|
The Silver Snail posted:Before I dedicate 10 gigs of space to sound effects, I'm interested in knowing: Is it very difficult to make your own simple sound effects? I've just begun getting into tutorials for GameMaker and other steps to start making my own games, and I keep seeing things about using assets like graphics or sounds developed by other people. I think I would prefer if everything in my projects was made by myself, but maybe that is impractical thinking. It's not necessarily impractical thinking, but just know that the more time you invest into other disciplines is less time you can spend on actually making games. Audio is a deep, deep rabbit hole, and I'm speaking as someone who's spent said 5 figures on audio gear. If you just want chippy sound effects, Bfxr should be your first stop.
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 19:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 09:41 |
|
|
...and at today's HDD prices, 10 gigs is NOTHING.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 19:19
|
|
|
wayfinder posted:...and at today's HDD prices, 10 gigs is NOTHING. Yes but it's still a pain in the rear end to ask someone to download 10 gigs. It'd be great if bandwidth and network speeds had uninhibited growth like hard drives.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 19:28
|
|
|
I have an audio dude, and I'm still going to grab it - because half your sound effects really can just be generics. Save the budget/effort for the set piece audio, music, etc.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 19:28
|
|
|
al-azad posted:Yes but it's still a pain in the rear end to ask someone to download 10 gigs. It'd be great if bandwidth and network speeds had uninhibited growth like hard drives. There is a torrent available for it, if that changes anyone's mind.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 19:29
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:I have an audio dude, and I'm still going to grab it - because half your sound effects really can just be generics. Save the budget/effort for the set piece audio, music, etc. This. If you've got a really limited budget, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't bring on an audio person at all. Throw money at what needs it. And I'd bet dollars to donuts Nathan picked it up too. Any audio person with a drop of sense grabbed this.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 19:30
|
|
|
Even if you make 8-bit games, download the pack and find some software that lets you bitcrush... I do a lot of 8-bit sound effects using digital distortion in Reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVsaLOwX3Y8&t=131s
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 19:33
|
|
|
Most of the pack is ambience/background noise anyway, something that you can't really do with 8bit without it sounding awful. Seriously get the pack though, its all stuff that doesn't "sound" royalty free unlike That_God_Damn_Eagle.wav or Wilhelm.wav Polio Vax Scene fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Mar 19, 2015 |
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 21:23
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:There is a torrent available for it, if that changes anyone's mind. Don't mind me, I was just expressing my frustration in general with service providers and bandwidth. We're at that point where single player games are hitting 20-40gb and above plus a 10gb day 1 patch.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 21:28
|
|
|
This is loving great! I couldnt make decent sound effect to save my life.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 21:53
|
|
|
al-azad posted:I don't know anything technical so I can't help you in that regard, but check out the design document for Overgrowth and any of the super detailed videos on youtube. Overgrowth is a fighting game with a focus on model accurate hit detection and animations. The result is a very fluid combat system that looks like a martial arts movie in execution as opposed to the more arcadey fighting in every other game. They get pretty detailed so maybe you can draw some inspiration from it. I'ma save the victory dance for several weeks until I determine whether or not I have the tech skills to adapt a version of this, and whether this style of movement even feels right in the rest of my game, but at least provisionally you're a hero-his method answers a *lot* of questions I hadn't thought of to ask, and seemingly saves the trouble of constructing a massive blend tree.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2015 23:33
|
|
|
It really caught me by surprise just how big & complicated part of game design the sound effects are! This far I've always just used some random free & terrible sound libraries or SFXR, but for my most recent project I actually paid a proper sound person; the difference is (of course) ridiculously notable. That said, it can be a ton of fun to hunt for royalty-free sound effects in places like https://www.freesound.org and then edit them on Audacity to fit your needs; even if the results are pretty crummy at first, the feeling of working on something "new" and experimenting with that is really amazing! (I also once tried to record sound effects with a Zoom H2N but that didn't end very well. Having more knowledge about that stuff would be really amazing!) In other news (and I hope posting about our own projects is OK  ), my game Environmental Station Alpha got its official release date on Steam today!  Going through the Greenlight process for the first time was scary, but I fear the scariest things are yet to come...  It's a pretty basic metroidvania deal, but after 3 years I'm really happy to have finished it!
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 01:19
|
|
|
Hempuli posted:In other news (and I hope posting about our own projects is OK Hey, neato! And congrats on getting the release date. Looks like a fun game from the trailer gameplay...but IMO you shouldn't be saying "Made with whatever" (who cares what system it's implemented in?) and you're probably better off not putting numbers on how many bosses, upgrades, environments, whatever are in the game. Just say "Lots of bosses! Cool powerups!" and leave it at that. Putting hard numbers on things gets people into the mindset of "is there enough game here to be worth $x?" and that's not what you want them to be thinking. You want them to be excited about the stuff you're showing off. Plus, saying "more than 10" tends to make me personally assume that there's 11 of the things. The numbers are small enough that there's no real point in rounding them off unless you're trying to obfuscate how many of them there are.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 02:17
|
|
|
Is 2DToolkit with Unity still popular? It had a ton of features Unity lacked even after 4.3, but I looked at its Trello and it seems like development has slowed down a lot.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 05:42
|
|
|
Omi no Kami posted:Thanks for the link! This is really informative, but is this level of fidelity standard outside of fighting games? In any action game (whether fighting, melee combat, or shooter), this kind of fidelity is the difference between feeling smooth and clunky. It's also why you don't see a lot of indie games focused on a core combat sandbox - it's incredibly difficult and time consuming. Great combat is never an accident, and it is usually several orders of magnitude more complex than you'd expect.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 06:55
|
|
|
The more I tool around and try things the more I agree with you, but I think it's also a heck of a lot of fun to tinker with. This may be a stupid question, but for targeting I'm trying to make range a level playing field: every single character has the same cutoffs for long range (kicks/long extensions), short range (elbows, knees, headbutts), or out of range (you whiff and look like a moron). If I'm doing hit detection with model-accurate hitboxes and hurtboxes, though, everybody is going to have marginally different ranges based on limb proportion and height, which puts an artificial burden on the character designer to make everyone have the exact same specifications. I know some games use ray traces from the striking surface to confirm the hit, but that seems extremely finicky and prone to lots of errors.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 09:12
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:Hey, neato! And congrats on getting the release date. Looks like a fun game from the trailer gameplay...but IMO you shouldn't be saying "Made with whatever" (who cares what system it's implemented in?)  TooMuchAbstraction posted:and you're probably better off not putting numbers on how many bosses, upgrades, environments, whatever are in the game. Just say "Lots of bosses! Cool powerups!" and leave it at that. Putting hard numbers on things gets people into the mindset of "is there enough game here to be worth $x?" and that's not what you want them to be thinking. You want them to be excited about the stuff you're showing off. Plus, saying "more than 10" tends to make me personally assume that there's 11 of the things. The numbers are small enough that there's no real point in rounding them off unless you're trying to obfuscate how many of them there are.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 11:38
|
|
|
Presentation given by Jane Ng at GDC about the firewatch art. She released a version of her presentation that doesn't require GDC vault. I think the game's visual style is really great, and though maybe the presentation would interest some people here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYnS3kKTcGg I didn't realize they were using unity, and apparently just recently switched to Unity 5. I hope we continue to see more games with strong visual identities like this one in the future.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 11:41
|
|
|
SupSuper posted:Unless you're making it in BASIC, then it's a huge selling point. Thanks for the feedback on the description! I've adjusted it a bit, although I must admit that I have some huge problems with marketing my games. Oh well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 14:56
|
|
|
Marketing games seems to be way harder than actually making them. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 15:39
|
|
|
The one thing that wasn't clear to me about the game was whether the traversal systems (the jet pack, the grappling hook) are stuff built in, Zelda-style unlock and infinite use tools, or finite use pickups. I also think the starting text could be a bit more evocative, e.g. If you showed instead of telled.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 16:22
|
|
|
BUGS OF SPRING posted:Marketing games seems to be way harder than actually making them. It's a question of skillset. If you asked someone who's good at marketing to write a game, they'd probably be just as clueless as we are about marketing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 16:23
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:It's a question of skillset. If you asked someone who's good at marketing to write a game, they'd probably be just as clueless as we are about marketing. If you're terrible at communicating, though, it may be much harder. I was a writer before, even if I was super shy. Guessing the stereotypical "I can't even document code reliably" coder would struggle more.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 16:34
|
|
|
Hempuli posted:
Looks good! Is there an inventory with droppable items and experience/level ups though? Cause in the promo video it seemed more like a straight up metroid type game where your guy advances only by getting a specific set of upgrades rather than a bazzilion items and stats to manage. It's hard to tell just from what was shown.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 16:34
|
|
|
Mercury_Storm posted:Looks good! Is there an inventory with droppable items and experience/level ups though? Cause in the promo video it seemed more like a straight up metroid type game where your guy advances only by getting a specific set of upgrades rather than a bazzilion items and stats to manage. It's hard to tell just from what was shown. The game's a very straightforward metroidvania deal, so permanent powerups with the only "stat" to increase being your maximum health. At some point I dabbled with an Exile-style finite resource setting along with an item pickup system, but that ended up being really hard to balance in terms of having finite resources but allowing the player to mess up stuff to some extent. quote:I also think the starting text could be a bit more evocative, e.g. If you showed instead of telled. quote:It's a question of skillset. If you asked someone who's good at marketing to write a game, they'd probably be just as clueless as we are about marketing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 03:00
|
|
|
I've been playing too much monster hunter and it's spilling into other parts of my life
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 03:25
|
|
|
So as I've learned in throwing together a game: RPG Maker feels... either depressing or just not good for anything new. I'm going with depressing. That being said, here's what I tried to poo poo out in RPG Maker. It's crap I can honestly say. But if there ARE any goods within this, I'll keep that in mind. EDIT: Not sure if it's gonna immediately download so lemme fiddle with the link real fast. shs posted:I've been playing too much monster hunter and it's spilling into other parts of my life widespread fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Mar 21, 2015 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 03:45
|
|
|
So okay, design patterns: I know that excessive dependency is bad, and in general you want to keep your code as decoupled as possible, but how do you organize different, unrelated systems that are co-dependent? Like, my character is ultimately three core systems: movement, combat, and statistics (health, MP, skills, etc). Combat needs information about the player's state from movement, since attack animations depend on orientation and disposition, and it needs movement to do something, as the player turns to face their opponent each time they strike. Both systems constantly need information from player statistics, as damage is partially based on one set of character stats, and movement is effected by another set. It seems like giving each class references to the two others and constantly checking numbers is bad design, but the only other alternative I can see is to encapsulate all three systems in a single class, which seems massively worse.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 04:38
|
|
|
Omi no Kami posted:So okay, design patterns: I know that excessive dependency is bad, and in general you want to keep your code as decoupled as possible, but how do you organize different, unrelated systems that are co-dependent? Like, my character is ultimately three core systems: movement, combat, and statistics (health, MP, skills, etc). Combat needs information about the player's state from movement, since attack animations depend on orientation and disposition, and it needs movement to do something, as the player turns to face their opponent each time they strike. Both systems constantly need information from player statistics, as damage is partially based on one set of character stats, and movement is effected by another set. It seems like giving each class references to the two others and constantly checking numbers is bad design, but the only other alternative I can see is to encapsulate all three systems in a single class, which seems massively worse. It depends a lot on your requirements. If you need a bajillion ops per second and you absolutely must have speed over anything else, you just make those systems directly coupled and as efficient as possible. this.Movement.MoveTo( Position ). The "hen" approach. If you can sacrifice some performance for flexibility and encapsulation, you can relate the objects via events, rather than direct calls. i.e. this.FireEvent( "MoveTo", SomePosition ) and the caller doesn't give a gently caress who handles it. The "hog" approach There's a lot of fancy or less fancy ways to do direct dependency or events, but they sort of boil down to various kinds of implementations with their own trade-offs of those two abstract ideas. Practically you tend to do a little bit of each, because it's the rare game that's 0 or 1 on the henhog spectrum. I write really hoggy event-driven systems, usually, but tend to cache and expose directly the components like movement/rendering that need to be high performance, are subject to about 90% of the traffic in any system, and every object essentially always has anyway. Unormal fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Mar 21, 2015 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 04:43
|
|
|
That's really helpful, thank you for breaking that down! With hoggier approaches, where do you deal with traffic directing conflicting events? Is that something the method that listens for the event should handle? I'm thinking about cases like figuring out what Movement should do if the combat module calls RotateTo(270), then 15 ticks later (before the player is done rotating) something else, like an interactable the player just hit, calls RotateTo(30). I think it's data that's really bugging me, as a lot of the events I can think of for my use case wouldn't be called more than 2-3 times/second. For movement, however, I'm trying to make movement speed partially a function of stamina, so the less stamina you have remaining, the slower you sprint. That's something that would need to be updated every time I calculate acceleration and top speed, and I really don't want to be making 30 gets/second for one little thing like that- would that be the sort of case where direct coupling would likely end up being more efficient?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 05:00
|
|
|
Omi no Kami posted:That's really helpful, thank you for breaking that down! With hoggier approaches, where do you deal with traffic directing conflicting events? Is that something the method that listens for the event should handle? I'm thinking about cases like figuring out what Movement should do if the combat module calls RotateTo(270), then 15 ticks later (before the player is done rotating) something else, like an interactable the player just hit, calls RotateTo(30). For Caves of Qud & Sproggiwood, Actors are just a bag of components. When a component is added to an object it registers with the Actor each event name it's interested in. Each event just takes an arbitrary dictionary of id:object pairs as parameters and assigns it to a function/delegate to handle. So the Actor ends up with a list of event ids that have been registered for, and for each of those event ids the components that are interested in that event. So it's more than efficient enough for my requirements. If the components really want to talk to each other directly, they can, by just going MyActor.GetComponent<Physics>() or whatever. Unity essentially follows this exact pattern for its GameObjects as well, so it's a pretty proven architecture. (Though I totally designed it from scratch like 10 years ago based on Bilas's dungeon siege presentations  )As far as multiple components handling an event as it propagates, my systems have a few hooks to control it: 1. Newer iterations of the engine allow components to set their priority, so that you can control which components get first crack at a message. 2. Each event delegate returns a true or false. If a delegate returns false, event propagation stops and later components don't get the message. 3. For both older and newer systems, for complex chains like combat, I typically end up with a few events in order to give my components the ability to modify state before things happen. BeforeApplyDamage->ApplyDamage->AfterApplyDamage (...and for components that are essentially universal and get heavy per-frame action like rendering, I tend to cache a component reference and expose its methods directly on the Actor itself) Unormal fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Mar 21, 2015 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 05:09
|
|
|
That's an incredibly neat implementation, and I highly suspect I'll end up trying to adapt it here... one of my first "big" projects in Unity was an absolute mess of GetComponents, I'm pretty sure at one point every single utility script was ultimately dependant on every other. Thank you for taking the time to elaborate!! Determining priority and keeping dueling events/notifications from turning into a nightmare has been a big problem from me since day 1, this is really helpful. 
Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Mar 21, 2015 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 05:11
|
|
|
Wow, thanks for the immense amount of feedback! I've just had time to work on the animation a bit more, and before I do anything intensive like redraw most of it I tweaked a few frames, perhaps most notably the one that was pointed at specifically. This is basically a 25 minute tweak, but I personally think it looks much better: (If it's still unclear, please don't hesitate to say so!) Also, thanks again for all great feedback! I will keep it in mind when I animate the the remaining units. It's been a great learning experience. Edit: Here's the previous one for comparison: 
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 17:41
|
|
|
Pigmassacre posted:Wow, thanks for the immense amount of feedback! I've just had time to work on the animation a bit more, and before I do anything intensive like redraw most of it I tweaked a few frames, perhaps most notably the one that was pointed at specifically. This is basically a 25 minute tweak, but I personally think it looks much better: Thats a lot better, but im not convinced about the outline.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 18:58
|
|
|
evilentity posted:Thats a lot better, but im not convinced about the outline. Fair point, I'm doubting the outline too. Playing around with some alternatives, never really considered not having a black outline but alternatives are looking kinda good..
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 19:07
|
|
|
Pigmassacre posted:This is basically a 25 minute tweak, but I personally think it looks much better: Yup a lot better, great job. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 19:26
|
|
|
Pigmassacre posted:Fair point, I'm doubting the outline too. Playing around with some alternatives, never really considered not having a black outline but alternatives are looking kinda good.. Do you have a lot of other assets / environments put together yet? If you don't, I would toss together a lot more (quick) assets to get a sense of the full composition of a scene because that guy is only like 16x16 pxiels on it and you're going pretty deep without his context right now.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 19:28
|
|
|
Sigma-X posted:Do you have a lot of other assets / environments put together yet? Well, this is pretty much were we're at right now:  It's for our bachelors thesis so we don't have a lot of time left until we gotta consider it somewhat "done".
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 19:55
|
|
|
Pigmassacre posted:Wow, thanks for the immense amount of feedback! I've just had time to work on the animation a bit more, and before I do anything intensive like redraw most of it I tweaked a few frames, perhaps most notably the one that was pointed at specifically. This is basically a 25 minute tweak, but I personally think it looks much better: The new one is MUCH more readable and definitely solves the original problem I was having trying to parse the leg movement.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 21:19
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 09:41 |
|
|
Pigmassacre posted:Well, this is pretty much were we're at right now: The only thing I'd do in such a limited time frame is hue shift his leafy shoulders to something perhaps a bit browner, because right now it blends in to the grass tiles.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 21:53
|
|