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KillHour posted:Find a screenshot of a game you want to copy the style of and do whatever they did.
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Jun 12, 2020 04:21
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Omi no Kami posted:That makes sense... since I don't want to go the cel shading route, do you see anything wrong with sticking with the standard shader? I don't need a lot from the shading side, just enough lighting information so I can light the scene and have props look decent from any angle, but I feel like a huge weirdo painting what is for all intents and purposes a ps2-era flat texture, then plugging it into a shader designed for physically-accurate lighting and decently high-definition textures.  Personally I wouldn't use handpainted textures along with any shading (i.e. drop the standard shader and go with unlit) but that obviously means you need to take care of shadows in some other way if you want them. A relatively common way in games is using vertex colors like I showed in one of my previous posts (Nintendo was doing this well into the Wii era) but it's a pretty different workflow. It's not like there's a right or wrong answer to it though and you may not be bothered by handpainted texure+basic shading the way I am  to put it simply; KillHour posted:Find a screenshot of a game you want to copy the style of and do whatever they did.
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Jun 12, 2020 05:01
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Fair enough- thank you guys for all of the advice. 
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Jun 12, 2020 05:20
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The common thing in the PS2 era was to have no real time lighting. Either bake into static objects or turn off shadows and use lights only for contrast. See the PS2 version of Splinter Cell has no capability for the real time lighting of the other versions but is still convincing by basically using the equivalent of light probes.
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Jun 12, 2020 09:55
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Going full-on unlit is really tempting, especially because I'm not doing anything particularly nuanced with lighting... the main thing that keeps holding me back is that I do have dynamic time of day- it's sloppy and just involves screwing with the shadowcaster, environmental fill and PP grading, but I'm pretty sure that if I cut lighting entirely and try to approximate the effect with a shader, I'll just end up re-inventing a really schlocky lighting system.
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Jun 12, 2020 10:20
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Re-inventing a really schlocky lighting system was bread and butter of that era, so you're right on track!
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Jun 12, 2020 11:35
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PS2 era did often have real time lighting on characters and precomputed on environment (for that matter, it also happened on PS1). Some exceptions are interesting though, for example the first two Kingdom Hearts games have the characters only receive a constant uniform lighting term, to mimic a cartoony look, except on the Pirates of the Caribbean stage where all the movie characters are lit "realistically" (ie like in FFX) while all the KH characters get their usual ambient, to induce a Roger Rabbit effect (they even comment on it).
Chev fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Jun 12, 2020 |
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Jun 12, 2020 12:20
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Omi no Kami posted:Going full-on unlit is really tempting, especially because I'm not doing anything particularly nuanced with lighting... the main thing that keeps holding me back is that I do have dynamic time of day- it's sloppy and just involves screwing with the shadowcaster, environmental fill and PP grading, but I'm pretty sure that if I cut lighting entirely and try to approximate the effect with a shader, I'll just end up re-inventing a really schlocky lighting system. Give the shader a shot, IMO. It's not too difficult to add a "light color" parameter that gets added onto or multiplied by each fragment. Of course this won't do shadowing or other variable intensities but it can do a lot to help set mood. Mostly white, bright color during the day; bluer, less-intense color at night, and oranges/reds during sunrise/sunset. The assumption here is that you're always going to have enough light to see what you're doing.
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Jun 12, 2020 14:45
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Give the shader a shot, IMO. It's not too difficult to add a "light color" parameter that gets added onto or multiplied by each fragment. Of course this won't do shadowing or other variable intensities but it can do a lot to help set mood. Mostly white, bright color during the day; bluer, less-intense color at night, and oranges/reds during sunrise/sunset. Huh I think I'll have to give this some tinkering then- I might find that getting stuff to look just right is too much of a slog, but especially since I've had an awful time playing with the new URP/HDRP workflows and am at the Eff Unity s Lighting stage of working with unity's lighting it's worth giving it a host!
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Jun 12, 2020 20:56
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Always inspiring to see game dev work chugging along in this thread! I've been MAJORLY depressed as of late with all the crazy poo poo happening, but hey! I managed to make this waterfall today so that feels pretty good. There's also been a little backend stuff here and there, such as playing different footstep sounds for different materials which makes a big change in how just walking around feels, but it's been sloooow goin.
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Jun 13, 2020 01:31
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That's a good-looking waterfall! Nicely done. I hear you on the depression. This has been a bad week for me, and it hasn't been a particularly great four months for that matter. I'm doing my best to at least not feel guilty about how little I'm getting done day-to-day.
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Jun 13, 2020 02:00
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That's a good-looking waterfall! Nicely done. Thanks! Indeed it's been a rough year overall, but this past week really kicked that into high gear eh? Nonetheless, any progress is progress I suppose! With that, we added some splashy puddles today and I continued tweaking the waterfalls trying to ride off yesterday's high.  
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Jun 13, 2020 19:46
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Bert of the Forest posted:Thanks! Indeed it's been a rough year overall, but this past week really kicked that into high gear eh? Nonetheless, any progress is progress I suppose! This looks cool. Keep sharing stuff. Hope things can brighten up a bit for you.
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Jun 13, 2020 20:16
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I'm continuing my bezier procedural geometry by extruding the shapes to add height with a triangle strip. The UVs are not quite right (checkers on the side should start at the top or bottom, and are too large)... and there's a seam where the vertices wrap around, but it's close! I don't care about continuity of the top and side textures but I want them to at least be consistent. 
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Jun 13, 2020 20:22
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Bert of the Forest posted:Thanks! Indeed it's been a rough year overall, but this past week really kicked that into high gear eh? Nonetheless, any progress is progress I suppose! I've been trying to do little things that don't require much thought, like making new ships/ship parts. That's stuff I can do even when I'm not super-motivated. Today I decided to add flags to the ships, which does require more thought, and the flag picker UI has been a real struggle. But getting the flags to display properly wasn't too bad, and it's let me do something that, while realistically really tiny, feels meaningful.   The flags are real small in-game, but they wave in the breeze anyway. So far the flags I've added are the US flag, BLM flag, LGBTQ flag, and Trans Pride flag. At some point I'm gonna have to add more country flags, but I appreciate the balance of fighting-oppression flags vs. regular flags right now.
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Jun 14, 2020 00:32
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add user importable flags so members of the 2034 CHAZ separatist movement can have one
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Jun 14, 2020 03:16
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Modding support is one of those things I want to add, but it has to take a backseat to actually getting the game done. Hopefully it won't be too hard to retrofit it in later. Most of my systems are pretty data-driven to start with, so all I need to do is allow them to source data from outside of the build.
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Jun 14, 2020 04:01
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Hell yeah. Consider simplifying for better visibility e.g. 
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Jun 14, 2020 13:40
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Are we all ignoring the big Battleship pegs, or should I maybe ask about that
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Jun 14, 2020 14:01
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anothergod posted:Hell yeah. Consider simplifying for better visibility e.g. I had a design like that initially, but aesthetically it looked off. In particular, the black background looked way better (to me) in-game. The text isn't exactly subtle, but I think we've learned that subtlety just straight-up doesn't work on this particular topic. Ignite Memories posted:Are we all ignoring the big Battleship pegs, or should I maybe ask about that Hahaha, goddamn, you're right, they do look like those. Those are the ventilation stacks that release the exhaust from the ship's boilers. If you look closely you can see some smoke effects above them. Said smoke used to be a lot less transparent but it was annoying to stare at black clouds all the time while playing the game so I toned it down.
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Jun 14, 2020 15:00
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Is anyone else participating in the Steam festival thing? https://twitter.com/polyblockstudio/status/1272976434076803078 Ours went live a few minutes ago, and even though there's a hojillion other demos available google analytics seem to suggest that a few people are finding it somehow. If you want to drive a tank around and maybe shoot at some other tanks then now's a pretty good time for that I think.
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Jun 16, 2020 20:50
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Tanknarok is namedropped in an article at Gamer.no today. It's an old and popular Norwegian site so hopefully that helps too. Best of luck, guys!
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Jun 17, 2020 12:18
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I generally use Tiled Map Editor to try out pixelart tiles, but I've been working on iso assets w/ an emphasis on verticality lately, and that's definitely pushing outside of Tiled's isometric support. AFAIK it's really great for something like Diablo, but not so much Tactics Ogre or FFT(Advance). Anyways, has anyone used any programs to build tactical RPG maps?  
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Jun 17, 2020 18:12
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If I were making even 2D style Tactics Ogre maps I'd probably do it in Blender and render it as a 2D image.
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Jun 17, 2020 19:02
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You can now actually finish and leave my first dungeon https://twitter.com/Shoehead_art/status/1273272745929908225?s=09
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Jun 17, 2020 19:17
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al-azad posted:If I were making even 2D style Tactics Ogre maps I'd probably do it in Blender and render it as a 2D image. Heh, while making this 2D iso pixel art my brain just keeps thinking how much better this would be if I just did it in low poly 3D with sprites like FFT. I put asset packs up on itch.io, and I thought this would be good practice, so here we are. This is me actually testing how it'd work in Unity  What's funny is that even tho the sprites are the same size on the screen for all 3 of those ortho cams, with a little thought you realize that they're actually wildly different heights. Bc of the Moon Fields I memorized the very easy Y scale for 60*, but it took some doing to figure out 45 and 30. I honestly forget how to figure out for any X rotation (it's 1/cos(angle) if you care), but that's fine. I can't imagine doing this at any other angles. 30* = 1:2 rise over run anyways PS: That we never got larger scale skirmishes like Tactics Ogre on bigger 3D maps is a shame. The Tactics Ogre PSP remake has 3D maps that they use to rotate the camera to overhead, but they never let you use it to rotate around things.
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Jun 17, 2020 20:19
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anothergod posted:Heh, while making this 2D iso pixel art my brain just keeps thinking how much better this would be if I just did it in low poly 3D with sprites like FFT. I think with a couple plugins you can do that in rpgmaker now
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Jun 17, 2020 20:35
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Edit: Nevermind, I don’t think it does what you need. Veni Vidi Ameche! fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 21:14
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MagicaVoxel would probably work for those kinds of maps. Though I'd try to do it in Unity so it was easier to attach game data to tiles when building. When I built a tactical rpg prototype I actually used a Unity voxel modeler/renderer I had built previously and it worked great for an FFT style map.
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Jun 17, 2020 23:12
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I put out a new demo of my game, and promptly got a report that once combat started, the player wasn't able to control their ship at all. It took me awhile to reproduce this, because the trigger condition was that you didn't skip the introductory cutscenes for the new mission. Which of course I always do when testing. The underlying problem was due to the logic I use for disabling objects during cutscenes. Obviously during a cutscene I still need time to run, but anything that exists in the mission shouldn't operate. So the various combat controller objects all inherit from a base class that's responsible for disabling them at the start of a cutscene and then restoring their original state at the end of the cutscene. But that logic only keeps a single copy of the "not in cutscene" state. So if (for some unknown reason) you start a cutscene while another cutscene is already running...your original state gets overwritten, and at the end of the cutscenes, you'll be dutifully "restored" to the "still in a cutscene" disabled state. It was easy to fix -- just have the logic ignore redundant attempts to start or end cutscenes. But man, this sure feels like the kind of bug that bites a lot of games. (the demo's been updated with a fixed version)
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Jun 18, 2020 03:24
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been thinking about this a lot lately due to the deluge of tiny and cute games from the itch.io bundle and figured I'd ask - what's the place(s) to meet other hobby gamedevs these days? I've consciously been working solo for a long time and this thread's the only place I've really shared any of my stuff or talked about gamedev with others. I'm... kinda terrified of working with other people since I tend to go long stretches without getting any work done due to sadbrains but OTOH if it's just smaller projects it might be more motivating, fun and productive working together with others. Bit of an odd question, but I really don't know where else I'd ask.
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Jun 18, 2020 05:23
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Your Computer posted:been thinking about this a lot lately due to the deluge of tiny and cute games from the itch.io bundle and figured I'd ask - what's the place(s) to meet other hobby gamedevs these days? Here's a link to DogPit discord, a gamejam discord run by forums user xibanya https://discord.gg/RnHWMcG
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Jun 18, 2020 05:39
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There's also the Awful Jams Discord which I guess I've always seen as the "Official" Making Games Megathread chat: https://discord.gg/UwXZtgJ
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Jun 18, 2020 08:40
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Yeah, both of those are good (and unsurprisingly there's substantial overlap in their populations). In the beforetimes you could also have looked for gamedev meetups in your area...I recommend adding a calendar event set for, like, December, to look for those.
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Jun 18, 2020 14:26
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i know twitter can seem like a big scary place to share your work, but there are a lot of indie devs on there and the ones i follow all seem really nice and supportive of each other
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Jun 18, 2020 19:25
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i hired somebody from fiverr to do some voice lines and I liked it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6UZB8VrISg
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Jun 19, 2020 03:52
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I'm working on custom paint jobs for my ships. The basic concept is pretty straightforward: drop a texture into a folder, and it becomes available to be splatted onto your ship, e.g.  (paint schemes like this aren't that far-fetched, though the colors are a bit unrealistic; look up "dazzle camouflage" if you're curious) Where it gets tricky is in figuring out how to customize it in the ship designer. The theory is that the texture supports up to 8 different colors by assigning on/off values to the RGB channels (so e.g. if a pixel is RGB (1,0,1) then that's color #5). I made this simple mockup of a potential UI:  ("scale" is how frequently the texture tiles) Where I'm stuck is in how to assign colors. There's a variety of color picker assets on the Unity asset store, but none of them look all that gamepad-friendly, and I don't want to minimize the degree to which the game depends on keyboard/mouse (currently, keyboard is only mandatory for inputting your ship name). I don't really relish the idea of making my own color picker from scratch...do you think it'd suffice to just have a bunch of preset colors that you could navigate through with the gamepad?
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Jun 19, 2020 21:19
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Where I'm stuck is in how to assign colors. There's a variety of color picker assets on the Unity asset store, but none of them look all that gamepad-friendly, and I don't want to minimize the degree to which the game depends on keyboard/mouse (currently, keyboard is only mandatory for inputting your ship name). I don't really relish the idea of making my own color picker from scratch...do you think it'd suffice to just have a bunch of preset colors that you could navigate through with the gamepad? Depending on if you want pickable light/dark/desaturated colors: Make some kind of radial wheel to pick the Hue, and slider (maybe just another joystick up/down) to pick the brightness value ?
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Jun 19, 2020 21:35
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Are you already using vertex colors for something else? I'd think it would be easier to just let people paint vertex colors onto the mesh and combine them in the shader. There are a lot of examples around of runtime vertex painting. If you don't want to bother with a true color picker I've seen plenty of indie games that just let you pick a color from a list of 32/whatever colors and I think that'd be fine. You could even combine the other suggestion and pick a color and then have sliders to customize it with brightness/hue/whatever. Tackling a whole color picker does seem intimidating but HSV sliders are pretty straight forward.
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Jun 19, 2020 23:54
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FuzzySlippers posted:Are you already using vertex colors for something else? I'd think it would be easier to just let people paint vertex colors onto the mesh and combine them in the shader. There are a lot of examples around of runtime vertex painting.
It's a really handy technique, because I can indicate functionality in Blender by just painting a bunch of vertices with different colors. I have no manual postprocessing to do to my parts after I export them to Unity (like setting up colliders or updating some kind of custom data file that says "projectiles come from here"); just a script to filter vertices based on their color. Plus I don't actually want to deal with a painting UI on the ships. That sounds complicated and also overkill. The goal here isn't that you draw a landscape on the side of your boat, cool as that might be. It's just meant to be another path for customization, and it should be as easy as possible to interact with. quote:If you don't want to bother with a true color picker I've seen plenty of indie games that just let you pick a color from a list of 32/whatever colors and I think that'd be fine. You could even combine the other suggestion and pick a color and then have sliders to customize it with brightness/hue/whatever. Tackling a whole color picker does seem intimidating but HSV sliders are pretty straight forward. Yeah, I started working on an HSV shader, and while it inevitably took longer than I'd like, I do now have something that can render an HSV circle, adjust value, and tell me the RGB color under a cursor. So I guess that's what I'm doing.
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Jun 20, 2020 01:02
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