|
 Getting to a point where my 5 person coop RPG is looking like a game again. Wanted to make something more substantial, but didn't have a lot of time to work on it last night. Earlier this week I got the first boss all modeled and textured and junk.
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2013 01:18
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 09:15 |
|
|
Lord Windy posted:How do you guys stay so motivated with your games? Everyone gets that from time to time. Sometimes the best thing you can do is get away from it for a few days and sometimes you just have to force yourself to get something done and ride the momentum from that. The absolute WORST thing you could do, in my opinion, is start a new game. Doing two games at once has never worked out well for me. It takes some discipline to stay on target.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2013 07:31
|
|
|
Manslaughter posted:sin() and cos() are amazing for anything you need to go up and down. If you need better control: What helped me visualize a sin wave is that it's literally the y component on a unit circle. Sin(angle) is the y coordinate of the point on the unit circle of that angle and Cos(angle) is the x component. So when you use "time" as the angle sin(time) oscillates between -1 and 1 as time progresses. Tummyache fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Nov 11, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2013 19:55
|
|
|
I could use some opinions on my character design if you guys have the time for it. I've been trying to nail down starting gear for the 5 classes in my game and I chose the healer class to kind of get a grip on a style and then work that into the other classes. I started basically by trying to adapt the healer from a previous 2D version of my game, but I think it turned out really drab and boring.  After watching Mido stream I realized all my UV maps were hosed up and redid them, then redid the textures over again. It turned out more solid than the first attempt, but still not too great.  Zizi, on IRC, gave me a poo poo ton of good ideas on how to kind of fill in the blank spaces in the equipment and make it seem like less of a solid blur. I got less into the mindset of "I want these to be cyan robes" and more into a "These robes should represent the characters abilities which are all about healing people with light and the juxtaposition of dusk and dawn". It was a lot of fun getting all worked up about it and I think it's WAY loving better than the other two, but I don't know if I can trust my opinion since it's all I've looked at for the last 5 hours.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2013 06:40
|
|
|
xzzy posted:Well that right there is the issue everyone who ever worked a 9-5 job struggles with. Once you cut that chunk of 40 hours out of your week it doesn't leave much room for all the other stuff such as living or having fun. I've got a full time day job. Trick for me is to sleep 5-6 hours a night and never talk to anyone ever again. For real though, I do only sleep 5-6 hours a night. Usually like every other week though I'll take a day to either catch up on sleep or hang out with some friends. I really don't think there's a way to complete as big a game as I want without taxing my mind and body to get it done. Maybe you should try lowering your standards, try smaller games and plan to finish them in larger chunks of time.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2013 20:43
|
|
|
So I tried my hand at remaking the base character model for my game. I had just enough time to texture it and it was BEAUTIFUL. The colors were so vivid, everything was perfectly placed, it was the greatest texture I'd probably ever made, I felt proud for the first time in what seemed like forever... Then blender crashed like 8 times in a row and deleted my texture so I made this instead.  
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2013 08:42
|
|
|
Nition posted:I haven't used Game Maker myself so I'm no expert on it, but it does sound like a decent place to start in the sense that you can do some programming, but you don't need it as much as with Unity. Unity markets itself as great for everyone but it's really very code-centric. Reading this was like sex for my eyes. I went on a bit of a crusade on reddit a while back because people kept coming to the gamedev subreddit asking what to use for game development if they had no experience coding at all. The idiots on there would consistently tell them, "Use Unity, it's the best at everything" or "Use this obscure Javascript/HTML5 framework with no documentation". Unity is an AMAZING engine to work with, but C#, the component system, and all the intricacies of the engine itself will dick you over and end up crushing your spirits if you're unsure how to use them. Things like Game Maker and RPG Maker are phenomenal first steps to take when you're not familiar with how code works. They will, hands down, do the best job of bringing you from crawling to running at your own pace, as fast or slow as that may be.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2013 02:18
|
|
|
After dragging my feet for like 2 weeks, I began finishing up a few of the spells in my game. It's really hard not to focus on bells and whistles right now, but I'm trying to shoot for a playable demo pretty soon. Full video here
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2013 07:23
|
|
|
shs posted:
I don't know if you're looking for advice, but I felt like the enemies could use a "tell" to notify when they're about to hit you. Felt kind of cheap to just count the seconds to when they'll attack next. I do really like the variance in attacks and stuff though the dodge rolling and sliding felt really good, but blocking seems kind of underwhelming. Also what's your beef with external IPs? The NAT punch worked great for me.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2013 01:23
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:The more that I work with it, the more that I dislike the default Unity Input system. It just seems like the least efficient way to do key commands. In order to get things properly moving based on FixedUpdate, yet still properly register double-tapping keystrokes, I'm having to maintain arrays to keep track of what's pressed and on what timer. Which means that detecting events would be straight up better, because that's what I'm doing except that I'm manually looking at every key in every Update rather than just checking the type of key when a key is pressed. I'd go straight to event detection except that I want to use the input configuration window that comes with Unity rather than write my own (yet). This is dumb. Am I missing something? Is there a reason why this is good? I just constructed all my gameplay so it's kind of internally buffered, then just check if the key is currently down instead of if it was pressed that frame. Like jumping, instead of checking if the key was pressed that frame and then setting the velocity accordingly, I check if the key is currently down and the player is on a flat enough surface, then set the velocity. I don't think it's bad, but the implementation is SUPER narrow, it doesn't play well with FixedUpdate at all. EDIT: Actually being super narrow is kind of the definition of "bad" in code terms... so probably look into other solutions if you're dependent on double taps and stuff. Tummyache fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Dec 27, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2013 20:49
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:Okay, here's a bit clearer (I hope) tutorial on using animation layers for manipulating 2d sprites. This is particularly relevant to a Megaman clone because one of my character's abilities is a very Megaman-esque dash maneuver. Here's how I'm setting up my layers: Do you get any stuttering when going from say Falling to Running? Whenever I have to transition THROUGH a state (like Falling > Idle > Running) it plays that middle animation for a few frames. I'm using the 3D stuff so it might be a case of my animation trying to play over the blend time before it transitions.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2014 16:06
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:I've had some of that happen with other 2d animations, but it seems completely not noticeable in this particular instance. Probably because the first frame or so of idle is a good transition from falling to walking. That has to be my biggest gripe with mecanim right now, that it doesn't completely resolve the states in a single cycle. Like it will ONLY move one state per update. I guess it would be a potential infinite loop if it ran around until it could find a case where it couldn't move to another state, but it does seem like the most logical way for it to work. It would help out a LOT with organizing states and cut down on like 50% of the transitions. Maybe I should throw a feature request or something out and see what they say. It's cool that you've got the layers to kind of organize different animation priorities though, I thought of doing that a while ago but hate dicking around with mecanim so much I never tried it out.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2014 17:41
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:I'm glad that you're finding it useful. I haven't actually figured out exactly how layers prioritize either - the "weight" value doesn't seem to work the way that I thought it would (I'm band-aiding it with parameters that turn conflicting layers off completely). Also the up/down ladder input is snapping back to the ladder even once you're well off of it. As far as I can tell the layers work in stacking order. So your base layer is always the lowest priority and the farthest one from the base is the highest priority. The weight is specifically to multiply any child transforms inside the animation. The weighting shouldn't be useful at all in 2D unless you have an articulated animation. Forer posted:I'm having an issue with a delay though on the animation even though it's in fixedupdate, it just seems like it doesn't want to immediately shift states or something, Have you taken notice of that or am I missing something else. Just out of curiosity, do any of your transitions use the "Exit Time" parameter? Tummyache fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Jan 4, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2014 04:34
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:I was afraid that was the case. Doesn't look like it unfortunately. EDIT: Uhhhh technically you can copy a layer as an entire sub state machine. But that's kind of gross. Tummyache fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jan 4, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2014 04:41
|
|
|
Forer posted:All of my transitions are crafted of the highest quality gold made into the precise shape of an arrow as determined fr- Oh, you said the animation parameters are set in FixedUpdate? They should be in the regular rear end Update, FixedUpdate is only called like every 1/20 of a second. Update is the one called every frame.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2014 02:53
|
|
|
Got fed up with my starter characters armor and redid all of them this weekend. I went with a completely different art style and learned a valuable lesson, pixel-art in 3D is something that requires a gently caress ton of effort. So I dropped trying to make everything crisp and clean and made these instead.    And here are the old ones for scale  I tweaked a little bit of the geometry too. Glad I've been taking these historical screenshots because it's crazy to see how different things look.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2014 07:28
|
|
|
x239marine posted:Sorry if this has already been asked, I didn't really see anything in the OP. I plug this every time people mention pixel art, but I made this tool like a year ago called Palette gently caress. Didn't think it would be useful, but I saw a few guys plugging it last Ludum Dare. It doesn't make good pixel art, but it makes making good pixel art a little easier. Wish I had time to remake it to be less crap.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2014 07:30
|
|
|
Shalinor posted:Uh, dude, I... uh. Man the lovely thing about networking is that it is a persistent thorn in your side. Only when the entire game is done will you be able to call the net code done. Not a lot of people understand that it's not just a matter of figuring one thing out, it makes every simple problem you run into a really complicated one.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2014 18:55
|
|
).
|
Yodzilla posted:So here's a general question about Unity, should you try to never use GetComponent at all during runtime or is it acceptable to use it when absolutely needed. I call it all the time and it doesn't seem to impact performance at all for me. That's anecdotal though since I don't have the profiler for it. But I've got tons of objects called getComponent right in the update and keep a constant framerate on my poo poo walmart pc. I guess if you were being an optimization nazi you could cache the components by the gameObject reference the first time you get it like a few other people mentioned.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2014 02:56
|
|
|
deck posted:The issue is he's in a collision handler, where all he gets is the GameObject reference. He either has to call GetComponent<> or do a hashtable lookup (which is probably exactly what GetComponent does behind the scenes). Ah you are absolutely right. I assumed getComponent was iterating through a list but a hash table makes way more sense.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2014 04:18
|
|
|
FraudulentEconomics posted:Piggybacking off of engine talk, I'm extremely hesitant to get involved in Unity because I'm not very strong on the code end of things. I use Construct 2 right now and can make it do about anything I want it to do with 2d. I'm not looking to make game design into a career, so would it benefit me to learn C# and Unity, or just stick to what I know and keep on with Construct 2? Agreed, so long as your doing it for yourself, stick to what you know if you're actually trying to get poo poo done. If by "career" you mean work for a company, then you'll have to learn whatever they need you to, which probs isn't construct. But if you plan on doing the indie thing forever than just use whatever you can truck the most game out of, branch off in your own time and don't push yourself to learn new poo poo because everyone else is using it. I learned C# and C++ and used Unity, XNA, Flash, and built my own engines and stuff and I've been seriously thinking of just going back to Game Maker.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2014 19:27
|
|
|
SuicideSnowman posted:I'm not normally into video game music but this is some pretty good stuff. It's got a jazzy Breath of Fire 3 feel to it. I don't know that it would fit into any of my games, but generally approve.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2014 04:11
|
|
|
NeonCowboy posted:
I don't like to give pity votes. Luckily I don't have to because this looks pretty god damned cool.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2015 22:33
|
|
|
loving congrats man. My first game only sold like 3,000 copies, but even then I was loving stoked, can't even imagine what it's like to be as big as you guys are getting.quote:Personally I've sent hundreds of keys when I did the mailings myself, and I will keep doing it after our launch is over. But most of the success came from youtubers who approached us. My recommendation from this era is that if you are going to do a single thing, learn to craft a press release and submit them to http://www.gamespress.com/. Also look out for websites that aggregate youtubers and journos, like for example http://videogamecaster.com/big-list-of-youtubers. Actually sending the keys is manual work and it's worth it, but keep in mind it's a cold call so your success rate is going to be low. Be funny and hire a writer if you need to. There's tons of starving english majors I wanted to ask though, the press reach has always been a weak point for me in the past. What the normal flow for contacting people? Did you just gather up a big list, email some codes out, and see what happened? Or is there actually some back and forth with the reviewers and poo poo?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2015 22:54
|
|
|
wayfinder posted:Yeah, I know... I had a lovely day and that was the turd cherry on top. Everyone's gonna be fine For what it's worth, I saw Coldrice's post and immediately jumped on chat with a few friends like "Look at what this rear end in a top hat is doing to his game!" It took about 2 hours for it to dawn on me. My brain had just turned April Fools into "That day where Amazon, Google, and Hulu do something weird."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2015 22:09
|
|
|
It's taken me a couple of days to recover and come to terms with my LD game. I think I did really well, I just ended up making another metroidvania game, which is what I always do. Wish I had spent a little more time thinking up something more original. Anyway, it's kind of fun, if a little too hard, and people seem to like the artwork. It's about fishing and hitting fish based enemies with fish. Legends of Kersalmon 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2015 05:32
|
|
|
It's been around 4 years since I was last here. Some life stuff happened and I had to pick up all my poo poo, get a new job, move to a new town, and put everything back together. Worst of all, by the time I got to work on my game again, Unity had gone and updated all the UI and Network code I was depending on. So I started again completely from scratch and made some massive improvements to everything. It's a small scale (5 Player) co-op online RPG with a heavy emphasis on teamwork. Here's an old screenshot of what it looked like ~4 years ago. A LOT has changed since then. I ditched the 3D models for characters because they were taking a shitload of time to animate properly and didn't even look good enough to justify it. Also the entire game worked on an auto-attack timer system like WoW, where you would mostly click on an enemy to target it and then click on abilities to use them on the target. I've done completely away with that system and moved onto more action based combat, similar to Terraria. I've been working on it for about 7 months on the weekends, hoping to have something playable before the end of the year. All the hard networking stuff is done, I just need to fill it with content and a few gameplay mechanics.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2017 17:21
|
|
|
WarpDogs posted:Really dig the style, but your genre is throwing me. 5 player co-op is kinda weird, but as an RPG? I'm having trouble visualizing what that looks like. It's REALLY similar to Terraria, only there's no building and there are some MMORPG mechanics in it like Leveling, Class Archetypes, and poo poo like that. It's not like turn based or anything, you just jump around and click to use abilities.  I wanted to make a coop game like Diablo, WoW, Monster Hunter, etc. But I always feel like those games either take 8 months to get started (WoW) or they feel like single player games where other people are around (Diablo). Also does anyone have a good workflow for gif recording? That one took me like 45 minutes to put together and it involved recording a video and then recording a gif of that video.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 10:13
|
|
|
Wicked, thanks for the recommendations guys. Goon Cam seems to work best for me, but I'm definitely going to try that OBS to GfyCat method sometime.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 17:01
|
|
|
KillHour posted:The "Victory" animation is really cool. I love the retro feel. The only thing I'd recommend: have you thought about making all the pixelated bits the same dpi? Having some things more pixelated than others looks off. I know it would be a huge undertaking though - you'd probably have to do a lot the art again. But it's the only thing that makes it seem "amateurish" to me. I thought about it, and generally I'm a pixel purist, but I figured standardizing the pixel size was a lost cause with all the 3D background things going on anyway. I'm focusing on the bigger stuff for now but I may go back and redo some of the higher res looking art. Some of it looking "off" is a big enough excuse for me to redraw it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 17:45
|
|
|
A little screenshot saturday action. I added a kind of study as a lobby to choose quests, craft, party up with other players. Currently I'm in netcode hell though because I decided to revamp all the networked interpolation and it's completely boned.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2018 00:15
|
|
|
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 BoF3 is one of my favorite games. I could see why people don't like certain parts, but it's a pretty strong RPG in general. Also that loving soundtrack was unmatched.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2018 17:46
|
|
|
Hey everybody, I used to post here a few years ago but fell off the gamedev radar for a while. I started back up a few months ago on a life-sim crafting game and could use some input on UI direction. I originally threw together this UI really quick just to get things working, but I always hated the look of it.  This week though I've been experimenting with a new UI theme based around an old Gameboy kind of aesthetic.  Can't tell if I'm just going down a rabbit hole though, nothing I do seems to make the UI feel right. I like the whole gameboy angle and the shader on the background looks cool, but it's just not clicking in my brain.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2022 17:15
|
|
|
Thanks for such quick replies! I think I'll move forward in this direction and bump the fonts up to be more readable. I really appreciate it!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2022 17:57
|
|
|
Joe Desperado posted:On the topic of parsing though, at first glance I thought the blue boxes (Inventory, Weight, Money) were buttons as well because of their shape and color. I would with either really bring down the saturation or just remove the blue boxes entirely. That's what I'm working on now. I'm going to break in a secondary color for general input controls like buttons and text fields, just so they are identifiable, but everything will keep the same saturation level.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2022 21:01
|
|
|
I like the cute old trick of using fake percentages and straight lying to players' faces. I can't find any of the old articles, but I'm sure most people have heard of it. A lot of old SNES games would roll a 1-100, then use that number to grab the actual chance from a table of predefined numbers. So if you have a 90% chance to hit, it's actually a 95% chance, and a 10% chance would actually be a 30% chance. In essence, it just bumps small number up a lot and large numbers up a little bit, which makes the RNG feel more accurate even though it's not really. On top of it feeling better, I also like how it punishes players for focusing too much on the math instead of just playing the game.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2022 16:59
|
|
|
I redid the HUD on my game to fit the whole Gameboy style. Maybe I'm just a simple man, but this little zoomy effect on the action bar is like my favorite thing. Here's the old and new style for comparison. The old one was kind of half way there before.  
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2022 11:05
|
|
|
Cory Parsnipson posted:Youtube keeps recommending godot tutorials, which is freakin awesome. After looking around for a bit, I've come to the conclusion that the "ysort" option on tilemaps is mostly for top down games like zelda and earthbound, but isn't quite right for iso games. I think what happens is it works well enough for most people or that their game is constrained to a grid on a flat board. My game isn't even isometric and I'm still having trouble wrangling the ysort to work properly. Godot 4 has some changes that are going to make it less of a headache, but I'm still waiting to try it out. I envy the people who bit the bullet right at the start and just made a 3D game that looks 2D. The lights look great btw.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2022 23:12
|
|
|
I think with the HUD looks better, the design is so clean and minimal that it doesn't really get in the way.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2022 15:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 09:15 |
|
|
I've been finishing my new update on itch and finally got it done this morning. I'm very happy with the UI, it feels so snappy and responsive now. Just moving your mouse back and forth over a list of items has all these satisfying little clicks. I really appreciate everyone who gave me feedback on that, I couldn't be more pleased with the result. I also added a bunch of other stuff, but the UI is my favorite. A fair amount of it was just sprite updates like this, which I posted on Reddit and everyone liked the old ones better...    One thing I massively underestimated was how impactful animations would be on how the UI feels. I was just messing around one day adding squishy transitions and it increased the quality by like 10 times. Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out. https://tummyache.itch.io/the-last-craftsman Hoping to do a kickstarter next month, but I've only got like 100 plays on my demo. Does anyone have any marketing pro-tips?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2022 00:06
|
|