Making Games Megathread: Congratulations on releasing the horniest game of 2022

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Mug: Apr 26, 2005

If your adding lines of code to your game to create more hours worth of gameplay, you are SO far off base that it's insane.

Here's a screenshot of his game

# ? Nov 25, 2012 10:07

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# ? May 14, 2024 03:00

ShinAli: May 2, 2003; The Kid better watch his step.

Any write ups on how Unity handles depth buffers? Want to figure that poo poo out because it made me pull my hair out during SA GameDev.

Doing a bunch of stupid gameplay prototypes while waiting on a job, but it's been months now and its making me think I should've been working up a game to actually sell

# ? Nov 25, 2012 10:28

HelixFox: Dec 20, 2004; Heed the words of this ancient spirit.

Mug posted:

If your adding lines of code to your game to create more hours worth of gameplay, you are SO far off base that it's insane.

Here's a screenshot of his game

I can't wait to look at these sprites for 300 hours!!!!!

RE: the pixel art conversation. I'm using pixel art for my game as it's the only art style I can do that looks good and I can't afford to hire an artist. I imagine there are lots of people in this situation.

I think pixel art can look pretty good still anyway and the general fatigue about it we experience doesn't necessarily apply to the potential customer base. E.g. zombies have been overdone for years now but zombie games keep getting released and keep being successful.

Zybourne Clock progress report: stuck in small amend hell, please send help. I need to fix some bugs in the editor then add a few assets I'm missing, then design and implement some more enemies, then I can see about creating a test build. I'll probe this thread for some testers soon!

# ? Nov 25, 2012 11:11

high on life and meth: Jul 14, 2006; Fika
Rules
Everything
Around
Me

Mug posted:

There's nothing deplorable about it, look at Sets and Settings. Folmer doesn't know jack poo poo about computers he just draws pictures and tells ambushsabre what to do (well its fairly collaborative but you get the idea). They have a good relationship; I could never do that.

Dude not fair. Sometimes I tell him what to do without drawing pictures.

Actually we're probably 50/50 on designing our games at this point. Our thing is basically that one of us gets excited about an idea, tells the other about it, we start working frantically and then a game exists.

# ? Nov 25, 2012 14:19

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

TheOrange posted:

Out of curiosity, what would be a good way to find game development meetups, I know of IGDA, but I'm wondering if there might be some more options to pursue. Between my group of friends gaming isn't really a viable topic of conversation and development less so. This is probably ignorance on my part, I am fairly close to LA and I imagine I could find something around here.

Right now I'm in a bit of a rut with Unity, and I'm trying to decide between doing something that's a mobile version of Night Raid from DOS, or taking my concept from the Gamedev contest and fleshing it out into a full game. Do you guys tend to start things over once you get finished with a prototype or use it as a base typically?

Look at meetup.com too. A loooooot of meetings have moved to that for organization, because it makes it easier.

... and it's dangerous to reuse whole prototypes, unless the code is 99% clean. That said, I reused my prototype for my current game, because well, yeah - I tried to keep the code usable throughout. If your code is a mess? Start a new project, and copy/clean the old stuff over one file at a time as you find need of it.

# ? Nov 25, 2012 15:54

TJChap2840: Sep 24, 2009

Lucid Dream posted:

Lots of great words.

Shalinor posted:

Lots of great words.

Thanks for these posts. They simultaneously scared me from procedural generation, and inspired me to tinker with my own incredibly basic algorithms.

I know I want to do something that creates a heightmap, but figuring out the best way that works for me is becoming very hard!

# ? Nov 25, 2012 16:20

mtrc: Mar 29, 2011; THE FUTURE, YOU GUYS

Anyone got any tips on focusing on small projects?

I told myself I'd finish a game this year, and I did my best to make small silly things that would hold my attention without straying. But it quickly becomes tempting to overstretch, and I also started a bunch of lovely projects that were too big to complete.

I'm in awe of people who have managed to stick to projects, particularly spare-time ones. Any suggestions for disciplining yourself into not overstretching massively? I feel like I'm not learning from these projects. I'm swapping around too often and trying things (like Unity prototypes) that I can't possibly finish.

# ? Nov 25, 2012 16:21

Orzo: Sep 3, 2004; IT! IT is confusing! Say your goddamn pronouns!

Mug posted:

Oh man, there's this guy on the QB64 forums talking about his 100,000 lines of code that make up his (planned) 300 hour RPG with 4GB of sound assets and 2GB of graphics assets and who knows.

Apparently my game only uses 8000 lines of code because its just a real time action game or something. I'm just amazed at things like this - in one thread he's asking people to help him make weather effects, then he's talking about his 20,000 lines of code that make up his weapon stats or something.

I love seeing train wrecks like this, the same as seeing truly awful kickstarters.

I'm not being a jerk to him or anything, he could very well be telling the truth or making something amazing, but chances are it's not quite the case.

Not defending this guy's practices or anything, I don't know anything about him and it sounds pretty silly to brag based on lines of code, but some people just prefer to embed their data in code instead of in...data. I did it for a few things when I was learning to make games (I had an breakout clone with the levels embedded in the code). Then again, I was like 12 or 13 years old and that was in a QBASIC class and didn't really know anything about good programming practices.

# ? Nov 25, 2012 20:09

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

ShinAli posted:

Any write ups on how Unity handles depth buffers? Want to figure that poo poo out because it made me pull my hair out during SA GameDev.

Doing a bunch of stupid gameplay prototypes while waiting on a job, but it's been months now and its making me think I should've been working up a game to actually sell

This info from the docs might be helpful? http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-DepthTextures.html

# ? Nov 25, 2012 22:12

Mr. Podunkian: Feb 28, 2005; welcome to murder city, i'm the mayor

ShinAli posted:

Any write ups on how Unity handles depth buffers? Want to figure that poo poo out because it made me pull my hair out during SA GameDev.

Doing a bunch of stupid gameplay prototypes while waiting on a job, but it's been months now and its making me think I should've been working up a game to actually sell

Guy above is right -- the basic principle is that you render using a shader that writes only to the depth buffer, and then use a camera to draw the masked portion.

If you have more specific info on what you're dealing with, I might be able to get you more specific info though.

# ? Nov 25, 2012 22:17

ceebee: Feb 12, 2004

the chaos engine posted:

Dude not fair. Sometimes I tell him what to do without drawing pictures.

Actually we're probably 50/50 on designing our games at this point. Our thing is basically that one of us gets excited about an idea, tells the other about it, we start working frantically and then a game exists.

This is the kind of work ethic I want to get involved in. Just need to find somebody who I can work with, seems to be the hardest part lately.

I want to get into game jams as well. Seems like a pretty cool event to get a bunch of likeminded people together. I'm completely new to this scene, training myself to be an artist for big budget AAA games made me neglect the prime reason why I got into game development/art for games in the first place. So now I'm playing catch up, and hopefully some of the stuff I learned while working on AAA titles will help me with smaller scale projects.

I'll definitely be entering the next SA Game Dev, whether I can find a programmer to work with or not, that's for sure.

ceebee fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Nov 25, 2012

# ? Nov 25, 2012 23:33

ambushsabre: Sep 1, 2009; It's...it's not shutting down!

ceebee posted:

This is the kind of work ethic I want to get involved in. Just need to find somebody who I can work with, seems to be the hardest part lately.

I want to get into game jams as well. Seems like a pretty cool event to get a bunch of likeminded people together. I'm completely new to this scene, training myself to be an artist for big budget AAA games made me neglect the prime reason why I got into game development/art for games in the first place. So now I'm playing catch up, and hopefully some of the stuff I learned while working on AAA titles will help me with smaller scale projects.

I'll definitely be entering the next SA Game Dev, whether I can find a programmer to work with or not, that's for sure.

So I'm the other half to the chaos engine and also the programmer, but I can shed a little light on this from my end. We first met on SA after I built a prototype, but couldn't distribute the art. I went to the threads and found a dude that was posting cool art and just went off and asked him if he wanted to collaborate to finish it up. I would say we got extremely lucky and found out we work really well together, and just decided to keep doing that.

I think the best way to get into the same kind of relationship is to do the reverse, come up with a loose game idea and several mockups of it, either in the same style or just different screens or whatever. Then start sending it off to people who seem like they might be interested and show them that you've put in a lot of the work already to getting that game out the door. Eventually one will stick and that's that.

# ? Nov 26, 2012 00:19

ceebee: Feb 12, 2004

ambushsabre posted:

So I'm the other half to the chaos engine and also the programmer, but I can shed a little light on this from my end. We first met on SA after I built a prototype, but couldn't distribute the art. I went to the threads and found a dude that was posting cool art and just went off and asked him if he wanted to collaborate to finish it up. I would say we got extremely lucky and found out we work really well together, and just decided to keep doing that.

I think the best way to get into the same kind of relationship is to do the reverse, come up with a loose game idea and several mockups of it, either in the same style or just different screens or whatever. Then start sending it off to people who seem like they might be interested and show them that you've put in a lot of the work already to getting that game out the door. Eventually one will stick and that's that.

Thanks for your input! I'm getting more into Unity and Playmaker which is similar to UDK's Kismet which I already have experience with (a visual scripting language basically). So hopefully I'll have a little prototype done with some art assets I'm working on to show people I'm serious about doing and finishing small projects.

# ? Nov 26, 2012 00:54

ShinAli: May 2, 2003; The Kid better watch his step.

Mr. Podunkian posted:

Guy above is right -- the basic principle is that you render using a shader that writes only to the depth buffer, and then use a camera to draw the masked portion.

If you have more specific info on what you're dealing with, I might be able to get you more specific info though.

Basically, the glow line effect beneath the player and enemies I did for my SA GameDev entry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PShI51-ciM

I wanted to take the depth buffer from game scene and use it with my glow line render (had a second camera that only saw another sphere with the proximity lines shader applied to it), so the line effects can be properly culled by the player, enemies, walls and such. It wouldn't let me set the depth buffer of a RenderTexture, so I tried using the SetRenderTarget function from Graphics but it didn't give me the intended effect.

The hack I just did at the end of it was to blit the game scene RenderTexture to a temporary one, clear just the colors and render the line effects into that RenderTexture.

I guess all I really want to know is how do I assign a depth buffer to a RenderTexture, or blit a depth buffer to the RenderTexture's depth buffer or something. I'm not crazy into thinking I could easily change an FBO's depth buffer in OpenGL, right?

# ? Nov 26, 2012 06:44

Sylink: Apr 17, 2004

I'm working on a game prototype and I need to do some creative things graphics wise by putting a lot of graphs (like bar graphs and other data) on the screen.

I can't think of a clever way to do this with sprites and currently I have a really ghetto version using pyglet and opengl.

I should probably switch over to C++ and learn openGL from there, what is the best place to start? I just need something simple to work with to test my concept, I'm not worried about a solid result at this point.

I could do this with sprites actually, but I need to be able to transform sprites in single directions and pyglet/pygame do not support it.

# ? Nov 26, 2012 14:12

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

ShinAli posted:

I guess all I really want to know is how do I assign a depth buffer to a RenderTexture, or blit a depth buffer to the RenderTexture's depth buffer or something. I'm not crazy into thinking I could easily change an FBO's depth buffer in OpenGL, right?

Actually, you kind of are.

Mind, it's been a while since I tried this - but last I checked, extracting the depth buffer or replacing it was outright impossible on older hardware, and prohibitively expensive on new hardware. Shader model 4.0 might have dropped some tricks for that though.

The solution was to render a separate depth buffer yourself. As in, start of the render cycle, render depth data to an offscreen buffer you manage. Then, you use that for everything - depth of focus, SSAO, etc. It may be in a buffer on its own, you may combine it with other data in another channel, you may bridge 24bit depth data into an 8-bit surface across RGB channels... whatever - but you render it yourself.

# ? Nov 26, 2012 15:42

ShinAli: May 2, 2003; The Kid better watch his step.

Shalinor posted:

Actually, you kind of are.

Mind, it's been a while since I tried this - but last I checked, extracting the depth buffer or replacing it was outright impossible on older hardware, and prohibitively expensive on new hardware. Shader model 4.0 might have dropped some tricks for that though.

Oh! I thought I did something like that when I tried to forward render particles in my deferred rendering engine, but maybe I just linked the same buffer to both FBOs as I don't remember anything weird performance wise.

Shalinor posted:

The solution was to render a separate depth buffer yourself. As in, start of the render cycle, render depth data to an offscreen buffer you manage. Then, you use that for everything - depth of focus, SSAO, etc. It may be in a buffer on its own, you may combine it with other data in another channel, you may bridge 24bit depth data into an 8-bit surface across RGB channels... whatever - but you render it yourself.

So write depth values myself via some shader, linking that texture to other shaders that would need the depth information? That's something I wanted to try, but it seemed a lot of work at the time since I've no experience with it and figured I should let the renderer take care of the depth testing for me. I'll dig through Unity's shader source code and experiment, then.

# ? Nov 26, 2012 23:55

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

ShinAli posted:

So write depth values myself via some shader, linking that texture to other shaders that would need the depth information? That's something I wanted to try, but it seemed a lot of work at the time since I've no experience with it and figured I should let the renderer take care of the depth testing for me. I'll dig through Unity's shader source code and experiment, then.

Bingo. A depth texture like that is important enough for other algorithms that it's all but a given in a modern pipeline. You need it for depth of field / focus, SSAO, fogging, non-lovely particles, and other stuff I'm probably forgetting.

# ? Nov 27, 2012 03:31

Mug: Apr 26, 2005

Orzo posted:

Not defending this guy's practices or anything, I don't know anything about him and it sounds pretty silly to brag based on lines of code, but some people just prefer to embed their data in code instead of in...data. I did it for a few things when I was learning to make games (I had an breakout clone with the levels embedded in the code). Then again, I was like 12 or 13 years old and that was in a QBASIC class and didn't really know anything about good programming practices.

He's specifically said that all of his game's "Content" is in external scripts, and there's like 4gb to 8gb of them.

It's gonna be beautiful.

# ? Nov 27, 2012 07:33

RoboCicero: Oct 22, 2009; "I'm sick and tired of reading these posts!"

Dude, if he has 4 to 8 gigabytes of text files that he's written himself holy god drat. I'm pretty sure at that point you either have enough raw data that it starts self-organizing on your hard drive or you can just convert it into a 10-volume book deal.

# ? Nov 27, 2012 19:26

The Cheshire Cat: Jun 10, 2008; Fun Shoe

RoboCicero posted:

Dude, if he has 4 to 8 gigabytes of text files that he's written himself holy god drat. I'm pretty sure at that point you either have enough raw data that it starts self-organizing on your hard drive or you can just convert it into a 10-volume book deal.

That's assuming he's actually written it already. He may just be estimating how big it will be when he's finished. Which I'm pretty confident is the case given the huge range between 4 and 8 gigs worth of text. I'm pretty sure if it was actually written he'd be able to estimate the size with a bit more precision than "give or take 2,147,000,000 letters"

# ? Nov 27, 2012 19:42

Fur20: Nov 14, 2007; すご▞い！
君は働か░い
フ▙▓ズなんだね！

poo poo, I only expect my code amount to double--at most--from between now and being completely finished, and that'll bring it to, like, 500kb. Maybe closer to 1MB, but there's basically no way it can possibly go over. 4-8 gigs? That's like... the total digital word count of every book professionally published in the past five hundred years.

# ? Nov 27, 2012 19:46

Polio Vax Scene: Apr 5, 2009

Every single computation is detailed in an XML file. With hardcoded memory addresses.

code:

<process>
 <method>
  <condition checkRef="0x0035D1">1</condition>
  <add resultRef="0x00A2CA">
   <value>2</value>
  </add>
 </method>
</process>

# ? Nov 27, 2012 20:04

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

RoboCicero posted:

Dude, if he has 4 to 8 gigabytes of text files that he's written himself holy god drat.

If you define "written" as ctrl-c, ctrl-v, edit a handful of characters to have it handle the next bit of information in series.

We've all done that, right? :tinfoil:

# ? Nov 27, 2012 20:33

Mug: Apr 26, 2005

Just threw together a prototype for a particle system that I'll use for bullet casings and blood spatters. Seems really good so far, just have to work it into the main engine now - only problem is that it wont clip behind objects so hopefully it looks okay.

edit: Here's a video about my particle system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2nBge7wq6c

Mug fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Nov 28, 2012

# ? Nov 28, 2012 14:42

ceebee: Feb 12, 2004

Mug you are a madman dude.

I can't believe all that code for just the start of a particle system, so crazy to me but I bet it makes perfect sense for you.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 06:21

Mug: Apr 26, 2005

Spent as much time as I could today (we have a newborn so I've had less time) moving the particle prototype into the game engine. I ended up having to blend it into the z-buffer so you can't see particles through walls. I was hoping I wouldn't have to do it, like "It will be okay if you can see smoke through walls, that's not so bad" but it was bad, it looked awful.

It's done now, the system is in place, I just need to spend some time designing nice looking particles.

So far, I have breakable doors for the BREAKIN! weapon ability, have a look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O88ZUuyMZ00

# ? Nov 29, 2012 07:37

RhysD: Feb 7, 2009; Bust it!

I made a site and trailer for my game! Check it out share it around if you can, I'd be greatly appreciative.

http://www.takemymachete.com

# ? Nov 29, 2012 15:15

HelixFox: Dec 20, 2004; Heed the words of this ancient spirit.

RhysD posted:

I made a site and trailer for my game! Check it out share it around if you can, I'd be greatly appreciative.

http://www.takemymachete.com

Looking good, I like the way the trailer blends in with the aesthetic of the site.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 15:21

RhysD: Feb 7, 2009; Bust it!

HelixFox posted:

Looking good, I like the way the trailer blends in with the aesthetic of the site.

Thanks! I tried to keep with the theme of the game, so hopefully it all ties in together in the end.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 15:27

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

Edmund McMillen did a post-mortem on Isaac, and it is fantastic. Very worth reading, for anyone trying to push genre boundaries.

... I think if I had to pick one contemporary designer that inspired me most, it'd be Edmund. Dude is just awesome.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 16:44

The Cheshire Cat: Jun 10, 2008; Fun Shoe

Shalinor posted:

Edmund McMillen did a post-mortem on Isaac, and it is fantastic. Very worth reading, for anyone trying to push genre boundaries.

... I think if I had to pick one contemporary designer that inspired me most, it'd be Edmund. Dude is just awesome.

It's your first release as an indie studio right? I'd say that "risky" is a better SECOND game option. Unless you can afford to eat the losses if it flops.

Plus a big part of getting success with a riskier idea is name recognition. People are going to be more likely to give it a shot if they can remember playing something else of yours that they enjoyed. Binding of Isaac is pretty cool, but I bet it would have been just an obscure little Roguelike-like if it had been made by some nobody in their basement instead of Edmund McMillen.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 16:48

SuicideSnowman: Jul 26, 2003

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Binding of Isaac is pretty cool, but I bet it would have been just an obscure little Roguelike-like if it had been made by some nobody in their basement instead of Edmund McMillen.

I somehow doubt that. It's a pretty stylish game and indie games are big right now.

He even mentions in the article that the game didn't start out doing all that well. It took off because of word of mouth from a small group of people ended up becoming a bigger group of people over time.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 16:59

Polo-Rican: Jul 4, 2004; emptyquote my posts or die

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.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 17:01

HelixFox: Dec 20, 2004; Heed the words of this ancient spirit.

Polo-Rican posted:

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.

I am absolutely flabbergasted that Isaac is made in AS2. I guess it just goes to show that end audiences really don't care about the method as long as the result is up to scratch.

# ? Nov 29, 2012 18:07

Shalinor: Jun 10, 2002; _{Can I buy you a rootbeer?}

The Cheshire Cat posted:

It's your first release as an indie studio right? I'd say that "risky" is a better SECOND game option. Unless you can afford to eat the losses if it flops.

Plus a big part of getting success with a riskier idea is name recognition. People are going to be more likely to give it a shot if they can remember playing something else of yours that they enjoyed. Binding of Isaac is pretty cool, but I bet it would have been just an obscure little Roguelike-like if it had been made by some nobody in their basement instead of Edmund McMillen.

Nah, this'd be second to market. Jones On Fire will be the first game that actually makes it to market, and it is pretty safe. F2P, established runner genre, experiments mostly with aesthetics. Good bet for mobile (well, as good a bet as exists at my budget tier), but I expect limited interest outside of there. Before that, Gravitaz made it to kickstarter, but failed due to the very reasonable conclusion that it was like Wipeout for the PC. It was just too safe, not exciting.

... which is why the next game needs to be riskier. Nobody really cares much about genre games in the indie space on PC. There are thousands of platformers, thousands of just about everything. I need to go big or go home, especially if I want to take another swing at a small kickstarter (and I do). Doesn't mean I need to make a crazy art game or anything, and the budget is still small, but - Next Game will be a game that only I could make, rather than being something you could sum up on the back of a napkin.

EDIT: and every game Edmund has made that got any notice was, to some degree, unique. That's how he built his career - nobody really cared, until then. A game about a skinless boy that's stupid hard and fast, a game about a vagina, a melancholy tale of a kid riding an octopus through space, etc, etc. You see similar patterns in other notable indies or small studios. Almost no one rises to prominence by making "a really solid platformer with a generic, safe story," that's only viable for large studios with tons of budget to throw at AAA polish.

Shalinor fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Nov 29, 2012

# ? Nov 29, 2012 19:48

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

HelixFox posted:

I am absolutely flabbergasted that Isaac is made in AS2. I guess it just goes to show that end audiences really don't care about the method as long as the result is up to scratch.

I'm sure the devs cared though, when they were crashing 25% of the time mid dev. Probably lost a lot of productive time to that sort of stuff.

# ? Nov 30, 2012 00:45

Mug: Apr 26, 2005

Yay! Someone in the video game media talked about me, completely unprovoked!
http://www.indiegamemag.com/igm-aus-inside-the-indie-world/

I'm sure I could have had something like this happen by just shooting off a bunch of emails, but getting noticed when you're not even in alpha and not talking to the press about what you're doing at all is a cool feeling.

# ? Nov 30, 2012 03:09

BovineFury: Oct 28, 2007; I moo for great justice!

In the themed game challenge last year (death and taxes) I did a puzzle game. It was made with XNA, had a installer, etc.

Now I've ported it to Unity and fixed up some problems. I hope it is clearer how to play, etc. It can be played directly from the browser now also.

https://www.bovinefury.com/LifeTaxesAndDeathFiles/ltd_unity/play.html

Give it a shot. Let me know what you think.

There is a secret to edit profiles. Click the avatar icon for the profile in the profiles menu. Edit controls will appear.

BovineFury fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Nov 30, 2012

# ? Nov 30, 2012 18:42

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# ? May 14, 2024 03:00

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Screenshot Saturday?

I'm making a vehicle combat game that owes a lot to the melee mode in Interstate '76, except that you build your vehicle entirely from the chassis up lego-style from parts.

Each part has some function and affects the centre of mass etc as you'd expect. It's very early in development though, there are a million bugs and missing features, and most parts are just basic shapes.

# ? Nov 30, 2012 22:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Making Games Megathread: Congratulations on releasing the horniest game of 2022

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