al-azad posted:

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I'm not sure what you mean by aliasing. Are you talking about the ocean shader near the horizon? The ocean shader is very temporary; it's a free thing I downloaded early on.

leper khan posted:

You can always kit bash your prototype and if you need to roll through and paint over all your assets you can do that later.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I was bullshitting with some friends about ideas for the bosses in my game, and I want to share one we were talking about. So, the basic idea here is that when Pearl Harbor happened, the islands got occupied, and the invaders built a gigantic cannon into one of the volcanoes, which they used to shell the United States, thousands of miles away. Right? Gigantic cannon built into a volcano. So how does this work? We want the volcano to factor into it somehow...what if they converted the entire volcano into the weapon? So the caldera is the barrel of the gun, maybe there's an ammo-loading "chute" built into the side that's a weak point for the player to attack. Put some extra, more "normally-sized" (read: still pretty preposterous) guns on the slopes so there's a threat that doesn't deal automatically-lethal amounts of damage.

Ah, but then you do enough damage, so the boss leaves stealth mode. The slopes of the volcano crumble, revealing even more guns underneath! And runways to launch airplanes!

And when you blow all of that up the main gun pops off of its mount and starts tracking you directly on a colossal turret! With a laser sight. And a bayonet.



I feel like my goal for the bosses in this game, at least conceptually, should be to take it to 12. Where 10 is pushing the limits of good taste, 11 is really absurd, and 12 is the player is actively having trouble with the controls because they can't believe the poo poo I'm pulling.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I'm amazed that you were able to pull it off, and I'm glad you're reaping some well-earned benefits.

I have no idea how you'd go about making a platformer or FPS or practically any realtime videogame blind-accessible. So many games depend on your ability to quickly read subtle visual cues and make decisions that rely heavily on your immediate situation (like, exactly how far are you from that ledge, or that doorway, and in exactly which direction?). About the best I think I can hope for is making my game accessible to people with limited mobility. I think I can pull that off by having options for autofire, some navigational assistance (basic terrain avoidance, the same stuff the AI uses), and of course permissive difficulty levels.

I do someday want to try making an echolocation game where there's no graphics at all, or the graphics are just a visual representation of the sound effects, so the game's accessible to the blinddeaf. It sounds like a fun design challenge, but it'd require way better SFX chops than I have currently.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

That's amazing. But it's also an example of someone overcoming disability to play a game that wasn't made with them in mind, whereas the game I'm imagining would be equally accessible to just about everyone.

KillHour posted:

Even if it did have enough energy to move the ship, the guns being above the water line would make the ship roll over and capsize.

Ghetto SuperCzar posted:

I'm not really good at the whole Art thing... but I do have fun using Medium for Oculus. However, that generates a lot of really detailed models, which kind of clashes with the idea of using pixel art sprites for other assets. Anyone have a good strategy for making things look more... jank?

N-N-N-NINE BREAKER posted:

There's an rpgmaker bundle on humble bundle, has anyone tried these before? If I just want to make something really simple are the 8 or 15$ tiers worth it?

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

A bit of musing about writing and, uh, narrative reward systems? I guess? I'm working on the high-level plot for my boat game, and I'm trying to figure out how victorious the player should be up until the endgame. Broadly speaking, the structure here is:

• Get your rear end kicked and run away in the Pacific (USA west coast)
  
• Have some successful battles in the Atlantic (USA east coast) but your land-based support evaporates, so go to Europe.
  
• ??? in Europe (plenty of mission ideas, but the ??? is for how it's structured narratively)
  
• Head back to Pacific for final confrontations.

Now, one way I could structure this is that the player is always on the losing side. They're constantly winning battles, but losing the war, in other words -- their individual efforts aren't sufficient to turn the tide. In each chapter, you arrive in a new location to find that it's only slightly less embattled than the last one, you do some missions, buy some time (and are heartily thanked by NPCs for said time), but ultimately it's futile and you have to move on. I feel like this could help make the story feel more desperate and the stakes feel higher -- the player's safe harbors keep getting overrun and they keep having to run away, until by the time of the final confrontation it's literally just them hauling rear end towards the final boss and hoping they can clutch out a win before the unstoppable tide of enemy forces annihilates them.

On the other hand, I'd worry that players would get annoyed if they aren't allowed meaningful victories over the course of the game. If everything you accomplish is always undone then it's hard to keep up motivation, you know? The common alternative approach is to let every victory the player makes stay -- you roam around, converting troubled areas into peaceful, secured areas, and the enemies just wait for you to show up. I've always felt that makes the overall stakes much lower -- "OK, the war's won here forever, time to move on to the next country". But it does give the player plenty of wins.

Given that I can't really do a dynamic/reactive story (i.e. the player has no control over the narrative), what are y'all's thoughts?

(NB losing the USA is pretty well decided at this point; there needs to be something important to rescue)

quote:

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Rocko Bonaparte posted:

Have any of you played with those anime/toon shaders in the Unity Asset Store? I am assume I don't just install it and get instant waifus.

Whybird posted:

I'm going one step further with my current project and making a comedy "near-impossible to defeat, probably not even fun, what the hell are you thinking even trying this" difficulty that's tuned to be too hard for the developer.

Whybird posted:

Then add a super-hardcore mode which requires you to enter your personal details before it will run, and has a 10% chance per hour played of logging into Gmail and calling your grandma a bitch.

ZombieApostate posted:

Forsooth, roll your own is dumb! Stitch together your eldrich frankenstein horror out of the dismembered parts of other people's work, I say!

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Running checks when a gun is placed isn't really adequate, because the layout may change around the gun after it's placed, changing how it can fire.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I have 98 ship parts at the moment, only 43 of which are weapons -- the rest are mostly bridges, smokestacks, and miscellaneous superstructure. A "bare" ship looks something like this:



They're pretty much blank canvases for you to sprinkle with whatever parts suit your fancy. (I have 15 ship hulls currently; this is a cruiser hull, specifically the Hawkins-class)

Here's dynamically drawing the current firing angles for a pair of guns. The underlying implementation is hideously inefficient, but doesn't produce noticeable lag on this very simple ship.

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

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

The problem is perhaps less of what happens if a gun is added, but rather what happens if a gun is removed.