Support NeoGAF

[Popstar]

In case anyone missed it, Bad JuJu Games has filed for bankruptcy. They're the parent company of Desura and Indie Royale having purchased them in November (from Linden Labs, who themselves purchased them in mid-2013). There have been complaints from devs not getting paid going around for awhile.

There's a Gamasutra article about it, and a thread here on GAF about the news.

 

[_machine]

Sad, but not surprising. It was never an especially strong platform and Steam and Humble Bundle have only increased their importance. Hopefully we'll find some good competition from GOG Galaxy though, they at least are very much into making the platform much more of a walled garden.

EDIT: Lol, after all the discussion about indie publishers, I get this an email titled "#1 Voted Indie GAME PROMOTER Offers To Promote YOUR Game For Only USD $99 (Limited Time Only)"

 

[Blizzard]

Have you tried looking at the profiler what's eating up most of the performance? Afaik UE4 should be quite good at high polycounts, but shader complexity and per-pixel operations can eat up a lot of performance quickly.

That does look like a very interesting way of creating level and I really like the look of it. I'm a sucker for the style

Yes, we've been profiling and the major bottlenecks are lighting pass and shadows, but since shadows rendering gets more complex as the scene has more polys our only choice would be to avoid dynamic shadows as much as possible. (We also can't use baked lighting because our levels are procedural). We do plan to write a post on the UE4 forums as well since there might be something unusual going on that we haven't taken into account during the lighting pass though.

And thanks a lot!

I wanted to echo _machine on this. I would be surprised if polygons on tiny floor pieces is really causing a big performance hit, unless they're casting shadows from the bumps or something. I would try to keep the original nice textured meshes, and look at other options.

*edit* About posting one's game, I've posted in the indie thread and other GAF threads for many years, and I would like to link my game on Steam if I ever get it there. That's sort of a life goal to me, to have a game actually show up on Steam (and maybe a Nintendo store).

 

[Jams775]

So to help me get better at making games I've decided to do a thing where I start making games as if I stared as a developer in the early eighties and continue to make games from the same "franchise" through out the "years". The type of game I'm choosing to make is Science Fiction in space. Now I'm new to this so I'm not going to go all crazy trying to make every scan line just right or anything like that. Just that it has a general feel of the given era.

I've decided to start with an 2600 like game called Star Blaster. It's a super simple horizontal shooter. It doesn't really have much to it and when making it I realized that 2600 games probably didn't have scrolling star backgrounds yet but I thought what the hell, it looks good anyways. I wanted to show the score in the game over screen but I don't know what the hell I'm doing and couldn't get it to work for some reason. I think it has to do with me being lazy and just loading a new scene that was for game over specifically instead of making it a GUI element or whatever so it would reset the score in the score script.

Everything is done by me except the font. I build a WebGL version so anyone can play it if they want. Here's a screen shot.
The Game

 

[mStudios]

Boah, Jesus, love that one! :+

Out of curiosity, can you do such stuff in 3d as well?

Thanks! Yeah, we can do 3D as well!

Holy shit :O

Haha, thanks!

This new character design is freaking cool!
Love it!

Thanks!

Looks incredible, really loving the style. However one thing irks me, cannot even properly name it. For some reason I think the proportions are slightly off? (this might just be me though, I am not an artist).

Thanks! Its probably her long legs lol

Pretty sweet

Your ingame art seems stylistically different than this concept art, do you have different artists working on concepts and ingame assets? (mainly thinking about the general face proportions here).
I find something interesting going on with the black shading on the arms contrasting with the more classic painterly concept art style. It's quite small here and not something I've really noticed in your assets before, so I don't know if it's something you actively pursue, but as far as I'm concerned, that could be a striking/defining visual characteristic if you push it further.

As for the ingame assets, there's something that seems off to me about the eye placement, but maybe it's just a stylistic thing. I think it was also mentioned earlier that the black from Right Alice's overcoat blends in with her chest, making for a strange optical illusion. I see a small color difference when in full screen, but in medium/small size, it seems to be basically the same color.
I agree about the previous comments with the two sided Alice - a clear dividing line would work better in my eyes, with some clear elements that are cut (haircut is one, a more proeminent frontal implant could be another). As it stands, I had to do a few double takes before understanding it was two different halves!

The story behind Celia its pretty long. She was meant to be the main character... 2 years ago, when I wrote the story concept at that time. And yes, she was drawn by a different artist at the time. Right now we're drawing her to match the current style
Here's a preview of her game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfDzaddenn4

About punk Alice, it was a mistake that I made while doing the animations haha. Her arms its on top of the body layer and that's why it looks like that. and about the eye placement, they're "centered" because I can manipulate the eye movement through coding. But since I haven't implemented Live2D (the animation program we use) I'm still using static images.

 

[MagicD]

EDIT: Lol, after all the discussion about indie publishers, I get this an email titled "#1 Voted Indie GAME PROMOTER Offers To Promote YOUR Game For Only USD $99 (Limited Time Only)"

Hah, since we've launched, I've gotten so many emails and phone calls with similar offers. I actually looked into a few of them just to see if they had any apps that I even recognize (not to mention became hugely successful)...and found absolutely nothing. Pass.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

Random thing: Would a GAF game jam be a fun thing that people from this thread would enter into?

 

[Jacksinthe]

Random thing: Would a GAF game jam be a fun thing that people from this thread would enter into?

Yes.

Already working on it - not for GAF but if we want a GAF-centric game jam that would be ace.

Currently planning a once-per-month Iron Chef style 3-hour limit with any game, any genre, picked by the internet on the spot. 30 minutes to plan and 2.5 hours to build. I expect nothing short of amazing shit from people DDD

 

[Jacksinthe]

100/sec

I don't know what I'm doing.

http://stuff.absinthegames.com/particleopour.gif

 

[MagicD]

For you iOS Unity devs, what are you guys doing about the now mandated inclusion of 64bit and your build size? The live version of our app is at 65mb, but building with il2cpp puts us at like 120mb...way over the 100mb cellular download limit. I'm hoping and praying that Apple ups that limit to like 200mb during WWDC next week, but if they don't (which is a long shot honestly) I don't know what I'm going to do. We're already about as lean as we can be in terms of assets and textures and all audio is compressed on disk.

 

[Unain]

Yes, we've been profiling and the major bottlenecks are lighting pass and shadows, but since shadows rendering gets more complex as the scene has more polys our only choice would be to avoid dynamic shadows as much as possible. (We also can't use baked lighting because our levels are procedural). We do plan to write a post on the UE4 forums as well since there might be something unusual going on that we haven't taken into account during the lighting pass though.

And thanks a lot!

Have you guys looked into Instanced Static Meshes?
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/BlueprintAPI/Components/InstancedStaticMesh/index.html

Those are made for procedural content. According to your screenshots I only see static meshes which are heavy on rendering if you've got a lot of them (every static mesh is a draw call). With Instanced Static Meshes every same mesh in the level is only 1 draw call.

I could be wrong though, maybe you guys are already using it. Just something to look into if not.

 

[Blizzard]

Just a heads up, anyone in the Wii U developer program, check your email. I got a newsletter today.

 

[mStudios]

Just a heads up, anyone in the Wii U developer program, check your email. I got a newsletter today.

I just got it :O
To bad their download site is slow as hell

 

[Blizzard]

100/sec

I don't know what I'm doing.

http://stuff.absinthegames.com/particleopour.gif

Yeah I'm not sure what's going on -- it's a 17MB GIF that started at maybe 100 KB/second downloading, but now it's wavering below 30 KB/second. Maybe your host is throttling big files?

 

[Five]

100/sec

I don't know what I'm doing.

http://stuff.absinthegames.com/particleopour.gif

Can you make the particles draw beneath the level so the clipping is less obvious?

 

[HellBlazer]

Random thing: Would a GAF game jam be a fun thing that people from this thread would enter into?

I'd be interested.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Yeah I'm not sure what's going on -- it's a 17MB GIF that started at maybe 100 KB/second downloading, but now it's wavering below 30 KB/second. Maybe your host is throttling big files?

Weird. No issues on my end with CTRL-F5. /shrug

Can you make the particles draw beneath the level so the clipping is less obvious?

Swapped, good call. I need to make a better "bounce". Right now I just kinda sorta rubberband the actual object on collision with a quick lerp which does clip since there is technically no actual collision there - shorcut to proper physics on collision but it wound up giving me the look I was going for.

 

[mStudios]

Every night I tried to at least write one page of the main story, since my friend is being lazy with the programming. I WANT TO FINISH YESTERDAY

 

[JulianImp]

I think I've finished the documentation files for my VN toolset extension for Unity, even though I still haven't standarized the way different sections are written. I know it might be a bit weird to read it blindly without having the code, but I guessed someone might want to take a look. I'd also appreciate any feedback I can get on its readability and whether it works for documentation, or if it needs some more tweaking.

Anyway, here's the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uX4s2-UMBisVK99b3ncZMQfJPKmbtUjNJQKQt51lumM/edit?usp=sharing

I'm still working on the missing command functions as well as the helper tools that automatize having to remember which parameters go where for each command. Once that's done, I'll probably wrap it up with the save/load and text logging functions, which I can do away with right now for testing but will be absolutely necessary for release.

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

Do you guys think it would be a good idea or not to have a free web version of a paid iOS game on my site?

 

[Yoshi]

Do you guys think it would be a good idea or not to have a free web version of a paid iOS game on my site?

The full game, no strings attached? Is it a game that is seriously mobile optimised in the sense that people will want to play it on the go? If you want to earn money with the game and it is not heavily mobile oriented then I'd limit it do a demo version.

 

[UsagiWare]

New day new progress:

New Character:
Celia, The Bounty Hunter:

nice

It's appstore.com/gleamer

I've just released one game on iOS so far.
I just realised that the last time I updated it I uploaded the wrong (older) version of the icon. How embarrassing.

Do you guys think it would be a good idea or not to have a free web version of a paid iOS game on my site?

Had to check a youtube video (don't have an apple device).
I like the concept, very simple which works wel on mobile. Howlong did it take you to make it?

What about a free IOS version with ads instead (and an IAP to remove the ads)?

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

We tried but the result was pretty bad, we used Crazybump but it didn't work out, I guess there are methods to make it work.
I may be telling something stupid but I think the issue is that the texture of those assets is small, basically pixelart (it's generated by Qubicle itself wich match 1 voxel x 1pixel) and I don't think normals can be done effectively on that resolution.

Here is a really good tutorial for making Normal Maps the "old school" way - I would imagine you get much better results for pixelart looking images doing this than crazybump or the nvidia photoshop filter provides.

I'd also suggest you give baking AO into your texture a try - sure, it absolutely does look worse than an actual lighting model bringing out that shadow detail, as you basically just drew implied static shadows on your model, but, well, frankly it was good enough for pretty much every AAA game out there on the PS3 and 360, and - personally speaking - that's more than a high enough graphical benchmark to be hitting as an indie.


I'm not super-familiar with Unreal, but I would guess building your walls and columns seperately and using those to create your textures then using those AO + diffuse + Normal Map textures on standard Unreal prefab cubes would hugely reduce your lighting pass bottlenecks.

Currently planning a once-per-month Iron Chef style 3-hour limit with any game, any genre, picked by the internet on the spot. 30 minutes to plan and 2.5 hours to build. I expect nothing short of amazing shit from people DDD

Lol... WAAAAAAAAAY more hardcore than I was thinking... I would burn through three hours just tinkering with getting a Players movement feeling nice XD

I was thinking much more easy-mode, something like a weekend over the summer, use any resources / assets you feel like, collaborate if you want to etc.

Do you guys think it would be a good idea or not to have a free web version of a paid iOS game on my site?

Ad supported webgame versus ad-free paid on IOS would make sense to me.

What about a free IOS version with ads instead (and an IAP to remove the ads)?

Or this!

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

The full game, no strings attached? Is it a game that is seriously mobile optimised in the sense that people will want to play it on the go? If you want to earn money with the game and it is not heavily mobile oriented then I'd limit it do a demo version.

Nah, it's just a puzzle game and it would play exactly the same. I'm not really a fan of having two different versions of the same game on the App store, but I guess ad supported web version could be a thing.

Had to check a youtube video (don't have an apple device).
I like the concept, very simple which works wel on mobile. Howlong did it take you to make it?

What about a free IOS version with ads instead (and an IAP to remove the ads)?

Took me way longer than I wanted it too. Almost two years, working on it in my spare time in the evenings.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

I guess ad supported web version could be a thing.

Ad-supported webgame has been an indie staple for a loooooooong time now with stuff like Newgrounds / Kongregate / addictinggames / miniclip / etc

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

Oh yeah. I was just thinking about my own site, but I guess I could put it on one of those.

 

[jimmythepage]

I wanted to echo _machine on this. I would be surprised if polygons on tiny floor pieces is really causing a big performance hit, unless they're casting shadows from the bumps or something. I would try to keep the original nice textured meshes, and look at other options.

That's something we can definitely try, thanks for the advice!

Have you guys looked into Instanced Static Meshes?
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/BlueprintAPI/Components/InstancedStaticMesh/index.html

Those are made for procedural content. According to your screenshots I only see static meshes which are heavy on rendering if you've got a lot of them (every static mesh is a draw call). With Instanced Static Meshes every same mesh in the level is only 1 draw call.

I could be wrong though, maybe you guys are already using it. Just something to look into if not.

We actually tried it, but it doesn't work with how procedural dungeon since the drawcall is on the entire room (if I recall) and it gave us some issues with the collissions.

Here is a really good tutorial for making Normal Maps the "old school" way - I would imagine you get much better results for pixelart looking images doing this than crazybump or the nvidia photoshop filter provides.

I'd also suggest you give baking AO into your texture a try - sure, it absolutely does look worse than an actual lighting model bringing out that shadow detail, as you basically just drew implied static shadows on your model, but, well, frankly it was good enough for pretty much every AAA game out there on the PS3 and 360, and - personally speaking - that's more than a high enough graphical benchmark to be hitting as an indie.


I'm not super-familiar with Unreal, but I would guess building your walls and columns seperately and using those to create your textures then using those AO + diffuse + Normal Map textures on standard Unreal prefab cubes would hugely reduce your lighting pass bottlenecks.

I see, it's something we can explore, thanks a lot for the tutorial, I'll report if we can make something out it.

 

[Pehesse]

For those hungry about WIP's, here's one fresh off the press: http://gfycat.com/AggressiveDarlingGnu

(It's taking me as long to make this 10 second pseudo gameplay stuff as to write the whole of the VN character subplots spanning... uh, more than 10 seconds of gameplay. Talk about diminish returns.)

Next objective is to color Honey and add some movement to the audience. If you spot anything else that needs doing, feel free to rip and tear!

 

[Unain]

We actually tried it, but it doesn't work with how procedural dungeon since the drawcall is on the entire room (if I recall) and it gave us some issues with the collissions.

Was worth a shot. The collision problem is something I'm trying to work around as well.
If you make the instanced meshes static then it works fine, but when you make them dynamic you go over the physics limits pretty quick.
A way to go around it is by creating the collisions after you have created the level.

 

[Chaotic Kitten]

For those hungry about WIP's, here's one fresh off the press: http://gfycat.com/AggressiveDarlingGnu

I love that she slaps her face to get ready to head out, and how weighty her walk is!

 

[Jacksinthe]

Lol... WAAAAAAAAAY more hardcore than I was thinking... I would burn through three hours just tinkering with getting a Players movement feeling nice XD

I was thinking much more easy-mode, something like a weekend over the summer, use any resources / assets you feel like, collaborate if you want to etc.

Oh it will be a pain in the ass hahaha! I think it's more about just creating something that works as intended and not so much something that has polish. I spent a good 2 months working out the kinks on our current character movement, lol. 2.5 hours for an entire minigame is more about the process of design than anything else.

My partner and I are willing to try at least once hahaha! We will fail hard but that's OK.

 

[VisceralBowl]

Yes, we've been profiling and the major bottlenecks are lighting pass and shadows, but since shadows rendering gets more complex as the scene has more polys our only choice would be to avoid dynamic shadows as much as possible. (We also can't use baked lighting because our levels are procedural). We do plan to write a post on the UE4 forums as well since there might be something unusual going on that we haven't taken into account during the lighting pass though.

And thanks a lot!

Do your levels use a skylight? If so, are you updating the skylight at all during gameplay?

I was working on a day/night cycle and I found that updating the skylight too often would result in crazy performance loss (which I should have expected tbh).

In general you should strive to use as little shadow casters as possible. It would also be a good idea to lower your max shadow resolution (I think it's r.Shadow.MaxResolution in console variables)

Random thing: Would a GAF game jam be a fun thing that people from this thread would enter into?

I'd be interested.

Currently planning a once-per-month Iron Chef style 3-hour limit with any game, any genre, picked by the internet on the spot. 30 minutes to plan and 2.5 hours to build. I expect nothing short of amazing shit from people DDD

That's pretty hardcore.

 

[Water]

Everything is done by me except the font. I build a WebGL version so anyone can play it if they want. Here's a screen shot.
The Game

There's weird stuff going on (OS X / Chrome). The ship often moves automatically to some direction and ignores input. Is any of that intended and are you seeing it yourself?

 

[jimmythepage]

Was worth a shot. The collision problem is something I'm trying to work around as well.
If you make the instanced meshes static then it works fine, but when you make them dynamic you go over the physics limits pretty quick.
A way to go around it is by creating the collisions after you have created the level.

Yup, and that's exactly how we resolved it

Do your levels use a skylight? If so, are you updating the skylight at all during gameplay?

I was working on a day/night cycle and I found that updating the skylight too often would result in crazy performance loss (which I should have expected tbh).

In general you should strive to use as little shadow casters as possible. It would also be a good idea to lower your max shadow resolution (I think it's r.Shadow.MaxResolution in console variables)

Nope, not using that, but thanks for the heads-up


I finally brought the team to appreciate that merge dinosaurs and lasers is a good thing! Thankyou Kung Fury! xD

 

[mStudios]

I let my craziness go further today:

Click for full resolution

Marie Perez and Gabe Perez as the voice actors

Yes, it's not done and it's an horrible poster. However, the idea is, if you save the picture and look at the thumbnail you can see her face :O.
I don't want to give away the Alternate/Punk Alice at first.

Quick Photoshops filters for the win and the white is killing my eyes.

I want to make a lot type of secret like this.

 

[JulianImp]

I let my craziness go further today:


Yes, it's not done and it's an horrible poster. However, the idea is, if you save the picture and look at the thumbnail you can see her face :O.
I don't want to give away the Alternate/Punk Alice at first.

Quick Photoshops filters for the win and the white is killing my eyes.

I want to make a lot type of secret like this.

The image looks good and I think it could be a nice idea, but you should probably tweak the text a bit so that it contrasts more and is more readable. The black-on-black characters are barely readable, IMO, and the contrasting boxes work well for the bottommost lines because they encompass the whole text, while the game's title has a tilted box which makes some characters bleed into the black background, making them harder to recognize at a glance.

By the way, I'll probably be fixing a couple of things soon and send you the UnityAssets for the VN tools later today.

 

[SpacePirate Ridley]

A little late for the screenshot saturday shenaningans, but was really excited to show this:

Those are nearly all the melee combat animations of Grant (the first playable character). We had an older version done from some weeks ago but the pixel artist decided to give a lot more life to it (moving hair, better special animations...) and repeat the whole thing again.

I let my craziness go further today:


Yes, it's not done and it's an horrible poster. However, the idea is, if you save the picture and look at the thumbnail you can see her face :O.
I don't want to give away the Alternate/Punk Alice at first.

Quick Photoshops filters for the win and the white is killing my eyes.

I want to make a lot type of secret like this.

I really like the effect on tghe poster, but the font colors need to change so they can be readable. It looks really cool nontheless.

 

[Pehesse]

A little late for the screenshot saturday shenaningans, but was really excited to show this:

Those are nearly all the melee combat animations of Grant (the first playable character). We had an older version done from some weeks ago but the pixel artist decided to give a lot more life to it (moving hair, better special animations...) and repeat the whole thing again.



I really like the effect on tghe poster, but the font colors need to change so they can be readable. It looks really cool nontheless.

Niiice animations! I'd be curious to see the previous version, see what changed to get that dynamism!

I love that she slaps her face to get ready to head out, and how weighty her walk is!

Thanks! Walk cycles are always some of the toughest to get right, I'm glad this one does its job :-D

 

[Dusk Golem]

My game, Close Your Eyes, got greenlit onto Steam... Very quickly, much faster than I anticipated, done in 11 days: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=447634612

This surprises me as the game has honestly a super simple graphic style, so I suspected a lot to judge it on that. Also, Indiegames.com did an article on Close Your Eyes that made me very happy.

Looking at screenshots for Close Your Eyes had me thinking it would be silly and ineffective, but through perfect use of unnerving sound and some twisted, surprising visuals, it easily left me frightened, unsure whether I should be playing it at night.

The response to the game has been very positive, so I've been very happy, and now busily expanding it to release it as a free-to-play game on Steam.


---

Uh, I read the previous discussion and I feel I need to explain myself. I've found this topic to be a great resource through the years, and a place where I can relate to the struggle of a lot of people who try to make games while having families, jobs etc.
It's a place that sometimes I visit multiple times a day and sometimes I don't check for months. But I think it's a great community and the source of some of the most interesting people I follow on Twitter. To be honest, the reason I lurked a lot and haven't posted that much is because I feel a little intimidated by the talent here. I just feel that what I do is not really worth sharing. As for the "promotional" post before, it's only because I do feel proud we finally shipped the game we've been working on for three years. I don't think it's a groundbreaking game, but for once I actually feel proud enough to show it.
But, on the other hand, I kind of also understand people who complain about these posts...

I have felt similar, I've lurked this thread a lot but usually don't post because I feel my games don't look visually great, or are some excellent showcase, I just make cryptic, surreal horror games by myself, and usually do most of the art, music, coding needed, and do it. A lot here make such amazing looking things I often feel I can't compare. XD; But it's very interesting to see people progress and grow, and talk. So I want to be more active, even if my games aren't stunning visually or technically, but it does take yourself coming over a certain mental barricade.

Random thing: Would a GAF game jam be a fun thing that people from this thread would enter into?

I'd enter if it happened at a moment I have free-time. Due to the nature of GAF I think it might be good to keep the time window open, and maybe we could make a thread for it itself?

 

[JulianImp]

Crap, I almost had a near-death experience with my VN toolset.

I was just making sure everything was ready to whip up a quick demo for mStudios, and I realized that the wrapping backgrounds I had created no longer worked. Then I looked things up and saw that Unity, when importing an image file as a sprite so that it can be used in UI calls, automatically sets the texture's wrapping mode to clamp (so no wrapping can occur).

I panicked for a while, quickly trying to think up of a way I could use wrapping offsets, but even the simpler ideas required lots of code refactoring and a new class specifically for backgrounds (so that I could use textures, which can wrap around, rather than sprites in it).

...And then I remembered Unity has a catch-all "Advanced" texture type I could use to get the files recognized as sprites and which allows you to set its wrapping mode so that it doesn't clamp the texture. There's one problem with that, though, and it's that it's something the users of my VN toolset will have to do on their own if they want their backgrounds to wrap around properly, which is probably going to be cumbersome on their end.

Anyway, I think it'll take me just a little bit longer to finish the example app, and then it'll finally be time to pack the alpha build up so that I can distribute it! I'm extremely hyped for finally getting some user feedback on the tools, since it's something I don't have all that much experience with.

 

[mStudios]

Crap, I almost had a near-death experience with my VN toolset.

I was just making sure everything was ready to whip up a quick demo for mStudios, and I realized that the wrapping backgrounds I had created no longer worked. Then I looked things up and saw that Unity, when importing an image file as a sprite so that it can be used in UI calls, automatically sets the texture's wrapping mode to clamp (so no wrapping can occur).

I panicked for a while, quickly trying to think up of a way I could use wrapping offsets, but even the simpler ideas required lots of code refactoring and a new class specifically for backgrounds (so that I could use textures, which can wrap around, rather than sprites in it).

...And then I remembered Unity has a catch-all "Advanced" texture type I could use to get the files recognized as sprites and which allows you to set its wrapping mode so that it doesn't clamp the texture. There's one problem with that, though, and it's that it's something the users of my VN toolset will have to do on their own if they want their backgrounds to wrap around properly, which is probably going to be cumbersome on their end.

Anyway, I think it'll take me just a little bit longer to finish the example app, and then it'll finally be time to pack the alpha build up so that I can distribute it! I'm extremely hyped for finally getting some user feedback on the tools, since it's something I don't have all that much experience with.

I almost had a heart attack today, too. My main scene disappeared from the game. I dunno what happened.

Cant wait to try out your tool!

 

[Mystic River]

For those hungry about WIP's, here's one fresh off the press: http://gfycat.com/AggressiveDarlingGnu

(It's taking me as long to make this 10 second pseudo gameplay stuff as to write the whole of the VN character subplots spanning... uh, more than 10 seconds of gameplay. Talk about diminish returns.)

Next objective is to color Honey and add some movement to the audience. If you spot anything else that needs doing, feel free to rip and tear!

looks nice! there is a lot of work there , by the way what program do you use to create those animated gifs? I am using GifCam but I don't really get good colors or previews with it

 

[bkw]

Crap, I almost had a near-death experience with my VN toolset.

I was just making sure everything was ready to whip up a quick demo for mStudios, and I realized that the wrapping backgrounds I had created no longer worked. Then I looked things up and saw that Unity, when importing an image file as a sprite so that it can be used in UI calls, automatically sets the texture's wrapping mode to clamp (so no wrapping can occur).

I panicked for a while, quickly trying to think up of a way I could use wrapping offsets, but even the simpler ideas required lots of code refactoring and a new class specifically for backgrounds (so that I could use textures, which can wrap around, rather than sprites in it).

...And then I remembered Unity has a catch-all "Advanced" texture type I could use to get the files recognized as sprites and which allows you to set its wrapping mode so that it doesn't clamp the texture. There's one problem with that, though, and it's that it's something the users of my VN toolset will have to do on their own if they want their backgrounds to wrap around properly, which is probably going to be cumbersome on their end.

Anyway, I think it'll take me just a little bit longer to finish the example app, and then it'll finally be time to pack the alpha build up so that I can distribute it! I'm extremely hyped for finally getting some user feedback on the tools, since it's something I don't have all that much experience with.

Perhaps you could write an editor script/tool that helps them make those setting changes?

 

[Paz]

I almost had a heart attack today, too. My main scene disappeared from the game. I dunno what happened.

Cant wait to try out your tool!

This might be a good time to discuss source control in this thread, and how everyone should use it all the time

Perforce is free for up to 20 users if you want local control, very powerful and great at dealing with large repositories. There are also online places that are cheap/free and mainly used for code repositories, though I have less experience with online solutions.

 

[Pehesse]

looks nice! there is a lot of work there , by the way what program do you use to create those animated gifs? I am using GifCam but I don't really get good colors or previews with it

I'm using Gifcam as well, so I'm not sure what's happening! I haven't fiddled with settings. Looking at it, I'm using the 16FPS recording mode with "Quantize" compression. Does that help?

 

[_machine]

This might be a good time to discuss source control in this thread, and how everyone should use it all the time

Perforce is free for up to 20 users if you want local control, very powerful and great at dealing with large repositories. There are also online places that are cheap/free and mainly used for code repositories, though I have less experience with online solutions.

Perforce also works well with UE4 and runs nicely on Azure, which you can get free through BizSpark if you have a registered company. So I can definitely recommend P4V, especially for decent sized UE4 projects.

 

[Ventron]

This might be a good time to discuss source control in this thread, and how everyone should use it all the time

Perforce is free for up to 20 users if you want local control, very powerful and great at dealing with large repositories. There are also online places that are cheap/free and mainly used for code repositories, though I have less experience with online solutions.

I use https://bitbucket.org/

Git, private, unlimited space and repos, and Aussie!
Free for only 5 users so may not be good for larger teams.

 

[Paz]

Perforce also works well with UE4 and runs nicely on Azure, which you can get free through BizSpark if you have a registered company. So I can definitely recommend P4V, especially for decent sized UE4 projects.

Oh that sounds interesting, I briefly looked in to hosting my own online P4 server but at the time (2.5 years ago) it looked cost prohibitive.

P4 is an incredibly powerful tool and yeah due to its sort of 'industry standard' nature folks have integrated it well in to Unity/UE etc, very useful.

 

[_machine]

Oh that sounds interesting, I briefly looked in to hosting my own online P4 server but at the time (2.5 years ago) it looked cost prohibitive.

P4 is an incredibly powerful tool and yeah due to its sort of 'industry standard' nature folks have integrated it well in to Unity/UE etc, very useful.

I don't know the details(though I can always ask) of the setu, but apparently it was quite easy to get up on Azure and we haven't had any problems with actual use. Not running out of the "free monthly credits" either so I definitely recommend getting BizSpark if someone here hasn't done that yet (if they are applicable for it) and putting those Azure credits to use. We will also get our own analytics backend up on Google Cloud (we got 5K/yr free credit at Casual Connect) so I'll report our experiences with that as we get it working.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

I'd enter if it happened at a moment I have free-time. Due to the nature of GAF I think it might be good to keep the time window open, and maybe we could make a thread for it itself?

Yeah, I'd make a new thread if there was interest and I'd ask cheesemeister or Donny if we could use their voting scripts to collate results like the GOTY or NPD Prediction threads do. I'd probably set the date as something like end of july / early august as usual downtime for folks with office jobs, and holidays for those still in the school system, plus its usually a quiet time in the industry post E3 and before any big titles start dropping that will take peoples attention away.

Just a straw poll really to see what if any interest from the people most likely to contribute think.