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KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


You need more whizzing as bullets fly by. Not enough action is happening to make it sound like a battle.

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TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
That's a fair point...I used the first mission in the game for demonstration there, so there's not a whole lot going on. I was more focused on the sounds the player's shots were making than the sounds that enemies were making. I ramped up the falloff on sounds made by enemy ships by a lot because otherwise there was a lot of very clockwork repetitive sounds in combat (every enemy ship firing its guns as soon as they were done reloading), but I guess sounds from bullets wouldn't be so regular. At least as long as they aren't attached to the player's attacks.

Figuring out how exactly near-misses should sound, and how to implement that without a big hit to performance, may be tricky...maybe something like, the player has a sphere collider on them; if bullets "hit" the sphere collider then I attach an audio source to them that plays a sound effect? Then the trick is figuring out which sound to use. I can find bullet flyby effects but they have a built-in doppler, and I'm not sure they make sense for the size of projectiles I'm dealing with. Maybe with some adjustments they'll work.

Corbeau
Sep 13, 2010

Jack of All Trades
Spent today researching individual component scale, sketching a destroyer design, then bloc-ing it out in Blender just to get a feel for how the components look on it.



The tiny rectangle on the left is a human-size figure for scale.

anothergod
Apr 11, 2016



Ledge grabs are in, and I think they make the traversal through the environment feel a little nicer. It's slow, but it gives a lot easier access to vertical movement which is nice. It also softens the punishments for failing long jumps. If you're careful and not just mashing the buttons you can ledge grab and climb up most any difficult jumping section. I think this'll make for really good "medusa head" sections, actually.

I played a bit of Nosferatu for reference. Very cool, but a lot stiffer than this. Still looking for references to complex platformers.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Protocol7 posted:

Mostly just experimentation like this OpenAI project to give agents a set of actions and be able to reward them for doing desirable actions.

The set of actions and stuff will be configurable. I'm honestly thinking of just rolling it in plain Python like I know how, and trying to find some other way to integrate it into any arbitrary engine, but I feel like that comes with a lot of potential performance overhead.

Basically, from a high level, we want:

1. Ability to define environment and the environment can be 3D
2. Ability to create sets of actions
3. Ability to assert the actions and assign reward
4. Ability to create 'goals' or 'objectives'

you're looking for mlagents. It uses tensor flow/etc for training. If you build your project instead of running in editor you should be able to set the timescale greater than 100. Helps training time if you're coupled to the update loop.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Crude prototype of bullet whooshes:

https://i.imgur.com/GiBxAmE.mp4

And a second version where the whoosh triggers when bullets get close to the camera, instead of getting close to the ship:

https://i.imgur.com/GiBxAmE.mp4
(plus bonus bad driving on my part)

Which of these sounds better?

The sounds themselves don't feel quite right to me, but I'm hard-pressed to say what they should sound like.

EDIT: moved the audio listener to the ship instead of being on the camera, and reduced the volume of the bullet whooshes:

https://i.imgur.com/hqSuYzV.mp4

TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Jul 14, 2020

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Do you have the doppler effect turned on? And did you move the slider on the audio source to 3D? I feel like you'll get a much better effect when the sound of bullets pass between speakers.

Personally I prefer the camera being the source. The camera is the player's window into the game and they respond based on that spatial information.

Lork
Oct 15, 2007
Sticks to clorf

anothergod posted:



Ledge grabs are in, and I think they make the traversal through the environment feel a little nicer. It's slow, but it gives a lot easier access to vertical movement which is nice. It also softens the punishments for failing long jumps. If you're careful and not just mashing the buttons you can ledge grab and climb up most any difficult jumping section. I think this'll make for really good "medusa head" sections, actually.

I played a bit of Nosferatu for reference. Very cool, but a lot stiffer than this. Still looking for references to complex platformers.
Check out Actraiser 2, Hagane and Demon's Crest for SNES. Those are all platformer/action games that have unusually complex movesets but don't compromise in terms of responsiveness. However, I don't know if it's a coincidence or not but all three are collectively known to be some of it not the hardest games on the platform, heh.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Crude prototype of bullet whooshes:
I don't really have anything to say about those examples other than that just having those sound effects at all is a massive improvement over the earlier one just for having them at all.

On the other hand, the sound for when a bullet hits your ship is distractingly bad. I don't care if it's realistic or not, get something that sounds the way those explosion effects look.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Thanks for the feedback!

Lork posted:

On the other hand, the sound for when a bullet hits your ship is distractingly bad. I don't care if it's realistic or not, get something that sounds the way those explosion effects look.

So, this is an area where I'm having to balance "realism" / big impact with gameplay. The simple fact of gameplay is you're gonna get hit, a lot. Having every hit produce a big sound effect is super distracting -- I know, I had it like that before, it was awful. So the current hit sounds are dialed waaaaay down, they're meant to communicate roughly the equivalent of "you just stubbed your toe" / "you just headbutted a beam" in terms of damage done. Of course I will readily accept that my current sounds aren't the best way to communicate that, and I'm totally open to other types of sounds if anyone would care to suggest something. But I'm fairly confident they need to have a similar level of impact.

I have bigger on-hit sound effects but they only trigger when you take more damage in a single hit...in practice with the current gameplay balance they almost never play. Death is by a thousand cuts, and I'm mostly OK with that.

al-azad posted:

Do you have the doppler effect turned on? And did you move the slider on the audio source to 3D? I feel like you'll get a much better effect when the sound of bullets pass between speakers.

Personally I prefer the camera being the source. The camera is the player's window into the game and they respond based on that spatial information.

Sounds are 3D and doppler is enabled. The main thing you're noticing is that the sound player doesn't actually move while playing. It's positioned on top of the bullet at the time the game decides to play a whoosh, and then stays there. I tried having it move with the bullet, but it sounded really strange:

https://i.imgur.com/oeNmt0c.mp4

I have no idea why the sounds are so weirdly truncated in that version. If anyone has any insights, please do share them.

I'm torn on the camera vs. ship being the audio source. It felt very strange to me to have bullets whizz by the ship without any auditory effect. But it's definitely also a bit weird for the camera's position to have no effect on what the player hears.

baby puzzle
Jun 3, 2011

I'll Sequence your Storm.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Sounds are 3D and doppler is enabled. The main thing you're noticing is that the sound player doesn't actually move while playing. It's positioned on top of the bullet at the time the game decides to play a whoosh, and then stays there. I tried having it move with the bullet, but it sounded really strange:

That's why you write your own audio renderer 😈

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Use a threshold system where beyond certain points of damage you get a big hit sound. That’ll communicate to the player something is wrong.

Scoss
Aug 17, 2015
Regarding Ship Sounds:

IMO having the sound of shells constantly whizzing past your ears for the entirety of a mission might get super tired. I tend to think a lighter touch is better with sounds that could be playing nonstop.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

More generally, advice on juicing gameplay in 3D games would be appreciated.

You have like zero appreciable hit confirm VFX or sound effects for both enemies and the player ship. You seem to be pulling more towards arcadey action than mil-sim, so I would encourage you to really go hog wild with hit-flashes and explosions and debris/particles. If it were me, I'd be trying to evoke a metal slug boss or something with that level of energy.

As for the player ship, I'd want to see way better visual feedback for when you're actually getting hit. There's too many bullets flying around on-screen for me to track which ones actually manage to make contact with the player ship, and the subtle flash and the health bar losing 1 pixel is not doing it for me. At bare minimum, there needs to be much stronger feedback for when you actually get hit by a torpedo or something that could do appreciable damage.

Scoss fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Jul 14, 2020

Lork
Oct 15, 2007
Sticks to clorf

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

So, this is an area where I'm having to balance "realism" / big impact with gameplay. The simple fact of gameplay is you're gonna get hit, a lot. Having every hit produce a big sound effect is super distracting -- I know, I had it like that before, it was awful. So the current hit sounds are dialed waaaaay down, they're meant to communicate roughly the equivalent of "you just stubbed your toe" / "you just headbutted a beam" in terms of damage done. Of course I will readily accept that my current sounds aren't the best way to communicate that, and I'm totally open to other types of sounds if anyone would care to suggest something. But I'm fairly confident they need to have a similar level of impact.

I have bigger on-hit sound effects but they only trigger when you take more damage in a single hit...in practice with the current gameplay balance they almost never play. Death is by a thousand cuts, and I'm mostly OK with that.
It doesn't have to be loud, it just has to communicate the idea that a dangerous piece of metal is loving up our ship, which is right in front of us. The current effect sounds like somebody threw a rock at the hull of our ship, which we are deep inside of. Even a weirdly quiet explosion would be better IMO, or a crunching sound... or just anything that sounds like actual damage is being done.

nurmie
Dec 8, 2019

TooMuchAbstraction posted:


I'm torn on the camera vs. ship being the audio source. It felt very strange to me to have bullets whizz by the ship without any auditory effect. But it's definitely also a bit weird for the camera's position to have no effect on what the player hears.

To me personally, sounds sound more correct when they're positioned against the camera. It's easier to triangulate the source of the sound that way, without having to do mental calculations about the angling of the ship and all that.

With the volume of fire the player generally receives, tracking every single shell seems like a bit of an overkill to me, both performance-wise and player feedback-wise. It's one thing when you have 1-2 shells whizzing past, but it's impossible to say whether the wooshes coming from 30-40 projectiles flying in several directions at the same time are properly positioned, plus the player will be otherwise occupied to notice discrepancies :v:

So something like a level system for volumes of fire seems appropriate. Like, if it's 1 or 2 shells over several seconds, they can be properly positioned. If it's more than that, I reckon playing a prerendered audio loop (maybe one out of several, maybe with several layers indicating severity of fire, maybe randomized for pitch/starting point, etc) would be more than enough. Ditto for a thousand cuts-style damage feedback, I suppose. Important one-off stuff like torpedos would need proper positioning though.

To add a bit of oomph to the sounds in general, it's worth to look at compression and side-chaining. It's basically making all other sounds much quieter when some loud and important sound happens, like a huge explosion or a shot from Big Bertha overpowering everything else. It's used extensively in game audio as a general oomph-adder (All modern Battlefield titles and War Thunder do it all the time, just to name a couple of examples) and more generally in music all over. It should be possible to implement in vanilla Unity audio engine (I'm not too familiar with it though so not 100% sure).

megane
Jun 20, 2008



anothergod posted:

I played a bit of Nosferatu for reference. Very cool, but a lot stiffer than this. Still looking for references to complex platformers.

Celeste is the best platformer I’ve personally ever played.

TIP
Mar 21, 2006

Your move, creep.



Unity's speech recognition is driving me insane.

At almost exactly 500 seconds of dictation it just fails. Sometimes it fails earlier, and very occasionally it manages an extra 20 seconds, but mostly at 500 seconds.

When it fails it doesn't throw any exceptions, and if you check it's status it will tell you it's still working, but it isn't. And the worst part is that the only way to get it working again is to use it's dispose method, but the dispose method causes the game to freeze if the recognizer has already failed. The only way to recover from that is to click the game window twice. If you do it only once it stays frozen but a pop-up appears telling you the game isn't responding.

I attempted to force the game window into focus and I also attempted fake mouse clicks on the game window, but neither worked to unfreeze the game. Only the player themselves clicking twice works.

I really only need the voice recognition to work for about three minutes at a time, so I tried completely destroying the speech recognizer after every section where it's needed, and then creating a new one when it's needed.

This allowed me to get about 45 minutes without it hanging the game, but it still eventually has an early failure and hangs. Testing is really fun, because it takes forever to verify whether it's working. :suicide:

After a lot of testing and trying every solution I can come up with I think I'm just going to have to skip over Unity's speech system and hook directly into the Windows Speech API. And then at least if the problem still persists I'll know it's a windows problem and not a unity problem.

If any of you have ever had a similar issue with your game hanging until you click on it twice I'd love to hear anything you learned from it.

It's so drat annoying, I know there's gotta be some way to automatically do whatever clicking on the window twice does. It feels so fixable.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


How the heck is militating uniform texel densities supposed to work? Like, here's a room and two props all set to 1.28 px/cm:



The room is already way too big for the 0-1 space, but neither prop is getting enough texture resolution. If I kick it up to 5.12, which is apparently the recommended ratio for third-person camera, the room UV gets even more ridiculous. I know that consistent scale is more important than precisely matching ratios, but it seems like anything small enough to fit larger objects in the 0-1 space is going to be prohibitively low-res for smaller objects.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

baby puzzle posted:

That's why you write your own audio renderer 😈

I used to do this kind of thing, which is why I never finished a project. The entire point of using Unity in the first place was to keep me from writing my own game engine.

al-azad posted:

Use a threshold system where beyond certain points of damage you get a big hit sound. That’ll communicate to the player something is wrong.

I have a threshold system, applied per-hit. Are you suggesting that it instead be applied when your health reaches certain points of damage? Like, you get a big explosion when your health hits 1/3rd? I guess that could work, as a sort of low-hitpoint-warning.


Scoss posted:

Regarding Ship Sounds:

IMO having the sound of shells constantly whizzing past your ears for the entirety of a mission might get super tired. I tend to think a lighter touch is better with sounds that could be playing nonstop.
This is a legit concern I also had. What sounds good in 20-second clips might get really irritating during a 10-minute mission. We'll have to see how it goes. I can always dial down the volume at least.

quote:

You have like zero appreciable hit confirm VFX or sound effects for both enemies and the player ship. You seem to be pulling more towards arcadey action than mil-sim, so I would encourage you to really go hog wild with hit-flashes and explosions and debris/particles. If it were me, I'd be trying to evoke a metal slug boss or something with that level of energy.

VFX have the same issue as sounds -- does a minor chip hit deserve getting a big explosion? I'm 100% confident that having constant big explosions going off will be tiresome, because I've been there before.

As for confirms when the player hits things, part of the difficulty there is that much of the time you're firing at long range, such that the target is smaller than the 128x128 pixel targeting icon. The other part is that I want to make it super-clear when a ship dies, which is when I do break out the big explosions and have a specific sound effect that plays. For hit confirms, I have a picture-in-picture system to show the current locked-on target at a higher level of magnification, which flashes up a "HIT!" text when you hit things...it's not diagetic or something that'll get your blood pumping though.

quote:

As for the player ship, I'd want to see way better visual feedback for when you're actually getting hit. There's too many bullets flying around on-screen for me to track which ones actually manage to make contact with the player ship, and the subtle flash and the health bar losing 1 pixel is not doing it for me. At bare minimum, there needs to be much stronger feedback for when you actually get hit by a torpedo or something that could do appreciable damage.

Right, when you get a big hit there is (or at any rate, should be) a bigger sound and hit effect. The small stuff being small is intentional though, so I'm really not clear on what you're suggesting needs to change. Do you want big sounds and VFX for losing .5% of your health?

Lork posted:

It doesn't have to be loud, it just has to communicate the idea that a dangerous piece of metal is loving up our ship, which is right in front of us. The current effect sounds like somebody threw a rock at the hull of our ship, which we are deep inside of. Even a weirdly quiet explosion would be better IMO, or a crunching sound... or just anything that sounds like actual damage is being done.

Alright, thanks for the suggestions. That's helpful!

nurmie posted:

To add a bit of oomph to the sounds in general, it's worth to look at compression and side-chaining. It's basically making all other sounds much quieter when some loud and important sound happens, like a huge explosion or a shot from Big Bertha overpowering everything else. It's used extensively in game audio as a general oomph-adder (All modern Battlefield titles and War Thunder do it all the time, just to name a couple of examples) and more generally in music all over. It should be possible to implement in vanilla Unity audio engine (I'm not too familiar with it though so not 100% sure).

It looks like Unity has an Audio Compressor. I've never used it before, but now I know it exists, so thanks!

megane posted:

Celeste is the best platformer I’ve personally ever played.

Celeste is a very standard platformer from a controls and design perspective. anothergod is looking more for games deriving from Prince of Persia, is my impression.

I mean, everyone should play Celeste, and I daresay its design has lessons for you regardless of the genre you're making, but it doesn't seem like an obvious "if you want more of X, try this out" recommendation.

LawfulWaffle
Mar 11, 2014

Well, that aligns with the vibes I was getting. Which was, like, "normal" kinda vibes.

anothergod posted:

I played a bit of Nosferatu for reference. Very cool, but a lot stiffer than this. Still looking for references to complex platformers.

I’d throw out Flashback as a sort of platform adventure game that always holds a place in my heart. It’s a little slower than what you have though.

I think this tweet shows off some core tricks that you might not notice in platformers. Click through for more examples, and a thread from a Celeste dev is in the replies which is also good. If you go to this guys site he has a browser game to demo the things demonstrated here.

https://twitter.com/davesinhispants/status/1281189581161988098?s=21

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Tip posted:

Unity's speech recognition is driving me insane.

At almost exactly 500 seconds of dictation it just fails. Sometimes it fails earlier, and very occasionally it manages an extra 20 seconds, but mostly at 500 seconds.

When it fails it doesn't throw any exceptions, and if you check it's status it will tell you it's still working, but it isn't. And the worst part is that the only way to get it working again is to use it's dispose method, but the dispose method causes the game to freeze if the recognizer has already failed. The only way to recover from that is to click the game window twice. If you do it only once it stays frozen but a pop-up appears telling you the game isn't responding.

I attempted to force the game window into focus and I also attempted fake mouse clicks on the game window, but neither worked to unfreeze the game. Only the player themselves clicking twice works.

I really only need the voice recognition to work for about three minutes at a time, so I tried completely destroying the speech recognizer after every section where it's needed, and then creating a new one when it's needed.

This allowed me to get about 45 minutes without it hanging the game, but it still eventually has an early failure and hangs. Testing is really fun, because it takes forever to verify whether it's working. :suicide:

After a lot of testing and trying every solution I can come up with I think I'm just going to have to skip over Unity's speech system and hook directly into the Windows Speech API. And then at least if the problem still persists I'll know it's a windows problem and not a unity problem.

If any of you have ever had a similar issue with your game hanging until you click on it twice I'd love to hear anything you learned from it.

It's so drat annoying, I know there's gotta be some way to automatically do whatever clicking on the window twice does. It feels so fixable.

Which speech recognition API are you using, and which version of Unity?

I've heard of other problems around a 500s timescale caused by a missing
code:

.ConfigureAwait(false)

I have PMs if you want more direct help.

jizzy sillage
Aug 13, 2006

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I have a threshold system, applied per-hit. Are you suggesting that it instead be applied when your health reaches certain points of damage? Like, you get a big explosion when your health hits 1/3rd? I guess that could work, as a sort of low-hitpoint-warning.

You should probably have a visual indicator of ship health on your ship itself, like deck fires and stuff if you're at <30%.

Maybe if you take a hit from 100% to 95% it's a normal volume, normal explosion effect, but if you're going from 25% to 20% it's more dangerous, right? So do some extra explosions on the decks, like ammo cooking off or fuel explosions, with some nice black diesel fire smoke clouds. The hit is still the same, 5% damage, but the effect is more obvious because the player should care more about being close to death.

DaveKap
Feb 5, 2006

Pickle: Inspected.



LawfulWaffle posted:

I’d throw out Flashback as a sort of platform adventure game that always holds a place in my heart. It’s a little slower than what you have though.

I think this tweet shows off some core tricks that you might not notice in platformers. Click through for more examples, and a thread from a Celeste dev is in the replies which is also good. If you go to this guys site he has a browser game to demo the things demonstrated here.

https://twitter.com/davesinhispants/status/1281189581161988098?s=21
Ah I love this stuff so much. I wish there was a proper collection of things like this on one site. There was one really amazing webpage that was a collection of "how cameras in 2D games work" that is my bible for that one specific problem.

TIP
Mar 21, 2006

Your move, creep.



leper khan posted:

Which speech recognition API are you using, and which version of Unity?

I've heard of other problems around a 500s timescale caused by a missing
code:
.ConfigureAwait(false)
I have PMs if you want more direct help.

I'm just using the built in Windows Speech functionality (using UnityEngine.Windows.Speech). From googling it looks like the ConfigureAwait is something from Microsoft Azure/Cognitive Services API for speech. I'm sticking to the free built in Windows 10 speech recognition because paid APIs are WAY too expensive for what I'm doing.

I spent today trying to directly use the Windows Speech API, and it was a huge failure! You can easily use it in a C# project by just adding a reference to the System.Speech DLL in your IDE, but that fails in Unity. Including the DLL in the assets gets closer to working, but still fails.

After much research it appears that I need to write my own C++ wrapper for it, and then create a DLL for my C# code to use. I found someone who did almost exactly what I need, but for Windows Speech Synthesis instead of recognition:
https://chadweisshaar.com/blog/2015/07/02/microsoft-speech-for-unity/

It doesn't look THAT complicated to do, but I have 0 experience with C++ so I don't want to disappear down a rabbit hole trying to figure this out. It actually would be really nice to implement this way because Unity's implementation only supports Windows 10 but the API goes back to Vista.

Instead I guess I'm going to just make the inevitable failures as smooth as they can be and come back to this at a later point. :/

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

jizzy sillage posted:

You should probably have a visual indicator of ship health on your ship itself, like deck fires and stuff if you're at <30%.

Maybe if you take a hit from 100% to 95% it's a normal volume, normal explosion effect, but if you're going from 25% to 20% it's more dangerous, right? So do some extra explosions on the decks, like ammo cooking off or fuel explosions, with some nice black diesel fire smoke clouds. The hit is still the same, 5% damage, but the effect is more obvious because the player should care more about being close to death.

That's a good idea. I want to reserve actually visibly being on fire for a damage-over-time status effect, but I could make the ship smoke heavily, and/or have occasional spontaneous explosions or sparks or something. Smudging the materials of the ship could also work, but I'm unsure how to implement it cleanly...maybe with a decal?

baby puzzle
Jun 3, 2011

I'll Sequence your Storm.
I'm not sure if I've plugged this person before, but he does very detailed playtesting, with a focus on user experience. He tested my game and gave me some great insights. He'll play even the most prototype games.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl4IxW2484SzBMzoIIZHHjQ

baby puzzle
Jun 3, 2011

I'll Sequence your Storm.
Trixie Mattel retweeted me what the gently caress do I do

https://twitter.com/SEQUENCE_STORM/status/1283210097724817408

e: i have never seen notifications explode like this wtf

baby puzzle fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jul 15, 2020

al-azad
May 28, 2009



baby puzzle posted:

Trixie Mattel retweeted me what the gently caress do I do

https://twitter.com/SEQUENCE_STORM/status/1283210097724817408

e: i have never seen notifications explode like this wtf

Plug your soundcloud and make a big deal about muting the thread.

Hover
Jun 14, 2003

Your post hits a tree.
The tree is an ent.
The tree is angry.
Oof, okay, finalized all the media and uploaded the early access trailer. This is a really big step and kind of terrifying so I'm going to post it for #screenshotsaturday and lead up to it with a fun little cryptid silhouette guessing game:

https://twitter.com/stacksquatch/status/1283199470155358208

That's how you calm nerves, right? Ramping hype and and presence leading up to the busiest time of the week for small gamedev? I figure it's a good trial run for the full release at any rate and it's not like I have a ton of followers right now.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Good luck!

A LOVELY LAD
Feb 8, 2006

Hey man, wanna hear a secret?



College Slice

Hover posted:

Oof, okay, finalized all the media and uploaded the early access trailer. This is a really big step and kind of terrifying so I'm going to post it for #screenshotsaturday and lead up to it with a fun little cryptid silhouette guessing game:

https://twitter.com/stacksquatch/status/1283199470155358208

That's how you calm nerves, right? Ramping hype and and presence leading up to the busiest time of the week for small gamedev? I figure it's a good trial run for the full release at any rate and it's not like I have a ton of followers right now.

Final step of marketing - bigfoot hoax

Mata
Dec 23, 2003
I found myself once more diving into blender and making a new unit for my lil game. The angle might seem a bit awkward but it's an RTS so this is what most people will be seeing.

Critique and stuff is welcome, I feel like animating a walk cycle is like doing a downward dog in yoga, it's one of the first things you encounter but it's not until your skills improve a bit that you realize how bad you are at it.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
That looks fine, perfectly serviceable. If you wanted to jazz it up a bit I'd animate the cloak too. The only thing I think is noticeably detracting from it is that it's not clear at all what the guy has in his left hand. You might consider just removing that element from animations where it doesn't read cleanly.

A couple of juice upgrades for my game:

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1283132272204410882

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1283570107831083008

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

fun little article by the shovel knight guys

https://yachtclubgames.com/2020/06/valuing-players-time/

about how to avoid timewasting stuff in games

Ranzear
Jul 25, 2013

Tunicate posted:

about how to avoid timewasting stuff in games

That's a bit more directly functional than I expected. One of my biggest gripes in my space of mobile game design is that menu fiddling to collect daily reward junk or clean out trash or even just close the news popup every single menu reload isn't gameplay and should be purged with maximum fervor.

I think in my case though it's more about skinner box bullshit overtaking the part that could actually be called gameplay in terms of time or effort invested by the player.

A lot of their examples are less about removing timewaste and more about removing friction. Sometimes friction is good. Death is a friction mechanic, which is why they mention tuning their checkpoint system so much because it needs some impact. I feel there's a confusion of timewaste and friction going on, but for the most part it's all good.

Shoehead
Sep 28, 2005

Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?
Still on my break form the Zelda game while my RL job is starting up (and crushing my soul and heart tbh)


This doesn't look like a lot but there's actual damage calculation going on now. Just a really quick and dirty (strength*attackpower)+1d6 vs defence+1d6 . Though atm the defence is too good!




Enemies have a footing value that gets chipped away at by attacks and once you wear it down you're knocking these guys over. So I set up a launcher attack (thanks Ken) to test out juggles vs attacks that really properly knock you back.

It all mostly works but again I'm feeling like spawning hitboxes with sequences is both really useful and not powerful enough yet for me. I'd love to be able to set values in the the hitboxes I spawn as I spawn them (so for example an attack with a higher attack power set by me) which you can do normally in the room editor but not in sequences yet. It would make this a LOT easier, though I've got around it by having so far 3 types of hitboxes with different values. You also still can't spawn a sequence that's been flipped so I have to make whole new sequences for if you are facing left.
Finally I still have no idea if you can tie the sequence to the same x and y position as your player, which I would really need for spawning hitboxes as you move. As it is the movement of the dragon punch is just sprite animation as opposed to how the enemies position actually changes as it gets knocked around. It's not ideal

Surprise T Rex
Apr 9, 2008

Dinosaur Gum
That looks rad as hell. I tried building a platformer/combo system a while ago for one of the old SAGDC jams, and it never really got anywhere, but this is basically exactly what I had in my head when building it.

Can you go into detail on the implementation of the combo system?

Macichne Leainig
Jul 26, 2012

by VG

Ranzear posted:

That's a bit more directly functional than I expected. One of my biggest gripes in my space of mobile game design is that menu fiddling to collect daily reward junk or clean out trash or even just close the news popup every single menu reload isn't gameplay and should be purged with maximum fervor.

I think in my case though it's more about skinner box bullshit overtaking the part that could actually be called gameplay in terms of time or effort invested by the player.

A lot of their examples are less about removing timewaste and more about removing friction. Sometimes friction is good. Death is a friction mechanic, which is why they mention tuning their checkpoint system so much because it needs some impact. I feel there's a confusion of timewaste and friction going on, but for the most part it's all good.

It's so annoying honestly. "Don't forget to collect your free FunBux, and then also this, this and this..."

Mobile games today are mostly full of cancer. I'd like to eventually start making mobile games that don't follow that trend. I don't care if I don't make loads of money or can't pay for the exposure, games should be games first.

Shoehead
Sep 28, 2005

Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

Surprise T Rex posted:

That looks rad as hell. I tried building a platformer/combo system a while ago for one of the old SAGDC jams, and it never really got anywhere, but this is basically exactly what I had in my head when building it.

Can you go into detail on the implementation of the combo system?

I have a combo variable and a small array.

The attack array is a list of my animations in the order they come in the combo so when the time to play the animation it looks kinda like

sprite=attack[COMBO]

This time I decided to have the combo number go up once an attack finished animating which turns out works pretty well.

Where it gets a little bit more complex is that you can interrupt the part of the animation where your character is reseting. So if you hit attack again in the last two frames of an attack animation the combo increases by one seeing as the increase at the end of the attack animation is being interrupted.

It's not perfect. You need frame perfect input to do the fastest version of the combo which I might change. It could do with some sort of input buffer for it.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Ranzear posted:

That's a bit more directly functional than I expected. One of my biggest gripes in my space of mobile game design is that menu fiddling to collect daily reward junk or clean out trash or even just close the news popup every single menu reload isn't gameplay and should be purged with maximum fervor.

I think in my case though it's more about skinner box bullshit overtaking the part that could actually be called gameplay in terms of time or effort invested by the player.

A lot of their examples are less about removing timewaste and more about removing friction. Sometimes friction is good. Death is a friction mechanic, which is why they mention tuning their checkpoint system so much because it needs some impact. I feel there's a confusion of timewaste and friction going on, but for the most part it's all good.

An interesting thing to think about is how death is usually friction but doesn't have to be. One of the reasons why games like Super Meat Boy can have you die hundreds of times and not get annoying is that restarting is basically instant, there's no friction. Imagine if there was even a 5 second delay on each restart and how much more frustrating that would be.

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Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Protocol7 posted:

It's so annoying honestly. "Don't forget to collect your free FunBux, and then also this, this and this..."

Mobile games today are mostly full of cancer. I'd like to eventually start making mobile games that don't follow that trend. I don't care if I don't make loads of money or can't pay for the exposure, games should be games first.

game immediately jumps into a tutorial on how to use the cash shop

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