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ClownSyndrome posted:Craftstudio looks like an interesting tool for making simple games with minecraftish graphics This is really cool looking, but since I didn't see it anywhere- are the visuals limited to the Minecraft, voxel style, or is that just the aesthetic it's advertising with? I'd love to hammer out some N64 style games over a few weekends with a friend.
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Apr 25, 2013 01:35
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Orzo posted:In my latest update I'm showing off something I spent the past few days tying up loose ends on for my engine. Now I can start writing permanently usable entity behaviors (i.e. the meat of the game) and edit their properties in the editor. I just want to say I really enjoy your updates- it's awesome seeing video footage of an engine developing from its infancy into something pretty powerful. Are you going to keep these tools internal or are you going to release it as some sort of awesome Zelda-like toolkit? FuzzySlippers posted:That video looked really solid. Do you have camera logic to keep your camera from pushing close to the limits of your levels or do you have something like bumper planes / collision objects set manually on the edges to keep the camera from getting too close? I noticed it was smoothly tracking in the Y while you were jumping but then stopped as you approached the top of the level. I missed this response when I replied last time- I can set map boundaries on a per-room basis with my map editor, like this:   I can tell how many rooms to have active after entering a door by doing a flood fill on the map and seeing how many rooms it hits. Those rooms are loaded and marked as active. When you leave the bounds of those rooms, it finds your new map position, does another flood fill, and keeps on going. This can lead to some strange glitches if I don't keep the bounds marked correctly.  I made some more progress with my engine- doors! They're simple (and shamelessly stolen assets, at the moment), but I had it running without them and I just like the definition they give to each room. They're a good tool to guide the player and make areas / rooms feel distinct from one another. The best part about them is that it was really easy to implement them, which means I did a decent job with my object hierarchy  . Player movement is even closer to being finished- all I'm missing at this point is crouching. I don't think I'm going to include crawling, mostly because it slows you down unnecessarily, which is kind of contrary to the central mechanic of the game- pursuit. I'll talk more about that later. For now, I'm going to start drafting the actual game map and figure out what kind of weapon upgrades I want. Here's some music I've put together to kind of get a feel for atmosphere: vvv Well, as a fellow XNA user (at least I think you're using XNA?), I would definitely be interested. I love C# and have yet to figure out Unity. DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Apr 25, 2013 |
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Apr 25, 2013 16:15
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 With the help of a friend, I have a fancy CRT filter working! I'm pretty happy with how it came out.
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Apr 27, 2013 05:00
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 I didn't join Ludum Dare, but I made a TON of progress on my game. Movement physics have been tweaked to feel a lot better, elevators work, fall and shot blocks work perfectly, and water! I recorded a video and uploaded it, although I'm still not sure how to get the framerate on these to not suck. Still, you can get the gist of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uctshdpIkL8
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Apr 29, 2013 04:11
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Shalinor posted:This looks fantastic. I do worry that the result will just be - well, Metroid - but I've played enough indie platformers lately with poo poo controls that I suppose I'd be happy with even that. Thanks! Honestly, if the biggest complaint my game gets is that it's just Metroid then I'll consider it a success. I made some more progress with room hazards- acid and spikes!   Also, just in case I hadn't mentioned it, all of the graphics here are placeholders. I'm not going to be using shamelessly stolen sprites in the final product- I just need something to get the movement and feel down. Once I get a little farther in I'm going to switch over to Spine for my animations. E: Making sure these elements all work together- here's an underwater elevator that passes through a traversable room. Looks like it's working 
DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Apr 29, 2013 |
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Apr 29, 2013 17:30
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  Sorry if I'm posting too much, I just finished another chunk of player movement. You can crouch walk or roll through tight spaces. This is the narrowest space you'll be able to fit through- no Morph Ball here.
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Apr 30, 2013 07:02
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Screenshot... Wednesday!   (These look way better at native res, so open them into a new tab to see them. The CRT filter doesn't like being downscaled.) Liquids look WAY prettier, and now they have a distortion / blur shader on them. The distortion bit is kind of subtle, but you can see it on the ramp if you look for it. It works on lava too, as pictured. Usually I would have left this kind of fun shader programming for later, but I actually needed water on a separate layer for an movement upgrade I'm working on, so I figured I'd do it now. I think it looks pretty good! For reference, this is what water used to look like:  Also have a new HUD and a lot of weapons implemented, but I don't want to show those off quite yet. The water is missing an image for the surface, but I'll get a texture for that later. DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 20:52 on May 8, 2013 |
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May 8, 2013 20:50
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Orzo posted:Are those the spikes from Symphony of the Night where you have to use the echo power? They very may well be- I think I just googled "spike sprite" and took the first usable result. Again, placeholders, but yeah. I got that upgrade implemented. Gravity Suit? That's so 1994.  
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May 8, 2013 22:14
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Screenshot Saturday! 
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May 11, 2013 17:40
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 Aw yeah,  I think this is going to work really well once I get skeleton animation integrated. Most everything is going to have lots of flat coloring to take advantage of this. I'm almost done implementing all of the player's upgrades, which means I'll be able to start on that animation soon. Once I get that done, I can finally start constructing the real game world instead of all of these test areas. Sonata Mused posted:I'm also wondering about this. Trying to make a 2D Castlevania-esque game. Shindragon posted:I have a question. Gamemaker has limitations beyond 2D right? Is a side scrolling beat em up out of the question? I"m pretty sure a beat em up is probably more complicated than platformer. I haven't used Construct, but Gamemaker can do pretty much anything you'd possibly want to do in 2D. I used it for a long time before switching to C++ and then C#, and you'd be surprised how much you can squeeze out of it. If you're just starting, you're not going to come close to hitting its limits. It can do anything you've seen in a 2D game up to the Saturn, at the very least. You can also transition to scripting as you get comfortable, so it's a nice introductory program as well.
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May 14, 2013 04:26
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Making Games Megathread - Use Futile for 2D in Unity Seriously though, it should probably be in the OP at this point.
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May 14, 2013 19:56
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Drafting up some thumbnails to get a look and feel figured out for my areas. I'm not really much of a pixel artist, but I think this should help me actually make the real tiles later, since color is going to be a huge factor in setting the atmosphere for each area.     
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May 15, 2013 01:38
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And one of those thumbnails roughly drafted into a tileset! There won't actually be water here later- it'll be sleet and cold, but I wanted to see how water looked with the tiles. I'm pretty happy with how the tiles look in-engine, so I think I'm getting to where I can start making more of them. Open the screenshot in a new tab, otherwise the scaling makes artifacts with the CRT effect.
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May 15, 2013 03:37
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Let's talk about development cycles. How do you guys approach developing your projects from a big picture standpoint? Do you perfect each feature as you go, until you've finished the game? Or do you get each feature to a workable state, then go back and give it another go-over? Basically, what software development methodologies do you use, if any? I started programming games way before I took a software engineering course, so it's taken some effort to break my old habits and organize my process at all. I used to focus on the little stuff a ton, but get too hung up on some little feature and never finish a full project. I'm going about my current project totally differently- trying to rough, basic working implementations of each feature completed and then I force myself to move on to the next one. Once I've got what's essentially a full rough draft of the game, I can go back and iterate over each feature that isn't quite up to snuff until I have a complete product I'm proud of. I'm curious to hear how everyone else approaches stuff like this- what worked for you, what didn't, etc.
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May 16, 2013 18:06
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Strachn posted:I liked it better when I thought the characters were named Curtis Keyboard and Donna Drums, it was cute. Jonny Vocals gave that away though. Johnny Vox, maybe?
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May 17, 2013 15:13
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Is there any reason you aren't using the move_contact command? Unless that's changed / been removed since I last used GM, it does exactly what your code is doing. As for why you're getting stuck, I'd guess the player is ending up 1px inside the floor, which is then registering horizontal collisions and setting hsp to 0. Try checking if the ground is at y + vsp + 1 instead of just y + vsp.
DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 06:34 on May 26, 2013 |
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May 26, 2013 06:31
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SystemLogoff posted:Also, Screenshot This looks like an awesome Mother-inspired RPG. Is it an awesome Mother-inspired RPG? You should tell us more about it, because it looks fantastic.
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May 26, 2013 20:30
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Rutibex posted:What's the sentiment on RPG Maker around here? After getting my feet wet with Minecraft modding I have decided to get back into making my old and abandoned RPG Maker game. I'm really starting to notice it's limitations now that I've had a taste of "real" coding; though it's basically perfect in so many way for the game I'm making that I can live with it knowing any other engine would require 10X more effort to implement the basic stuff RPG Maker has incuded by default. I figure this is as good of a time to talk about fangames / fan works as any. I think fangames have their place as a learning tool- its how I started gamedev and I wouldn't know half as much as I do if I hadn't spent hours and hours analyzing, duplicating, and comparing the movement of Mario, Samus, and Mega Man. Creating a replica of something you can only oberve is great practice, much like copying drawings by sight is if you're just beginnning. The main issue I have with them, though, is that there is nothing to be gained by making your work derivative. Instead, it's a detriment. I don't want to play something that, on the surface, looks like a game I like, but underneath shows no understanding of the original work. Instead, I want to play something new that learned from what made those games great. Being heavily inspired by a game is fine- hell, my game is about as close as you can get to a Metroid fangame, but I want that inspiration to be communicated by the heart and mechanics of the game, not because people recognize characters and places from another game they played and liked. Plenty of games have done well while being clearly havily inspired by another franchise. Shadow Complex is basically Metroid Fusion on UE3. Darksiders and Okami are both supposed to be incredibly Zelda-like, though I haven't played them. Hell, even Earthbound is mechanically a poor clone of Dragon Quest. I think what I'm trying to say with this wall of text is, if you want people to play your game, make it your own. Learn from your favorite games, figure out what made them fun to you, and duplicate THAT instead of just making it resemble them on the surface.
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May 26, 2013 21:12
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All that description does is solidify that you have too many subsystems. Any one of those is enough for its own RPG. Implementing them may not be an issue, but balancing them is another story. Pick one and refine it until its fun on its own. If they're not fun on their own, they won't be fun together.
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May 27, 2013 01:25
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Lots of progress without a ton to show for it- here's a bit of a milestone, though: First screen without any stolen assets! I'd be lying if I said the player was completely replaced, though. I just bought Spine, and I'm loving it so far. I haven't actually integrated it into my engine yet, but I did it the hacky way and exported a gif, then turned it into a huge spritesheet and slapped it onto my player. Ta-dah! The skeleton / animation / design aren't even close to done, just something I slapped together to learn with, but it's great to see some progress on the player character. The skeleton animation gives it this sweet rotoscoping look that I'm really excited about- it's exactly the kind of sci-fi 80's vibe I want. The other amount of huge progress I made was ripping out the rendering code and rewriting it all to use textured quads. Now I can draw those and other primitives with ease, which will let me do dynamic lighting a lot more easily. I can also apply shaders on a per-sprite basis now, so distorting explosions and active camo are all things that are actually doable if and when I want them. I'll update again soon when Spine is actually integrated into the engine, but I wanted to share a thing for Screenshot Saturday. Lucid Dream posted:Here are some gifs of some things we added this week: Iron greatsword, Pump action shotgun, Blunderbuss, Arnie's Gun, Some kind of energy charge cannon (this one isn't finished, still needs particles and effects) This is badass.
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Jun 2, 2013 07:02
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Well, after some practice with Spine and applying some shader magic, this: Turned into this!  Much better. Now I have to make the entire set of animations, but still, I'm really happy with how it's coming along. I'm excited to ditch the placeholder sprites and get a real protagonist in here.
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Jun 3, 2013 00:06
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Zizi posted:Gotta be honest, I'm kinda digging the silhouette-with visor look in your previous post. Maybe you don't need much more "real protagonist" than you have. That's pretty much all it'll be- I forgot to put the visor on the skeleton. By real protagonist I just meant ditching the Samus sprite I'd been using. I'm not much of an artist, so the player and all of my enemies really are just going to be colored silhouettes.
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Jun 3, 2013 00:27
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seiken posted:I have a first draft of a lighting system for my thing. Since it's a huge gif, here's a demo linked on another page. This looks great- it's something I'm going to try implementing myself, soon. Yours looks fantastic, awesome work! I got skeleton animation totally integrated into my game- the last few posts about them had been exporting from Spine -> Gif -> Spritesheet, then using those ingame. This is actually using a Spine skeleton in-game and it looks silky smooth:  I know the hands don't line up perfectly, but I'm still happy with it so far. Now I need to make the player's animations, but still- I'm at the point where I'm not using any stolen assets at all in-game. Feels good, man.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:15
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seiken posted:I think we're working on projects that are spiritually very similar (Super Metroid with tech that makes use of the compute-power we have today is my philosophy, ignore the daft placeholder art). If that's your game's general thesis statement then yeah, our projects are very similar in concept- awesome! The more Super Metroid-influenced games the better, in my book. I've implemented skeleton animation systems before but I'm not at all an artist- these are pretty much my first "real" attempts at making animations. Some of them still look a little janky, but by being at such a low res and a solid color instead of detailed bones, it's easier to mask poor animation and get something that looks decent. That, and lots and lots of reference images / videos. I'll definitely check out your posts about the lighting system, the more direction I can get with that, the better. Now that I have the actual animation system in, I can start working on enemies and the game's big-bad. That'll be fun to make- you're going to be hunted by the creature, and it grows more powerful as the game progresses. Like the SA-X, but not limited to scripted encounters. It follows you at a steady rate across the entire game map, so you never know when it'll show up.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:41
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNT6mNhQbB0 Video! The framerate on Youtube kind of kills a bit of the impact, but I have animation blending working, plus you actually aim / draw your weapon when you fire now. If anyone is on the fence about trying out Spine I highly recommend it- I can tweak my animations to get them exactly where I want, I can refer to bones by name in-engine (I have the gun slotted into his hand like this) and I got it integrated into my code in about twenty minutes. For non-artists like me it takes a LOT of the work out of animation (although it still takes a decent amount of effort and a lot of careful references). I'm excited to use it for boring stuff too, like door opening animations and menus. Definitely check it out if you work with 2D.
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Jun 7, 2013 06:39
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Shalinor posted:This looks completely fantastic, dude. Well done. Thanks! I have no idea what I'm doing with it. I guess maybe Greenlight when I get far enough? I don't think I have enough actual game content to really start showing it off yet. Enemies are definitely to come- I'll be designing them alongside the map as I go. Dewgy posted:This is really cool looking. Can you change the images shown for different bones based on animation? I like how it looks and I'm kind of fiddling with my own project, but I'd like to have a little more manual control over the animations. Yeah, you can set individual images per-keyframe, so you can combine traditional animation with the skeleton animation for, say, a reload animation, or changing hand positions. Whatever you want, really.
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Jun 7, 2013 19:08
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Yeah, paperdolling on new skins or whatever is super easy. I haven't done anything fancy with it in my game yet, but I'm using it to hide the gun sprite until you actually find a weapon. It works just fine.
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Jun 7, 2013 19:54
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Sorry if this is too many updates too fast, but it's nice to share after a day's work. Here's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZAqCoMG0zg This is the first time I've got a video of something that looks like a real game- not just some test footage, but this is what I've got so far for the actual opening / etc. The rooms are lacking detail at the moment. I'm leaving them like that until I'm happy with how they all play / feel, and then I'll go back and fill in detail / doodads / unique tiles / etc. Time to move on to the rest of the game world!
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Jun 7, 2013 23:30
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It's not always the best solution, but something I've kind of resigned myself to is making sure that my projects all have aesthetics that are simple enough for me to do. I go for visual styles that mask my lack of artistic skill or just plain don't need a lot of heavy art in the first place. Maybe try going for a heavily stylized aesthetic for your game- wireframe, low poly, cel shading, whatever. Minecraft is a pretty good example of a game that managed to get an audience despite that, but don't necessarily just copy the Minecraft style. Hell, look at Terraria- they're practically recolored Final Fantasy sprites. Find a style you like and commit to it- a simple, consistent, low detail aesthetic can sometimes be a lot better than a more complicated one.
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Jun 19, 2013 17:30
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Ok so where can I play Brock Samson's Goblin Toilet Crusher?
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Jun 23, 2013 18:26
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Orzo posted:Yo check out this thing I did. Things like this make me feel like writing my own level editor paid off. So, in my custom behaviors, code like this: This is looking great! I wasn't a fan of your old sword animation but the new one is nice and responsive looking. The lighting that emerges from the hidden torch is sexy as hell, too. I've used C# for a while now but I have to ask, what is with that syntax in the first picture? I've never seen () =>, what does it do?
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Nov 13, 2013 16:19
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I just got caught up on a couple hundred pages, so it was a while ago - the sword was just a lerping box. Thanks for the explanation! I'll have to try those out.
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Nov 13, 2013 17:08
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It's amazing how much progress you can make and still have so little to show for it. I'm working on an RPG backend so that I can eventually make an SMT style dungeon crawler. I'm only working on all the party / skill / inventory stuff so that I can tie it to whatever visual representation I want to later on. I'm pretty stoked, though- I'm reading in skill descriptions from XML, when you use them it's applying elemental strengths and weaknesses, and it's all designed on top of MVC. It's not much, but I'm looking forward to working with everything from a much higher level once I've got the backend finished. It's already starting to clean up pretty well- here's my little test setup:code:code:
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Nov 21, 2013 21:48
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I've been working on my RPG backend in Java and it's about ready to graduate from a console application. I want to target Android- is libgdx my best option? It looks pretty good, but I'm not sure what other choices I have. I don't need 3D support, 2D will serve me just fine.
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Nov 24, 2013 10:36
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I'm not a fan of the Dreamworks eyebrow thing you've got going on, but it's definitely an improvement over the original. Maybe try and find a middle ground in exaggeration?
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Nov 24, 2013 22:17
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Well, I don't have screenshots yet, so hopefully a bunch of text is ok- the core of my RPG framework is functioning, including most of the battle system. You can see triggered skills working here- Artorias has one called "Damage Buffer" that activates when his weakness (physical attacks, here) is struck. It restores a small amount of health.code:code:
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Nov 25, 2013 00:24
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 It doesn't really do anything yet, but it's running on Android! Now I just need to tie all my backend logic to a functional GUI.
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Nov 26, 2013 03:42
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Megaman's blink at the end perfectly concludes that masterpiece of a gif. I would totally play physics-driven Megaman.
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Nov 26, 2013 20:36
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The bassline is in the wrong key in your chiptune. The chord progression for the bassline should be F C D D G C D D, based on the really quick by-ear check on my bass just now.
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Nov 27, 2013 01:23
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  Screenshot Friday! I have a usable GUI tied to my battle system and it's playable. No visual representation for any of the battle yet, but I can do that next now that I have the interactive portion working. It's exciting to see this take shape.
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Nov 29, 2013 22:12
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