|
Nude posted:Lots of stuff To add to this slightly, the guys who did Ratchet & Clank dev commentary also have a podcast that is pretty neat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3przu0LZqc This is a really good talk about dynamic difficulty I think and a good introduction to the why's and hows I think.
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 06:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 00:40 |
|
|
Hey, so it's been ages since I've posted anything from our game, Hollow Knight. We've spent the last few months porting the game from Stencyl to Unity so haven't had anything interesting to show off. Finally starting to get back to that point now though! Here's a boss death animation I just finished up. So easy to do with Unity's particle system! Feels pretty satisfying. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 10:31
|
|
|
^^^^^^^ Looks amazing. Camera shake and all the little details bring that to life. Long live fartsplosions.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 11:39
|
|
|
StarMinstrel posted:^^^^^^^ I know camera shake gets a lot of bad rep these days for being overused, but drat if it isn't effective a lot of the time.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 14:50
|
|
|
HelixFox posted:I know camera shake gets a lot of bad rep these days for being overused, but drat if it isn't effective a lot of the time. A lot of effects get a bad rep because people overuse 'em, it's all about moderation I guess! I've noticed that chromatic aberration is getting a lot of hate these days. Again, seems like it's only because it gets overused or used in completely inappropriate situations. I know it's easy to get carried away with stuff though, especially when you find a new toy.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 16:38
|
|
|
Crunch is when taking a day off from work to take care of your sick toddler actually feels like a day off.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 16:40
|
|
|
George Lazenby posted:A lot of effects get a bad rep because people overuse 'em, it's all about moderation I guess! I've noticed that chromatic aberration is getting a lot of hate these days. Again, seems like it's only because it gets overused or used in completely inappropriate situations. I know it's easy to get carried away with stuff though, especially when you find a new toy. Like anything in game design and graphics work, chromatic aberration is a tool. Used well and wisely, it can do great things. Used poorly and too much, it looks awful and is the kind of chromatic aberration people see and go "oh, it's this filter again..." I've seen great uses of chromatic aberration, all of which have been in situations where it makes sense -- a viewpoint through an expectedly crap camera lens or even very lightly around the blurred edges of water droplets on the "fourth wall" camera. But sometimes you see really bad uses. People have been complaining about the chromatic aberration in Star Citizen since the first alphas were out that let you walk around a hangar for five minutes before the game crashed and took your display drivers with it. To my knowledge, it's still there and still excessive because it's a cheaply implemented "cinematic" "next-gen" effect. Camera shake is the same thing. Done well, it looks great. Done poorly or excessively, it doesn't. Personal experience with bad camera shake is in the 2003 space game Freelancer. Any hits to your ship caused the same amount of camera shake on every hit, regardless of damage caused. With enough people shooting at you, you simply couldn't see where you were flying. Your camera shake is perfect. Not too powerful but not subtle enough to not get the point across.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 17:10
|
|
|
mutata posted:Crunch is when taking a day off from work to take care of your sick toddler actually feels like a day off. Are you ever not crunching? I take it your still with DIMG? 
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 18:16
|
|
|
Resource posted:Are you ever not crunching? I take it your still with DIMG? Yep! And the past couple years have at least been consistent. A yearly cycle will do that. We have the end date coming in the not too distant future, though, so tis the season.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 18:19
|
|
|
This is really cool https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/blui-html-meets-unreal Basically a 18 year old student has made an Unreal plugin that lets you create UI with HTML. I've been working on an incremental game in JS and I might try and port it over to UE with this. Would make releasing on mobile a snap if it goes well. A huge benefit is now your web guy can become a partial game dev as well without requiring many new skills.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 18:54
|
|
|
GarethIW posted:Our LD32 jam entry "Get Off My Land": Cute Llamas but the voxel style reminds me way too much of that Cube World guy who took all that money and disappeared off the face of the earth.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 19:14
|
|
|
BUGS OF SPRING posted:This is really cool Aren't there better ways of porting an html5 game to mobile? It seems to me that if you aren't using any of the other features, something like phonegap would have way less overhead.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 20:22
|
|
|
The Fool posted:Aren't there better ways of porting an html5 game to mobile? It seems to me that if you aren't using any of the other features, something like phonegap would have way less overhead. Oh most certainly. It's part I know Unreal and I want to test how it works.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 21:53
|
|
|
Onion Knight posted:
I absolutely adore this and it's pretty much proof that what I've been wanting to do with my own project is possible. It's just... man do I ever not like working with Unity. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 22:15
|
|
|
You don't have to use Unity.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 22:21
|
|
|
Dewgy posted:It's just... man do I ever not like working with Unity. What else would you want to use? I don't know I've looked at quite a few different things and have come back to Unity for the ease of importing content/development/debugging. Now that baked light and the profiling are part of the free package I can't really see using anything else. By default the things I make in UE4 look nice and the things I make in Unity 5 look pretty horrible but I can make import content and complicated logic quickly in Unity and everything else seems much more challenging/time consuming. The Unity cloud build attached to Bitbucket/Github is really nice. If you can figure out a problem away from your dev computer you can get on the Bitbucket website make a change, then check back 10 minutes later can have a new Android/iOS/Web Player build in your email.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 22:32
|
|
|
Stick100 posted:What else would you want to use? I don't like the coding and organizational side of Unity. Mind you I haven't much played with U5, but my favorite to work with so far is GameMaker, with UE4 being a close second. I admit I need to give it a fair shake and a few tutorials but I'm also fairly distrusting of a lot of the built-in stuff thanks to posts here and elsewhere.  e: Also I'm working on Mac and Xamarin is total butt.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 22:45
|
|
|
On the topic of Gamemaker, how well does Gamemaker build to Android? Does anyone have any experience with that?
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 22:58
|
|
|
Dewgy posted:e: Also I'm working on Mac and Xamarin is total butt. How do you find UE4 to be on Mac?
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 23:04
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:How do you find UE4 to be on Mac? Runs really nicely, worst bit is some of the UI stuff is definitely PC focused like tutorial wording and keyboard shortcuts, at least at this point. The main reason I've been playing with it is it works so well, whereas GameMaker kind of, well, doesn't. Unless I want to use an old one. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 23:10
|
|
|
Is Unity 5 safe to use yet? I would be switching over from 4.6... More importantly is it compatible with UnityVS?
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 23:21
|
|
|
Megasphere looks really loving great, it gave me proper motivation to figure out how to implement nice lights in game im working on. Deferred shading + normal maps + geometry lights in 2d. If you look closely, the lights are obstructed by the balls. Shaders need a ton of work, but looks promising! Video of how it looks in test environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7QzxPsyRsE
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2015 23:40
|
|
|
What do you people use for project backups? My project folder is ~2.3gigs atm, so I'm looking for a storage solution that intelligently backs up files as needed. How well does Dropbox work for this? Last time I checked it had massive sync issues due to having a garbage upload rate on their end. (IE, You make a change, it starts uploading, you make another change and save, first upload hasn't finished yet, second one starts and poo poo breaks). StickFigs posted:Is Unity 5 safe to use yet? I would be switching over from 4.6... SweetBro fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Apr 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 00:14
|
|
|
Dewgy posted:I don't like the coding and organizational side of Unity. Mind you I haven't much played with U5, but my favorite to work with so far is GameMaker, with UE4 being a close second. I admit I need to give it a fair shake and a few tutorials but I'm also fairly distrusting of a lot of the built-in stuff thanks to posts here and elsewhere.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 00:38
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:You could totally do lit pixels with UE4. It would actually be easier than with Unity, at least in terms of making the shader and lighting play nice. Unity's deferred, at least in 4.X, is... special. Yeah I've played around with modifying some Wolfenstein 3D assets a bit and I've gotten good results, but my biggest problem is while it's easy to get it to use nearest neighbor filtering for everything in UE4, it's still not quite doing it pixel-for-pixel, the results are based on screen-space and not your source sprites or artwork, at least as far as all my testing has gone anyway. Still looks good, but not quite the effect I was hoping for. e: and their normal map format is weird
Dewgy fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Apr 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 01:00
|
|
|
Honestly now that VS Community will take the Unity plugin I find it all a lot more tolerable. VS is so far ahead of the busted rear end copy of Monodevelop unity needs to use (and that you can use resharper &c) butting heads with mechanim or something every once in a while isn't too bad. Honestly the v5 UI stuff is pretty ok too, but maybe that's just because the older poo poo was so frustrating.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 06:04
|
|
|
Manslaughter posted:You don't have to use Unity. Thank you. Am I really the only one that thinks that something like Unity seems way too much for something like a simple 2D thing? Maybe I'm a bit outdated and didn't fully grasp unity yet, but to me it seems more efficient to do simple 2D stuff from scratch (or using some simple lower level libraries like OpenTK) instead of relying on what seems like a mountain of 3rd party libraries and tools. I think I need to try to do something small in Unity to see if it's really that much more practical.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 09:13
|
|
|
Point n clicks are such a slow deal game dev-wise, too, that just adding a room is a time for unproportional excitement. Followed by painful anxiety and hyperventilation.
Mr Underhill fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Apr 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 10:06
|
|
|
Police Automaton posted:Thank you.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 10:13
|
|
|
SweetBro posted:What do you people use for project backups? I use git for everything, including both pre and post processed assets. The working copy is now at 1.5GB, the remote is hosted on Bitbucket and it's not giving me much trouble. From time to time I also do a manual backup of the repo to a local NAS and to a S3 bucket. The industry has traditionally used Perforce for SCM since it has very good support for big files. They now have free and hosted variants, so it may be worth checking out: http://www.perforce.com/helix
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 10:33
|
|
|
Police Automaton posted:Thank you. No way, if you want to put something simple together in 2D, Unity is super easy. There's no need to use any 3rd party libraries or tools to make something that works and plays well... unless you want to, of course.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 10:42
|
|
|
unlurked posted:I use git for everything, including both pre and post processed assets. The working copy is now at 1.5GB, the remote is hosted on Bitbucket and it's not giving me much trouble. From time to time I also do a manual backup of the repo to a local NAS and to a S3 bucket. The industry has traditionally used Perforce for SCM since it has very good support for big files. They now have free and hosted variants, so it may be worth checking out: http://www.perforce.com/helix We're using git on bitbucket too, but we're only putting our finished assets in there (ie flat spritesheets). PSDs etc are in dropbox. Working copy is still up to 1.17GB :P
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 10:49
|
|
|
Police Automaton posted:Am I really the only one that thinks that something like Unity seems way too much for something like a simple 2D thing? Starting from scratch is hell.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 12:01
|
|
|
Somfin posted:Starting from scratch is hell. Depends on what you need but in general and regarding pure 2D, I'd even say with something modern like C# not really. If you use some of the more low level libraries that make access to things like OpenGL etc. more straightforward even less. Sometimes it's the bigger hell to have to bend your things around whatever the outside black-boxes expect from you. This can get really convoluted really quick. Like always I guess, it depends on what you want to do.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 12:14
|
|
|
"I'm just making a simple go-kart, there's no need for anything complicated. So instead of grabbing a bicycle wheel off the shelf, I'm gonna whittle a wheel out of wood, when travel to a distant country to get some rubber, then hand-forge an axle...."
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 12:17
|
|
|
Fangz posted:"I'm just making a simple go-kart, there's no need for anything complicated. So instead of grabbing a bicycle wheel off the shelf, I'm gonna whittle a wheel out of wood, when travel to a distant country to get some rubber, then hand-forge an axle...." Point taken, but I whipped up some simple dwarf-fortress-esque faux 2D thing up (with C# and OpenTK, so not even without any "outside help") a few years ago. I had a few classes like a "world view" where I could scroll around and click on things. (with menu popup on right click) some faux-"terminals" I could print text to, and also classes for input of text etc.. Latest incarnation had arbitrary sprite (with indexed coloring) and mouse support. Everything was built out of ASCII symbols (did I mention DF was all the rage back then?) but could as well have been used with proper textures/graphics. I then made a fractal landscape generator and you could look at the ascii-zised landscape in the "world view". Kinda neat but about as hard on the eye as it sounds. I didn't really need much longer than a week for the basic version (without the generator and stuff) and the interface gave me unlimited a 4-figure framerate on my old computer back then. If you really need this is the other question  and yes I admit, things like Unity are more comfortable I guess. I don't think I would bother trying to build something with more advanced 3D stuff by myself. Maybe I should try Unity out.EDIT: Just to make it really clear, I am really not bashing Unity. It just from the ouside, seems like such a heavyweight for some things. Police Automaton fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Apr 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 12:39
|
|
|
Hmm, what do you guys think: I realized this afternoon that all of my problems with making (in-game) time management fun go away if I allow the player to control more than one person: instead of being a detective who mysteriously never goes into his office I can set it up so once a character gains a very high level of friendship/trust with him, you can choose to control them. As long as I keep a harsh limitation on how many people you can directly use (I'm picturing 3-5 through the entire game), doing all the fun parts of detective work becomes favors they're doing for your main character. Everybody sticks to their normal schedule when not being directly controlled, so you're allowed to skip all of the boring stuff and effectively work around the clock, but forced to be strategic about who you use, as every single moment spent adventuring is lowering their efficacy at work/cutting into their sleeping hours. Assuming that isn't a terrible idea (which I'm pretty sure it's not), what I want to ask you gents is how to preserve the sense of a main character in spite of the switching. I could shift the narrative to focus on the police station/beat as a character, which has its own charm, but I feel both the story and the environment are much more compelling if they're anchored on a single guy doing his job for good or bad, and frame everyone else you switch to as extensions of that- guys who like him (or his money) enough to go out of their way and help him. One option would be to artificially limit the amount of time you can spend as not-detective: maybe every favor you call in only lets you play for n hours of the in-game day based on how much they like you (and thus, how much time they're willing to put into your ask), or maybe there are certain aspects of the case that only the lead detective can do efficiently, so you want to play as him more often than not. I'm shying away from directly hooking it to the economy (you want me to chase down your witness for you? Suuure, that'll just be $200), because you either make it so expensive that rpg hoarding instincts kick in and nobody ever pays for help, or so affordable that it's the same as being free, and you're back to losing focus from the detective as the main guy.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 13:03
|
|
|
You could frame it by asking them for help, they agree and take off while your main character continues doing his normal daily work. Then at some convenient point, they come back to tell you "this is what I did" at which point you control their actions.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 14:22
|
|
|
The main benefit to Unity is you don't have to worry about dependencies or file handling. You just open it up and start making game logic and drag some png's into place. Then you select the target platform from a menu and hit compile. Obviously it's got a lot more than that going on in the background but the "zero to running around in a game world" time is pretty short and that makes it very attractive.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 14:35
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 00:40 |
|
|
Fangz posted:"I'm just making a simple go-kart, there's no need for anything complicated. So instead of grabbing a bicycle wheel off the shelf, I'm gonna whittle a wheel out of wood, when travel to a distant country to get some rubber, then hand-forge an axle...."  Pizza made from scratch tastes better than the frozen ones.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2015 14:36
|
|