Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Is this the proper venue for broad goon modding projects that aren’t for commonly modded games?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The White Dragon posted:

Yeah this thread is fine for that!

You'll probably get more direct responses in this thread, but you'd get more eyes on it in the monthly chat thread :v:

I'll write up a tailored post for each, thanks! I'm putting together promo material for it now- it's just a free "you've completely hosed up the balance, and we're fixing it on the top difficulty" mod for payday 2, but it's become surprisingly complex.

I've also finagled that rarest of rarities- a "design lead" position with zero coding or asset pipeline competence. I have like 10 people doing things for me (and fellow goon, programmer iamgoofball) despite the fact that I'm basically the idea guy.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Jun 5, 2018

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I recently reviewed GDPR for a company doing a lot of international data work, and let's just say it's really, really ambiguous on scope and scale. I can understand companies freaking out over it.

Anyway, my project! Some of you might know I spend a lot of time playing popular steam co-op FPS Payday 2. It's done really well for itself, operating for several years under the Games as Service model, adding new missions, difficulties, and unimaginable amounts of DLC. Goon Wilko made several modding tools for the game and was actually hired by the developer, Overkill Software. Aside from some communications stumbles and a particularly toxic modding community, the game was doing well.

This changed about a year and a half ago, when a new gameplay design lead took command and started making really...questionable design decisions, especially with relation to weapon and difficulty balance. The number of enemies in a map kept increasing, basic elements core to the original design got dropped, and a lot of significant bugs were introduced that were never fixed, despite being very simple to adjust. This took its most dramatic form in the release of "One Down", a new top difficulty mode for the game that was accompanied by a whole wave of amateurish and really incomprehensible decisions. One Down (later rebranded "Death Sentence" was infamously and obviously rushed- to the point that enemy models and textures introduced in the new difficulty were actually created by interns with limited oversight or knowledge of the game's design.

Into this void, came "Death Vox". I'd been known in the SA thread for some time for my tendency to write long, dumb rants about how I would change the game's top difficulty for the better. Another goon with ties to the payday 2 modding community and significant coding chops, iamgoofball, made the catastrophically poor life decision of offering to help me, an Idea Guy, make an actual, massive, game-spanning mod that would rework the top difficulty. About nine months later, a team of other modders has signed on, a launch trailer is being developed, and goon design fanfiction has become a modding platform project:



Crackdown basically rewrites or overwrites every aspect of the stats and systems of the enemy side of payday 2's design, using a framework that's surprisingly stable and scalable. It makes changes to enemy pathing AI, stats, spawn patterns, individual mission elements...and a ton of other things, including variables the developers appear to have forgotten exist. Later on we're going to use it to promote a mod structure base that will hopefully extend the game's life past the end of support. I'll not spam the place up with a full changelog, but to provide an example of our visual changes:



These are two kinds of "Bulldozer", payday 2's giant lumbering special enemy type- the original "Zeal" versions made for Death Sentence. Specifically, these are the "White" dozer, on the left with an all-ranges-lethal LMG, and the "Black" dozer on the right, with an extremely close-range shotgun. Not being able to easily tell the difference between these enemies is...kind of a problem, but the interns who made these units didn't know that. Due to shared references, in order to load these "Zeal" versions, the game actually has to simultaneously call the new assets and the old non-Zeal bulldozer textures as well. Despite a severely reduced resolution texture, these units have double the normal asset footprint. We replaced them with these:



Maybe not professional-grade, but now players can actually tell which enemy will nail them from across the map. As an added bonus we've gotten illumination effects working, and these gentlemen's visors glow in the dark. Oh, and the freaking Z on the visor isn't crooked. There, now you have to be aware of it too.

We've done this for almost every enemy type, and a bunch of other things. We're now clearing up the remaining interface bugs while we get ready to "release" the mod a bit after E3. I'm looking forward to your collective mockery as our goon project nears successful completion.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jun 5, 2018

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Yeah often the ways that people hack mods into games are interesting on their own even if you have no interest in the game itself. I know that Payday 2 modding isn't actually super complicated because it exposes a lot of the mechanics in easily accessible lua scripts, but it's still interesting to see what people are able to accomplish within that limited framework.

I'll write up what I can when I can, iamgoofball and Wilko are the real stars there. goofball came up with a really beautiful override setup that makes it easy for a script kiddie like me to bypass the horrible garbage code that the base game uses for enemy stats.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The White Dragon posted:

I highly recommend everyone in this thread play Breath of Fire 3. It's a master course in things you should never put in a video game ever

Has there ever been an informative LP?

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Zereth posted:

I think Discendo Vox meant of Breath of Fire 3 specifically.

Yeah, this. Sorry for the confusion!

MithosKuu posted:

I've got two covering Megaman X7, which for a megaman game is pretty drat close to unplayable

OK, I'd love to see those. I have a sick fascination with the development and design of terrible, corporate, professionally developed games. Link?

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Aneurexorcyst posted:

So my game finally has a release date on Steam. I've screwed up any chance of marketing now, but I'm super happy to have finished the game and have a set release :)

https://twitter.com/SeanNoonan/status/1019351256429748224

Nice trailerwork!

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Aneurexorcyst posted:

So my game finally has a release date on Steam. I've screwed up any chance of marketing now, but I'm super happy to have finished the game and have a set release :)

https://twitter.com/SeanNoonan/status/1019351256429748224

Congratulations on your release-I'm loving it, despite instantly being a million lightyears behind the other goons on the leaderboard. I wanted to ask a question about the UI design here- it seemed very intentional that you're obscuring the player's current score during play. Is there a particular reason for that approach?

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
VR bomb defusal, but serious and complex in tone, with a curve going all the way up to Ruckingeur.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
springy should only be used if you can make his physics react to being hit.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Tell us more about your monetization plan, Escape Goat. No ads is a bold move!

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
You know you have to draw this out into a series, right?


...and that if you do so, you may wind up making more revenue than half the thread?

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Sundae posted:

Been working non-stop on day-job poo poo for months now so my stuff is going at a snail's pace, but thankfully my artist continues to knock my socks off while I'm buried under clinical manufacturing campaigns.



squirrel would make a nice av/promo image, with that text.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bert of the Forest posted:

Oh god damnit haha. I am unfortunately notorious for phallic monster designs constantly propping up. My wife always points this out, and I try to keep it in mind, but the dicks cannot be stopped apparently. :getin:

https://twitter.com/SlickNickLives/status/1052620609895555073

Nonetheless, Steamworld Dig + Farming is indeed basically the concept! The main question here is whether or not that's enough to get it noticed in the crowd. I mean we have dick-monsters apparently so there's always that. :v:

go all in and make an incredibly dick-oriented homoerotic horror game. Just balls to the wall.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I think there's definite potential in a Tesla tie-in DLC. I hear they're hurting for cash, and you might be able to help them solve some engineering problems.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Broken Loose posted:

if anything a tesla tie-in would help you find even more new and exciting ways to make cars explode

Yeah the button was what made me think of it

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Doubling what TooMuchAbstraction says, be proactive and approach this aggressively with thorough application process research. People are otherwise going to use your project to make a lot of money on a lovely product, and you absolutely could and should eat their lunches.

vvv fantastic, best of luck! We're all looking forward to the day twenty years from now when we see you in the papers as part of an internal sweep of contract awarding bribery and corruption in the Air Force.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Dec 28, 2018

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
All Hands on Deck? Deck Wrecker? (Somehow st first I thought this was space pirate themed, which offered even more puns)

Also,

Dear Punlock creator, I am furious that “blue” was not a correct answer on this daily.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Dec 30, 2018

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Escape Goat posted:

The TapSmart xmas article on the Punlock Holiday Special (http://www.tapsmart.com/games/punlock-festive-word-game-twist/) gave the game a nice boost in interest. It seems like there's about 5 to 10 $1 purchases per 100 downloads. From what I understand that's not bad for freemium. And the reviews seem to be consistently good, not just the obligatory nice ones from friends, family, and goons (which are lovely!).

Overall, about 1500 downloads so far. From a satisfaction standpoint, I'm really happy. From a business standpoint, it's a faceplant. It just seems cost prohibitive to acquire more. If I do Apple Search Ads I've seen cost-per-install range from 1.50-5 dollars (and my app only can ever max out at $4). Facebook ads so far I've seen little if any effect. It's so weird how hard it is to get people to download a free game but I guess that's just the reality.

Not sure where to go from here, it's been a real treat to fulfill a dream a long time in the making, but I'll have to find a way to do something more lucrative from here on out. I guess I'll just keep the game alive and see if any famous celebrities get kicked off of a plane for refusing to close it.

There are several fairly straightforward things you could do to iterate on or expand the base puzzle design, but it’s hard to say if they’d translate into profit without passing into the Freemium Abuse Abyss with, like, a progressive energy system or something.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The White Dragon posted:

Just be aware if you're thinking of getting into Unity that in the time I've used it over the past three years, it started out fine and then the amount of anti-consumer and even anti-developer bullshit that's slowly been added to their editor and compiler is loving staggering

Tell us more!

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Omi no Kami, I'm confused- by your account, aren't you looking for oceanfloor depth, not elevation aboveground? I know a tiny bit about GIS from some disaster work I did in Puerto Rico, I might be able to help you source something, maybe.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I just purchased and started playing sequence storm, and jeez this really deserves more store prominence. I know the thread hammered you on the player proxy representation issue, baby puzzle, but the released product is smooth as butter and has a fantastically tuned learning curve and aesthetic.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Helper bot looks too much like a South Park character. You should have an AI competence slider that adjusts how much Helper bot fucks up commands, and have it swap out the face between public domain images of, in order, Soichiro Honda, Henry Ford, Ralph Nader, Preston Tucker, and Elon Musk as it moves down in quality.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
The emergent design issue of collision override seems like it actually exposes an entirely new design axis for puzzles.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I was thinking even simpler- beam of color X overrides beam of color Y, creating an order of operations and space-filling/negation logic...and then if you want to, layer in factor in splitting or convergence, the beam puzzle classic 201 logic level. You could do both, too!

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
$20 horn armor DLC

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
You sound like you should apply for jobs at companies. You've got an incredible portfolio piece now.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Lunatic Sledge posted:

I think... Labyrneath II is officially finished. I want to shoot for Kongregate's game of the month list again, and I've got a couple of days until April actually starts, so I also have a couple of days to dick around with bug testing on Gamejolt. Improvements over the first Labyrneath include:

- Multiple checkpoints per level, holy poo poo
- Boss... experiences
- Less hosed up hitboxes
- Level select
- A save that can't be accidentally overwritten
- The pause menu is tied to more than one key
- Totally different gimmicks and mechanics
- Turning the sound off should actually work for real now
- This bullshit:



(this is from an early build, there's a bit more going on with the background in the final game)

Since the biggest complaint I got on the first Labyrneath was about the excessive anime cleavage, but ridiculous Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade boobs also got like 120,000 people to click the stupid thumbnail, for the sequel I reached a compromise and the title screen is now way more rear end focused I'm going to hell

also like with the first Labyrneath, I cranked this fucker out in like a month. If I ever find the patience to spend more time than that on a game, or the drive to just pump out a game EVERY month, I'm going to live like a king on my pile of tacky browser game gold

Congratulations, Lunatic Sledge!

Some notes:
  • I was unable to run the game in chrome. This might be an isolated case, so maybe others can check.
  • I recommend adding a short invincibility period upon respawn, as you can spawn into enemy projectiles.
  • At the start of "Switch Flippers" there was a sign of some sort of artifact on a tree above and to the right of player spawn.
  • Your boss fight has...issues, I'm afraid. The period to reenter gameplay upon death is too lengthy, and I have no idea how to dodge the seeds that come from the right after the first phase.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Mar 30, 2019

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Lunatic Sledge posted:

Labyrneath II v1.1 is up! Player now has about a second and a half of invincibility on respawn (and will flash during this period), I fixed the floating tree corner in Switch Flipper, and now if you die during either of the boss levels the boss's subsequent entrances will be significantly shorter. I didn't get rid of the entrance entirely since I don't want the player to have to dodge poo poo right back out the gate, but this does shave like 2+ seconds of waiting off. You'll still get the full entrance if you start the level via level select or just reaching it manually.

OK, three more:

1. It would be helpful if the rebound seeds were a different color or had some other indicator.
2. At the end of the final boss encounter, after killing the boss, when I waited around for a second, a second copy of the boss flower came back onto the screen, superimposed over the flaming carcass of the first version. I unfortunately left the screen at the same instant and could not tell the cause.
3. I'm not quite sure how to put this...I think your target audience and demographic are going to expect more of the same reward mechanism you employed so effectively in the first game.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Given your audience I'm amazed anyone complained. I will say that cheesecake aside, the ending is a bit of a wet squib. Maybe consider a teaser for a sequel?

1. Consider removing the coin/key from player inventory on death. As it stands death is frequently faster upon coin/key pickup than re-navigation.
2. I personally found the music too loud relative to gameplay sounds.

My only other feedback is relatively minor, resource-intensive stuff, such as "consider making the start of each level match the end of the previous" and "add time attack versions of levels with no checkpoints".

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Mar 31, 2019

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I knew 4chan was hard up for competent, intelligible content, but, uh, wow.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Would it be worthwhile for Sledge to go in and correct the record? Probably a terrible idea...

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Valve bears tremendous blame for this set of market information issues.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I'm not really sure how anyone could handle 200 games released per day while giving visibility to the games that "deserve" it. Or are you blaming Valve for the market glut to begin with? Are you wishing it was ten years ago when just the fact that your game existed at all was generally enough for it to garner attention? Because TBH the glut feels more like Unity's fault than anything else. Or more realistically, just the general rise of awareness in the public consciousness that videogames are a thing that people can make.

I strongly disagree; there were methods of managing the amount of products that went onto steam that Valve could have applied that would have done wonders to both improve the visibility of games to interested parties, and removed some of the incentives for the undercutting wave of low quality products. There's a great deal of parallelism to other silicon valley media platform entities here; the X per Y content stat is popular, but sets aside the many, many system-scale changes that could be made. Valve's actually particularly terrible at this because so many of Steam's systems and changes have only been implemented as a means of revenue extraction, or to erect greater barriers to competitive entry. Like Youtube or facebook, they gesture at the amount of content, but they are really careful to not address alternative methods or make even obvious improvements (and it's more egregious with Valve because they work even harder to not pay people to do content management work).

Instead they brought in Yanis Varoufakis to talk about how great controlling an arbitrage market is.

Valve has a near-monopoly on the space. Virtually every aspect of the gaming industry that seeks the PC market has been shaped and defined by their decisions about Steam as a platform. They control the horizontal and vertical. How games are displayed is just the most obvious part of the problem; the visibility and presentation of metrics like hours played, the tagging system, refunds, integration of social spaces around the games, secondary currency systems, inventories, VR...all of these have created perverse incentives and determined entire game genres. To put it differently, Valve's not responsible for the glut of games, but they're partially responsible for the glut of terrible games, and they're directly responsible for all the creators that drown in it.

pseudorandom name posted:

This sentiment ignores the fact that if Valve were still playing gatekeeper and kingmaker, most or all of e.g. the games in this thread wouldn't be allowed on Steam because they aren't good/interesting/notable enough.

Well I think that this is just plain wrong (and kinda insulting to the really high quality stuff the folks in this thread have produced!). Valve still is playing gatekeeper and kingmaker; they're just doing an incoherently lousy job of it. The systems they designed to create and manage content display still plays the same role of determining what succeeds and what fails- Steam is far from some frictionless free marketplace with perfect information. There is a whole spectrum of options between "Gabe Newell personally approves what single game goes on the store this week; bring your tax returns" and the current pseudorandom information clusterfuck with a constant undercurrent of scams. Even when they were more directly selecting games, it's not like it produced good outcomes; I still remember Half Life 2D.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:23 on May 5, 2019

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bert of the Forest posted:

Anyone wanna help me with naming my next project? I usually don’t struggle much with this but nothing sounds quite right to me. Admittedly part of the problem is that I partially want the name to be something memorable but broad enough that I can turn it into like a horror anthology if it goes well, but maybe I’m putting the cart before the horse.



Anyway basic premise is “spooky tv that shows creepy stuff after midnight” w/ twilight zone inspirations, so here are the names I thought of thus far:

Late Night/Midnight TV (favorite thus far but impossible to google thanks to its real world use, could be expanded into a broader “Late Night” series)

Blackout Broadcasting (blackout the name of existing game so less potential for separating it from this context)

Drawing blanks for more names. The simpler the better but maybe I’m just overthinking this.

Watershed

After Dark

End of Broadcast

Night Signal

Black Channels

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bert of the Forest posted:

Yeah after giving it a bit more thought, and running some of these by other folks, I think I'll take the plunge with Night Signal. It's the closest to hitting all the tonal and marketing points I wanted, and I think y'all have just about exhausted every other combination there is, so I feel more confident now that I've gotten a good look at the possibilities! Thanks again y'all! And of course to Discendo Vox in particular. Gonna start hashing out a cool logo, hoping to get the store page whipped up this week so it can sit and start garnering wishlists for a while.

My advanced degree in Idea Guy Studies is finally paying off! Glad you liked it, and it's already on my wishlist.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I hate to be a debbie downer given how hilarious that is, but you may want to give some thought to accessibility issues, both in terms of making someone click a hundred times and the flashing light effects.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Omi no Kami posted:

Desert Position?

Pole Bus.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bert of the Forest posted:

My brain broke and I started fantasizing today about "what if I purchased/got the actual film license for the Killer Tomatoes franchise and made a Dead By Daylight meets Katamari game with it?" and these were the result along with a 3-page pitch document. This is what I did instead of actual work for a better part of the day. Halp.







EDIT: Link to the pitch doc in case anyone dares peruse: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ik4xptk1mmy57b6/KillerTomatoes.pdf?dl=0

Dude. Dude. ok, bear with me here.

go to the official site.
https://killertomatoes.com/

scroll down and click on "buy the game".

Realize you should really send the pitch document to them and there is a good chance they will say yes.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bert of the Forest posted:

Oh yeah, the very real possibility is what fueled my sudden pitch rage to begin with! I'll admit this dawned on me more when I started sharing this doc with other local devs, and as of right now have already scheduled a time with another dev to start putting together a prototype to help sell the pitch to the studio. Fingers crossed! If this actually happens I will be so freakin' pumped.

Excellent, way to go!


That’ll be two percent of the gross.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply