Making Games Megathread: Congratulations on releasing the horniest game of 2022

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Making Games Megathread: Congratulations on releasing the horniest game of 2022

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Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Hey Mug, great OP, but one small thing:
It says Unity is "not-free" but only the "Pro" version costs money. The free version is still pretty full-featured.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 22:19

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:33

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

I want to put a small game up for sale on my website, but I'm not sure which system to use. Does anyone here have experience with using the different payment systems?

I'll get the game on Desura if I can, so that's one thing. I already have a Paypal account so I can use that, but I know a few people have had trouble in the past with Paypal freezing accounts etc unfairly. There's FastSpring, there's Google Checkout, I really like the Humble Store system a few indie games have but it seems you can only get that at the moment if you're part of one of the bundles.

Any tips or shared experiences?

# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 23:59

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

I'm also finding it a bit of a nightmare looking for a good, simple, not hugely expensive registration system. Ideally I'd like people to be able to buy my game on my website, then automatically get emailed a registration key which they can put into the game. Ideally I'd want to, not restrict them to a certain amount of activations exactly, but at least see the amount of activations for each key so if I saw one key with like 200 activations I could block it. Maybe activation could also be tied to their email so their friends can't all use the same key so easily.

It's hard to find good threads that aren't just filled with geniuses replying "DRM sux every1 will crack it neway". I realise that, but I there are also people who don't even know what a crack is but if the game is totally unprotected, might just give it to a bunch of their friends who may have otherwise bought their own copies. Practically no-one ever replies in these threads who's actually released a game.

I'm thinking of just going with no copy protection, but if anyone has actually used a copy protection system in the past, I'd love to hear what you used and how it worked out. I'm working in Unity. Could probably use anything that's C#-based also.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 01:35

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Thanks for the advice. I think I'll just go with no copy protection on this one. It's not like this little game is a huge deal anyway.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 03:53

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Mug posted:

How often do you guys have an idea for something to put in your game, but you have to create a little prototype of the idea working stand-alone before trying to put it into your game?

I am slowly building up a little folder called "Prototypes" and its just got a ton of programs in it that perform basic routines that I've eventually moved into my game code after I got it the way I wanted. I have a little program that is just a black screen demonstrating bullets flying around, one that generates vision cones and draws them, and I'm making one now where you just click on a black screen to spawn an explosion.

Do youse sometimes make prototypes in programming languages other than the one your game runs in so you can quickly bang something out to see how it feels before integrating it? I'm just interested to hear how other people go about this kind of thing.

I've found this sort of thing to be a really good idea for two reasons:
1. It forces you to create something that's standalone rather than getting all tied into your current project, so it can be a lot easier to reuse elsewhere.
2. It's often way easier to test when you don't have all these other variables going on in your main app.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2012 00:37

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

The White Dragon posted:

Now I've never claimed programming to be my strong point--just good enough to get things working without the universe imploding-- but I've been checking my task manager with my game open and have gathered the following data:

On an i5 quad core, it usually runs at <1% (displays as 00) CPU and peaks at around 3% between stages before falling back to <1. This, I'm cool with this, I must be doing something right, haha.

It's the memory consumption I'm worried about : whenever I go to a new stage, it seems like it's loading all the PNG data into RAM, if that's even how it works. This seems to be a pretty static value and only increases at very noticeably set times (i.e. transitioning between stages and the world map). Even though the PNG data falls out of use, it looks like the RAM doesn't get flushed and it hovers around ~250-300MB, increasing by about 4-10kb every time you go back to a screen you've already been to, and proportionally to a screen's data size the first time you go to it while the program is running.

At the size rate of the screens that I'm using, it'll probably come out to be about 1GB if everything gets loaded. I mean this isn't really a problem in this age of "16GB of top-quality-brand top-speed RAM costs $120," but conceptually I don't really like this. Is there a way to flush your memory usage in XNA? And if there is, is that even a good idea?

Re going to the same screen increasing RAM each time:
I'm no expert on XNA (or programming!) so someone might be able to give you a better answer, but in C# you don't usually want to manually clear out objects from RAM, you just want to make sure the're free for the garbage collector to do it itself.

It's likely that when you go back to those screens, something's being created each time that isn't getting de-referenced afterwards. Something that the garbage collector thinks is still being used.

There might be a way in XNA to see what objects it thinks are currently in use. If there is, then you can just go to the same screen 20 times or whatever, then look for the object you have 20+ of when you should only have one. Although the garbage collector won't act instantly so it's worth waiting a few seconds (or more) after testing as well.

Otherwise it's more about making sure everything you created temporarily is dereferenced - setting temporary arrays to null and that sort of thing. The garbage collector is actually pretty complicated as well; Microsoft has a good page on it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973837.aspx

# ¿ Sep 24, 2012 21:24

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

The Cheshire Cat, that's a way better reply than mine and I think I learned something too.

Can I just clarify, you're saying that if I made 50 clone ships from shipGraphic, none of them will get collected until I've cleared the reference to shipGraphic itself?

Nition fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Sep 24, 2012

# ¿ Sep 24, 2012 22:19

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Finally releasing my first game today. What started as a learning experience somehow turned into three months of work and a full game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIsgrpWNMi0

Demo download, purchase, and everything are here.

It's pretty "casual", though it's not easy to complete, so I'm putting it as USD $2.50 and I'll see how it goes. Plus there's the demo version. Turns out releasing games is actually pretty nerve-racking! It's written in Unity using C#. This is my first Unity game (it's my first real game at all really), although I've used C# a bit in XNA in the past, and its been good experience. Unity seems really solid as a platform.

A hope this post isn't too spammy.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2012 00:16

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

We don't talk about that. So many lives lost...

# ¿ Sep 26, 2012 03:41

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Just not within the limits of the payment system unfortunately. The only way I could do that would be to bundle all three installers together so it'd be a 3x bigger download. I'm hoping to also get it on Desura which I think should fix that. I agree it's not ideal. If anyone bought one and wanted the other I'd be happy to send them a free activation.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2012 09:50

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Just did some research. I think there is actually a way. I'm gonna do some tests in the background.

EDIT: Managed to get it to be a single purchase which gives you three download options. You can't come back infinitely and re-download but it's definitely better.

Nition fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Sep 26, 2012

# ¿ Sep 26, 2012 10:46

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Oddx posted:

One thing, in the demo my mouse's sensitivity is way too high. Can that be adjusted in the full game?

Actually I just patched that in. Press - or = on the keyboard to adjust mouse sensitivity. You can also press I to invert mouse.

Mug posted:

Cool, I'll buy a copy tomorrow when I get paid (literally do not have $2.50 in my account, just bought Blade Runner 5 disc version with my last dollars)

Man, if you don't have $2.50 to your name, PM me your email address and I'll send you a free copy. Make sure you spend that $2.50 working on your sweet game instead though.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2012 02:24

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Mug posted:

I did some cool stuff in my game that I thought I'd write a few words about.

After I made the "Explosions" work by emitting an ellipse that slowly grows, I took the same logic that makes them work and recreated all of my in-game "Sounds" to use the same expanding spread.

Now, when you fire a bullet, you gun emits a "SoundPulse" that expands across the game field. It expands slightly slower than the bullets travel, so you can shoot people dead before they hear your gunshot. If the soundpulse hits a person, they will either call for help (Emitting a sound pulse that says Help! and also includes the location of the person they're scared of) or they'll start shooting back at you.

Security cameras emit "Alert!" sounds that catch people's attention. Other electronics use sound for other reasons, too.

The coolest thing is the SpawnSoundPulse routine has a variable you pass for it for "IsVisible". If you set it to True, all the sounds in the game are rendered as ripple that move across the screen so you can see exactly who is hearing what and when. Sounds can be set to "Penetrate Walls", "Penetrate Glass", and "Penetrate Ornaments". A "Silenced" weapon can be heard if you're in the same room as it, but not from outside that room. If someone in the room hears the gun shot, they will call for help loudly, which can be heard through walls. But because bullets can hit people before the gunshot sound hits them, you can kill people with silenced weapons as long as no one else is in the same room.

It's cool!

This sounds awesome. Did you ever play Commandos (1998) or the sequels? It had some stealth/cone of vision mechanics a bit like your game. Also, hope you have some fun with my game, thanks.

tehsid posted:

Hey dude, congratulations. You've made it!

You're on Rock Paper Shotgun!
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/27/exquisitely-synth-ful-skylight-demo-and-release/

Good work, I'm really enjoying it at the moment. The music is fantastic and the game flows really well once you get the hang of it. Thanks!

Glad you like it. Sometimes I think I should have added this or that or improved whatever vefore releasing it, but I could probably have kept doing that forever. It started off as basically just a test, I had to get it released!

And yeah, apparently it's way easier to get your game on indie game sites than it is to get your music on music sites. I sent info and a free copy to a bunch of places last night and already a few have put up articles. When I released an album at the end of last year, I sent it to 50+ sites and blogs and didn't get a single review. Actually the most exposure I got was through SomethingAwful.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2012 21:10

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Yeah, it seems like every second game is a 2D pixel-art platformer at the moment. Over at the TIGSource forums it's pretty much an epidemic.

The chaos engine, that image has a great style and everyone is going to be burnt out on pixel art soon.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2012 20:57

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Mug posted:

I draw the way I do in my game because I don't know how to do anything else. I think my game looks nice enough so far, personally.

edit: To add more to this post, does anyone actually look at my game so far and really think "Ugh, pixel art indie game"?.

Nah, your game has a good somewhat unique style. Just the fact that it's isometric instead of 2D makes it a lot less clich�.

Shalinor posted:

If retro-cool tracks with gamer age, I suppose the next wave will be extremely low polygon count people. Which I guess means my block people are going to be super awesome here soon. I was retro-cool before it was cool.

You know you want this.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 03:20

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Svampson posted:

The LoS looks super neat but the problems are more noticeable when you look at it in higher resolution

The fog method it uses is more suited for stuff with more gentle slopes, and not 90 degree walls. I'd probably benefit from rolling my own LoS system in the long run anyway since I'd like something that works directly with my tilemap system and tiles.

One thing is that everything is nearest-neighbour style and then the edges of the fog are anti-aliased. Can you change the fog texture from Bilinear to Point, or something like that? I don't know how that specific system works.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 20:07

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

The one thing I don't like about the inspector is how there can be confusion between what you've changed in the inspector and what's in the code.

Like if you define

code:

public int myNum = 5;

and change it to 10 in the inspector, it still looks like 5 in the script. And if you then change it to 8 in the script, it'll still be 10 in the inspector and in reality.

Of course you can leave things out of the inspector entirely if you want to, but I sometimes feel like it'd be better if modifying a variable in script automatically updated it in the inspector as well. Just thinking about that though, you could have the save script in multiple objects with different variable values, so that might not be such a good idea.

What I do is, if I want something in the inspector, I define it without a value so I have to use the inspector (C# internally initialises everything to defaults anyway, if you're worried about that):

code:

public int myNum;

And if I need something public but I don't want it to show up in the inspector, I use the flag:

code:

[System.NonSerialized]
public int myNum = 5;

# ¿ Oct 9, 2012 21:26

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Man, that new GUI system looks so much better. I used the built-in one for Skylight. :ohdear:

I hope that's in the next release after 4.0.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2012 20:36

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Mug posted:

Okay, one more one I just did then. Can you guys tell what this is meant to be?

I recognised it as an integrated circuit fine, the only thing is it's facing the other way to all the other icons. The music icon for instance, is on the same plane as the icon's border. This one is the only one facing the other way, which looks a little bit off to me.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2012 19:54

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Lord Humongus posted:

Hey guys, does this remind you of resident evil? I kinda wanna try making a low poly game in the style of the old re games.

The computer is untextured and the capsule is a test player.

If you're doing low-poly survival horror, you might also like to check out Alone In The Dark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_the_Dark_(video_game)
And to a lesser extent, Alone In The Dark 2.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2012 05:59

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Kunzelman posted:

I just thought that I would poke my head in here to say that I made a twitter list of all the twitter names that are in the OP. I like using lists, and in case someone wants to check all those people out without individually following/making a twitter, I thought the list would be helpful.

Here is a link! Feel free to add it to the OP.

Want to add me? My Twitter isn't in the OP because I only made it recently. @_BillB

# ¿ Oct 20, 2012 01:09

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Oddx posted:

Screenshot Saturday: Some trees and a cabin off in the distance. Figuring out typography for this art style is difficult.

I really like this sort of low-poly art style. Maybe I played too much Interstate '76. You might be interested in some of the similar stuff on Geo A Day: http://geoaday.tumblr.com/

# ¿ Oct 31, 2012 08:07

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

I'm currently using Blender for everything (modelling, UV mapping, animation) and I've taught myself over the past few months. The interface is still pretty insane, and they keep changing it so old tutorials can make no sense, and a lot of "learning" Blender is learning the hotkeys.

However, I'm convinced that it's a good option. It's clearly very powerful, and I'm getting a lot done with it now that I've got the hang of it. Part of the problem is that there's so much in it that they've kind of run out of space for all the menus and options and hotkeys, especially when more things are always getting tacked on. And 99% of people won't need 75% of the stuff anyway.

For instance, there's a new tool where you can draw a shape and it'll automatically create bones (for animating) to fit the shape. But you'd have to be creating an insane amount of bones to find the normal method of pressing e and moving the mouse once per bone too tedious.

There are people doing very high-quality stuff using Blender as their modeller of choice. Plus of course, it's free. But be prepared for a steeper than usual learning curve. I still get confused about basic parts of the animation system. It's a good point though that if you wanted to get a modelling job, it's probably better to have experience with an industry standard program like Maya or Max.

This is quite a good place to start if you do choose Blender: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

# ¿ Oct 31, 2012 21:17

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

HelixFox posted:

Been working on backgrounds today.

What I'm really hoping for from your game is massively overwrought dialogue/story like in your Avatar.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2012 07:32

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Myopic posted:

It's probably Stockholm Syndrome, but once I got used to the Blender UI and the hotkeys it made me wish that all 3d modelling programs were the same. I only use other apps when I absolutely have to. I'm sure 3ds max or Maya are the ways to go if you want to do this stuff professionally - industry standards and all that - but if you're just a hobbyist I'd say go with Blender (although if you're a student definitely give the Autodesk stuff a try).

Moving stuff around in 3D in Unity is certainly way clunky once you've been doing it in Blender for a while. I have to press a button to rotate the view!? What is this nonsense?

# ¿ Nov 2, 2012 01:51

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Lucid Dream posted:

More video recording testing, figured I'd share (HD):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WyxiIXWcCI

Hey, you're the guys who contacted me back in March about using my music in your game!

Lucid Dream posted:

...we made contact with a couple really cool indie bands for music...

Hey, I'm one of those bands! The game is looking really good.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2012 01:46

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Yeah it was. You've got really nice fluid animations going on there. Although I didn't fail to notice that many of your poor animals are stuck in a hole.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2012 06:03

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Kinda like Lemmings maybe.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2012 21:12

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

The deer's walk does look a bit wonky, but in general you've got much smoother animations that most people, so it's certainly a good start. The art is good too.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2012 01:43

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Just spent hours trying to work out a stupid vector maths problem. It was more complicated in reality, but the crux of it was the fact that if you rotate something along its forward axis, it doesn't change direction! Think of a wheel spinning.

Oh well, this won't be the first entry in the "obvious things you've spent ages working out" file.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2012 04:29

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

ShinAli posted:

Any write ups on how Unity handles depth buffers? Want to figure that poo poo out because it made me pull my hair out during SA GameDev.

Doing a bunch of stupid gameplay prototypes while waiting on a job, but it's been months now and its making me think I should've been working up a game to actually sell

This info from the docs might be helpful? http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-DepthTextures.html

# ¿ Nov 25, 2012 22:12

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Screenshot Saturday?

I'm making a vehicle combat game that owes a lot to the melee mode in Interstate '76, except that you build your vehicle entirely from the chassis up lego-style from parts.

Each part has some function and affects the centre of mass etc as you'd expect. It's very early in development though, there are a million bugs and missing features, and most parts are just basic shapes.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2012 22:47

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

I've been waiting for someone to make a vehicle combat game with heavy customisation basically since Interstate '76 came out, and no-one ever did! This game was basically the impetus for me getting into making my own games, because I figured I'm gonna have to do it myself!

I remember when I got the demo of Lego Racers in '99 and you could build your car, but then it turned out that all the parts were purely cosmetic with only some vague effect of performance tacked on based on how many blocks you used or something.

I want to be able to build a car that SUCKS. Cars that fall over when they corner or don't have enough power to fire all their guns. But it can't be too complicated - I think a lot of these sorts of games fall into "placing powerlines in Sim City 2000" territory as the devs add more and more minutiae. You won't have to wire each generator to a gun or whatever. Building from the parts is fairly simple in practice: The complexity comes from the various consequences of using those parts.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm excited about this project, but firing the guns isn't even working properly yet.

Also, I fully intend flying vehicles but that'll come much later as it'll require a whole different control system. Different-sized chassis will be implemented next, then tracked versions.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2012 00:09

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

That will definitely be a thing. There's drag at the moment but it's not affected by your design yet. Eventually the drag value will be calculated based on some sort of aerodynamics calculation that I have no idea how to do just yet.

Mass of the parts is working though and that's pretty cool.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2012 01:14

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

"Co-op roguelike american football". That sounds amazing.

Mug posted:

To calculate drag, you just throw a flat wall of "Air particles" at the front of the vehicle once every time you make a change to the car. The number of particles that collide is the drag factor.

And that sounds smart and simple. I can cast a grid of rays and see which ones hit.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2012 01:40

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Well, no need to actually bounce the rays, just check the angle of the object at the hit point. Now, some sloped surfaces will actually have square colliders and stuff like that, so it won't be quite that simple.

Edit: I'm playin' some Footbrawl Quest. It took me a minute to get it because it's pretty unique, but once I understood what I was doing it's really well made. It seems HARD though.
Edit2: This is really good. The walls are even destructible!
Edit3: Touchdown!

Nition fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Dec 1, 2012

# ¿ Dec 1, 2012 02:20

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

It can be any level of complexity under the hood really as long as it seems intuitive to the player. Anyway, I'm not actually planning to do the aerodynamics for a while yet but thanks for the various input.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2012 05:54

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

Vankwish posted:

Alright, here you go.

It's got a Greenlight message at the end, but ignore that. I'm not after votes from here just comments about the gameplay itself and if you guys are interested in this more old school type of game.

I realise that there are lots of guys here who are a bit upset with unfinished games being on Greenlight so I don't want to upset anyone but I do want some feedback.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JlfYm4SJBM

My thoughts: Gameplay looks solid, it's very Descent. Graphics are kind of basic but for a one-person job you've made the right choice there. I'd have the HUD on the ship a little less angled, to ease reading it (unless the player hardly needs to look at it anyway). The computer voice that announces enemies etc is also a bit hard to understand, and I'd ease up on the audio effects a little there.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2012 02:51

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

rarbatrol posted:

For those of you using Unity with C#, so you have any recommendations for getting started? I write a lot of visual basic and C# at my day job, so I'm familiar with the language, but not the Unity side of things. Am I best off reading through the unity scripting reference material?

That's what I did basically, and it worked out pretty well. The Scripting Reference (assuming you mean this) is quite good at covering all the Unity-specific stuff about C# - with the sections on accessing and instantiating components and all that sort of thing.

I also looked at the example projects a lot in the beginning. Google searches and the Unify wiki also work pretty well (as Vankwish says above).

All examples in the main part of the reference manual are actually in all three languages. I think Vankwish might not have noticed that you can click the language button at the top right of the code.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2012 03:23

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:33

Nition: Feb 25, 2006; You really want to know?

It is worth noting that sometimes the JavaScript has comments which the C# or Boo do not.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2012 04:55

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Making Games Megathread: Congratulations on releasing the horniest game of 2022

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