for pointing out that I forgot the link to the game, derp da doo. Here's A Girl And Her Bunny: http://www.melanieehrlich.com/games/agirlandherbunny (I love that Xibanya is enough of a Melanie fan to know which game I meant even though I forgot to include a link to it, or even what it was called  )
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Aug 6, 2015 06:23
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blinkeve1826 posted:Thanks guys! I will definitely be taking both of your suggestions into account. I totally forgot about Scratch, Xibanya, will totally have to look into that! Melanie fan 4lyfe 
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Aug 6, 2015 06:30
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I've been monkeying with Twine for a couple years now and it really is a good program for starting out with game design, especially if the raw code side of thing isn't really your jam. Of course, my area of interest is writing and worldbuilding, so it fits especially well for me. I highly recommend people look into the documentation for Twine 2.0 and take a look at all the things that engine can do. If you've only ever played Twine games, you might be surprised to learn there are a lot of things that engine can do which very few people take advantage of. As for me, I've started on a rather ambitious project this year! It's a light-RPG cyberpunk parody made in Twine, and it's going to be an episodic series! Hero.ROM Episode 1: Wrath of the Gang Queen is out and you can play it! (I'd love feedback if anyone has any.) I'm working on Episode 2 right now. Goal is go have it done by the end of the month (but...we'll see.)
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Aug 6, 2015 06:50
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I've been following Handmade Hero to learn how to program games. It's a tutorial series by Casey Muratori, a professional games programmer. Unlike most other game tutorials that make you program something simple he shows you how to do it the 'hard' way by programming in C, using no external libraries (to my knowledge, haven't finished it yet) and by implementing all kinds of complicated features like procedural level generation. He streams on twich every weekday and uploads it to his youtube channel afterwards. It's for free, although you have to pay for his source code and assets for now until he has finished the project. I wouldn't recommend it to a complete beginner to programming, but as an inexperienced amateur coder I could follow along just fine by looking up documentation on stuff I've never done before, and he does a great job at explaining things regardless. Nowadays I just look at what he's trying to do, try to figure out/implement it myself first, then watch the video. I'm not far in yet but I've already learned a ton, and to my surprise, low level coding isn't as hard as I feared. Give it a try if you want to learn how to program games from the ground up.
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Aug 6, 2015 07:25
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This is a good idea for a thread. Last year for SAGDC my team made Public Access Wars and this year we made Critical Admission. I think both games have a lot of promise but obviously with the one month limit they can only go so far. I totally plan on at the very least tidying them up so they can be seen as decent games in their own right rather than just as decent gamejam games, maybe this is the thread to motivate me to do it! This month I'm absolutely slammed with work I need to do but once that's out of the way my plan is to first tidy up PAW: Mostly just removing and replacing art assets, correcting a few typos, etc. Then I'd like to add an online leaderboard to Critical Admission and maybe a way of buying/selling parts and improved tools (e.g. a scalpel that can be called up using a hot key, an xray which shows you what's inside people without needing to cut them, etc.). That will hopefully flatten out the difficulty curve (as currently it becomes very very difficult around level 9). After that I have two ideas I'm really up for jumping into. One is a spin on some of the stuff I did with Public Access Wars - a collaborative improvisation/storytelling game where, using voice chat and simple animation tools players build stories. Something like the card game Once Upon A Time. The other is a simulation game about building a political party. I think cash and members would be the resources - I'd abstract away the politics so every policy and every person sits neatly on a left<->right spectrum. Then you'd start your party (setting out where on the spectrum you want to be) and attempt to build it over time. What I like about this is I think it'd be interesting to have parties drift across the spectrum (as they do in real life). It's an interesting problem to think about how I could make that work in a game. Maybe instead of controlling "the party" you're actually an ideology, and you need to both push your ideology within the party and push the party to electoral success. I don't know - this idea isn't very fully formed I just think it'd be fun to work on.
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Aug 6, 2015 15:32
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I have somehow spent two days looking for a program that can take a sprite sheet and cut it up into individual images by dimensions instead of trying to automatically detect discrete sprites (this won't work because my sprite sheets have no padding). How is this not a solved problem? edit: The best thing I've found is this: http://imagesplitter.net/how_to_split_images The only problem with it, besides being web-based which is a bit annoying, is that it puts the url in all your image names so you have to manually fix them all. edit 2: Woop woop, I found it! Command line ImageMagick seems to be the way to go. SlightlyMadman fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 6, 2015 19:52
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To add to JamietheD's awesome tips for newbie game design, I have another tip for people who want practice with game design without jumping into the deep end of code. You can practice video game design by making tabletop games! It's a little-known fact that some video game companies prototype their design ideas by translating them to card battle or tabletop tactics games. If you have a great game idea but don't necessarily have the coding chops to make it a reality, this can be useful to you, as well. Physical prototypes aren't quite as glamorous (and they're much harder to share online) but they allow you tremendous freedom of creativity and let you play around with and iterate on large design ideas in an afternoon that would take weeks to realize with code. If you have a pen and a stack of index cards, you can make your first game. (Maybe a D6 too if you're like me and randomized cards somehow aren't enough randomness for you.) Trust me, my apartment is littered with little tabletop timewasters I've come up with over the past few years. It may not seem like practice at first, but making card/board games can teach you how to make elegant systems that are still engaging. Since you don't have a computer that can do the math for you, you're encouraged to keep the numbers small, the rules clear and the game elements readable. These are all good training for making your first game, where you'll want to keep things similarly simple-but-elegant for the sake of both your players and your code-writing self. One of the best card games I ever made came about because I had an awesome idea for an iOS game that I wanted to prototype. (Okay, "awesome" is debatable. At the end of the day it was basically Heroes' Charge.) Trying to distill that down to turn-based card combat was a challenge. but the game I ended up with was actually way more fun and playable than what I had originally pictured. (And also it wasn't at all like Heroes' Charge anymore.) If I can find those old decks I might post some photos and explain how the iOS game became the card game.
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Aug 7, 2015 05:28
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Just started (as in, like three days ago) tooling around with RPG Maker VX Ace and I'm working on my initial project game thing. It's honestly amazingly fun, and every time I manage to get a new script working or tweak things, I feel so proud of myself. I know it's going to be a polished turd when I'm done. It's barely going to be more than a demo. But, I'm making noticeable progress every single day and every time, I can look back and go, "I learned about <x> today." Honestly, just making things feels fantastic to do. And everything I learn here, I can apply elsewhere. I may have a new hobby!
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Aug 10, 2015 05:26
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Just starting work on my next game. It's still early in the design phase. Here's some notes I've jotted down:
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Aug 11, 2015 08:39
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Galick posted:Just started (as in, like three days ago) tooling around with RPG Maker VX Ace and I'm working on my initial project game thing. It's honestly amazingly fun, and every time I manage to get a new script working or tweak things, I feel so proud of myself. I know it's going to be a polished turd when I'm done. It's barely going to be more than a demo. But, I'm making noticeable progress every single day and every time, I can look back and go, "I learned about <x> today." Yeah I feel like learning a new skill and implementing it is pretty addicting! Another note for people who want to make the jump to programming for  real, I did not get my start with Scratch since I thought (foolishly) that it was a waste of time; only now that I understand programming better do I appreciate it. What took my down the road to learning some stuff was getting started with SQL, and in hindsight it was the perfect way to ease into things. I recommend getting a free version of Microsoft SQL server and playing around with their demo Northwind database running SELECT statements and simple INNER JOINs. Soon you'll start thinking of creative ways to use database tables to make a game run. It's not a large jump from that to object oriented programming.
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Aug 11, 2015 16:21
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Hello. I enjoy making video games in my spare time. I developed All Senior Citizens Should Have Life Alert for SAGDC this year, and I am currently developing episodic content for another game called Monday Afternoon Crystalers, which also happens to be a retooled version of my entry for SAGDC last year, Monday Afternoon Quizzlers. All three of these games were made in Javascript, which I like since all you need is a browser to play them. Programming games in Javascript is kind of weird especially compared to coding in more traditional languages like C++ or Java, but once you get past the initial differences and quirks, I've found it to be an incredibly useful language for doing games for game jams or for prototyping. I tend to develop games by myself, which is actually less of a burden than you'd realize. In fact, I would suggest that if you really want to get a good grasp on making a game, you should try at least once to create a game that's totally created by yourself. That means programming, art, and sound all done by you from scratch. Not only will you feel a greater sense of accomplishment when you're finally finished, but you'll also gain a better understanding of how elements such as art, animation, coding, music, and sound work in cohesion in a game.
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Aug 11, 2015 17:46
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Galick posted:Just started (as in, like three days ago) tooling around with RPG Maker VX Ace and I'm working on my initial project game thing. It's honestly amazingly fun, and every time I manage to get a new script working or tweak things, I feel so proud of myself. I know it's going to be a polished turd when I'm done. It's barely going to be more than a demo. But, I'm making noticeable progress every single day and every time, I can look back and go, "I learned about <x> today." RPG Maker buddy! I'm on vacation and messing around with VX Ace too. So far the most effort I put in was in a spreadsheet where I am designing classes and weapons and elements and trying to figure out how to use common events to rip off the esper mind reading from Live A Live.
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Aug 12, 2015 12:35
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I'm getting kind of frustrated coming back to my Space Merchant game because working in JavaScript is by its nature much more disorganized than working in C#. Does anyone have any tips or guidance for organizing such a project? Part of the issue is that the JSAnywhere app that I first made the game in only supports one .js file per project, which means ALL of the functions are in that one .js file, making it rather disorganized indeed. Now I need to sort through that nonsense and I'm not sure how to go about separating things. (I'll post my code once I have access to it.)
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Aug 13, 2015 16:25
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Xibanya posted:I'm getting kind of frustrated coming back to my Space Merchant game because working in JavaScript is by its nature much more disorganized than working in C#. Does anyone have any tips or guidance for organizing such a project? Part of the issue is that the JSAnywhere app that I first made the game in only supports one .js file per project, which means ALL of the functions are in that one .js file, making it rather disorganized indeed. Now I need to sort through that nonsense and I'm not sure how to go about separating things. (I'll post my code once I have access to it.) I've been going through the same thing, developing in Cocos2D. Only supporting one .js file is crazy pants though. Maybe you could split them up and run a script that cats them together to publish? As for js as a language itself, once you get the hang of its completely bizarre OOP patterns, it's not so bad. It really takes some getting used to though.
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Aug 13, 2015 17:03
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SlightlyMadman posted:Maybe you could split them up and run a script that cats them together to publish? http://requirejs.org/
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Aug 13, 2015 17:16
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SlightlyMadman posted:I've been going through the same thing, developing in Cocos2D. Only supporting one .js file is crazy pants though. Maybe you could split them up and run a script that cats them together to publish? Well the good news is, now I'm working on the game in visual studio instead JSAnywhere so I can now have as many .js files as my heart desires. Will keep that (and the link from The Fool) in mind if I run into that constraint again though. Here's the stuff I have as it is on my phone since my later tinkering is on another computer. You'll notice it's pretty  but remember I did all this on a loving iPhone with no internet access (I had the bootstrap poo poo on the phone already from something else I had been working on). Also I did some stuff in ways that seem inefficient or weird because the JSAnywhere app was giving me errors on code that is totally fine except in JSAnywhere for whatever reason so I had to get creative and think of workarounds. (Also looks like JSAnywhere doesn't recognize " written with the iPhone's Spanish keyboard as an ", since JSAnywhere doesn't tell you why it got mad at you, THAT was a fun one to figure out.)HTML: https://gist.github.com/0af4325148af5667cc26 CSS: https://gist.github.com/a4d5579811a29c44cc58 JS: https://gist.github.com/84d19672dcab3097685c Overall though I do recommend JSAnywhere just because it's fun to make a thing if you're bored somewhere for a long time, so you can check it out here. http://javascriptanywhere.net/ I really wish Microsoft made a C# compiler for iPhone but I see why they wouldn't do that. Ahh and then my fiance Ziggy Starfucker was on his tablet going "Well I have a C compiler on my tablet, why don't you use that? Oh you can't do C? I'm so forgetful.  " (ok not quite like that)
Xibanya fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 17:25
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Xibanya posted:JavaScript stuff I am so jealous of people who can actually program stuff without having a hardcopy book open on their desk and a pdf reference on their phone. I only got to the point where I could make python lists and functions and mess around with them in RenPy or command line stuff. Xibanya posted:Ahh and then my fiance Ziggy Starfucker was on his tablet going "Well I have a C compiler on my tablet, why don't you use that? Oh you can't do C? I'm so forgetful. I'm sure he didn't mean anything by that. Sever.
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Aug 13, 2015 20:05
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First-class functions and closures make JS a pretty ideal language for games. Not that other languages don't have those features, but event based architecture in general rocks. Also you can hardly find a language or environment that is easier to modify/debug at runtime, being interpreted. Ironically those features are probably the biggest drawbacks for the uninitiated. Just because there aren't rigid class definitions doesnt mean you can't implement them. Even features like private methods/properties are possible. It's just less clear how to accomplish it at first. I'm interested to see if Unity will release a native JS build now that WebGL is widely supported and their plugin will get dropped from chrome soon. root of all eval fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 20:13
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DawnOfMinstrel posted:I am so jealous of people who can actually program stuff without having a hardcopy book open on their desk and a pdf reference on their phone. I only got to the point where I could make python lists and functions and mess around with them in RenPy or command line stuff. Well, you'll notice in my code it's all pretty basic stuff - super basic HTML, creating classes, defining properties, making arrays, for loops, that sort of thing. But that's all you need to get started - ideally those things are something you should learn to do by memory for any programming language. (And of course if you use visual studio it's even easier because you don't even have to spell entire words.) Now for more complex DOM manipulation, yeah at that point I'd need to look that up. What, no therapy? BossRighteous posted:First-class functions and closures make JS a pretty ideal language for games. Not that other languages don't have those features, but event based architecture in general rocks. Also you can hardly find a language or environment that is easier to modify/debug at runtime, being interpreted. Ironically those features are probably the biggest drawbacks for the uninitiated. Just because there aren't rigid class definitions doesnt mean you can't implement them. Even features like private methods/properties are possible. It's just less clear how to accomplish it at first. I'll keep that in mind! Also JavaScript is not a very sexy language to claim to be able to use, which is pretty much its worst drawback. E: grammar Xibanya fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 20:27
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Xibanya posted:I'll keep that in mind! Also JavaScript is not a very sexy language to claim to be able to use, which is pretty much it's worst drawback. Here is a quick and dirty intro to public/private methods and props in JS. https://jsfiddle.net/k90f687h/
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Aug 13, 2015 21:09
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BossRighteous posted:Here is a quick and dirty intro to public/private methods and props in JS. Nice, that's handy!
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Aug 13, 2015 22:02
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Hi! I'm an absolute scrub who's aware of the fundamentals of programming, but has never built anything more complicated than a dice roller or a bizarre class project with no real-world applications. I was discussing with someone about building a game about a person marooned in an escape pod, adrift in something approaching the space Bermuda triangle. They wanted to get some kind of basic framework in C++ or C# written up (so far it seems to be on the backburner), so in the meantime I fired up a copy of Game Maker I bought for $5 way back when on Steam, snagged a copy of the Tyrian sprite sheet, and got a ship to move about, rotate, and bank. All done in code - it is a learning experience, after all!  Apologies for the frame rate! This was done and some problems were ironed out over about four hazy hours late at night/early in the morning, and I'm really glad that I left comments in everything. I found that Game Maker doesn't support running a couple of rooms simultaneously (so I could have the player avatar walk around the ship, fix problems and live their daily life while also simulating the ship drift), so I'm not sure what to do with this next. Maybe a racing game taking after that in Inner Space. Unfortunately, as the gif shows, simply setting the particle emitters to be slightly down and to either side of the ship only looks good when the thing is facing directly upwards. I can't seem to wrap my head around rotation matrices (which I'm told is the way to properly calculate the position of those red engine lines regardless of sprite rotation) either mathswise or in code, so that's really bugging me, and I'm not really sure how to fix that or where to go next with this tiny stub of a prototype.  Regardless, making bits of games is fun, and seeing even that terrible spaceship work as intended has been a really rewarding experience. If anyone has any advice, whether for fixing the engines or gamedev-for-fun in general, it'd all be much appreciated.
Anticheese fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Aug 14, 2015 |
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Aug 14, 2015 07:01
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I like it the gif! Thanks for sharing! If you're looking to pick up a programming language, unless extremely precise timing is required or some sort of processor-intensive net-gaming is going on (and even then...) I strongly recommend looking at C# first as opposed to C++. It has a lot of really great built-in libraries that make it really easy to pick up and it's also pretty powerful so you can make almost anything you can think of in it. The main downside as far as making games is concerned is that it seems that Microsoft has been attempting to phase out XNA support, which is dumb and bad and something I do not like.
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Aug 14, 2015 07:51
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I'm really glad you like it. I did a bit of C++ in high school, followed by C# and Java at uni. I'd definitely say I'm most comfortable with C#, but all of those courses were just intro level, and I've found a lot of tutorials to be less than helpful in terms of further education. I guess the big issue is figuring out what to build that's in my skill range but still gives room to learn. Is there an IRC channel for pretty much green people who'd love to learn?
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Aug 14, 2015 08:20
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Mata posted:I guess this is an appropriate thread for my project My thought on hearing this is to ask more questions. Are you fighting 'the world', or 'an opponent' or even both? What is the purpose of your building up? Are we talking Anno or Age of Empires/Rise of Nations? I'm a fan of both kinds(Yet suck at both).
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Aug 14, 2015 08:26
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The thread title is incredibly appropriate. I just finished an hour-and-a-bit-long call with a very good friend who went over some basic concepts in computer graphics (why sprites are typically rotated 90 degrees. It's something I had caught in my code to draw the ship facing the proper direction, but I hadn't figured out that the reason is that I was using sprites from a shmup from the 90s instead of stuff intended to rotate), and coordinate maths. I don't think I could make it from scratch quite yet as I post it, but this hands-on experience has been one of the most exciting and gratifying maths lessons anyone could ever ask for. This is the best way to learn new things. Pictured: sick space doughnuts with the engine emitter offset correctly calculated I am so incredibly excited and enthused to get this working. I know that it's a really, really trivial aspect, but working through it and getting it right has left me with a much-needed smile. Thanks for creating this thread, and I hope that more people pitch in, regardless of where you're at skillwise.
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Aug 14, 2015 13:29
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