I'm pretty sure the NDA prevents me from saying anything on this, but, you know...occam's razor.
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GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay
- Thread starter Jacksinthe
- Start date
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I knew Gabe had knives, but he threatened you with a razor too? That's harsh.
plagiarize
Banned
Booooooo.
yeah it's too bad really. I have a love / hate relationship with 3dsmax. it's bloated, often slow(graph view is a joke) some things just don't work(cat, the issues I mentioned and so on) and yet still all they seem to do is add more useless features they'll stop maintaining come next version. But the modifier stack system is brilliant, and imo makes max the best program for polygonal modeling.
anyway, I'm beginning to realize why maya is so popular in game dev.
Very nice - Looking forward to playing!
When cards launched Valve said publicly that games could only award half the cards that a game's badge requires. The only way to get more than half, is with a game that has microtransactions. For every additional $10 you spend in microtransactions, you get another card.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Grats, dude!
plagiarize
Banned
So I finished up the conveyor belt section. I do genuinely like it, but it turned out to be way too much work for how much gameplay it represents. Ah well, I guess that's just how game development goes sometimes!
It likely means I won't get level 5's environment building and puzzle work finished up this week like I was hoping, but I'm not going to sweat short set backs until Oculus announce a hard release date for the consumer Rift. If anyone is going to play this thing, it's going to be people with a Rift looking for something free to try out. I hope it's short enough and free enough that other people will check it out too, but I realistically know that my best chance is going to be Rift owners.
Here's the last few sections I've built. No sound on this one I'm afraid.
http://youtu.be/2-avIon_dIU
If you just want to skip ahead to see how stupidly basic the conveyor belt is that took me *three fucking evenings* go here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-avIon_dIU#t=89
The maze section in the first half with the glowing bread crumbs and the smashy traps took less than two hours, and I think is more fun and 'gamey'. But what're you going to do. The conveyor belt is definitely good enough to stay in.
It likely means I won't get level 5's environment building and puzzle work finished up this week like I was hoping, but I'm not going to sweat short set backs until Oculus announce a hard release date for the consumer Rift. If anyone is going to play this thing, it's going to be people with a Rift looking for something free to try out. I hope it's short enough and free enough that other people will check it out too, but I realistically know that my best chance is going to be Rift owners.
Here's the last few sections I've built. No sound on this one I'm afraid.
http://youtu.be/2-avIon_dIU
If you just want to skip ahead to see how stupidly basic the conveyor belt is that took me *three fucking evenings* go here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-avIon_dIU#t=89
The maze section in the first half with the glowing bread crumbs and the smashy traps took less than two hours, and I think is more fun and 'gamey'. But what're you going to do. The conveyor belt is definitely good enough to stay in.
One more post on this. Hopefully I'm getting close to something reasonable, at least for the moment, and can move on to other things. 
I recently had this split mode:
Someone elsewhere suggested horizontal bars, so I tried that too. Animated:
Someone also said the numbers were hard to read, so I tried bigger numbers. Currently there is no number if a unit is at full (10) health. Animated:
Any strong opinions one way or another? If not, I'll probably stick with the last two options and allow players to cycle (numbers -> bars -> no overlay) for now.
I recently had this split mode:
Someone elsewhere suggested horizontal bars, so I tried that too. Animated:
Someone also said the numbers were hard to read, so I tried bigger numbers. Currently there is no number if a unit is at full (10) health. Animated:
Any strong opinions one way or another? If not, I'll probably stick with the last two options and allow players to cycle (numbers -> bars -> no overlay) for now.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
One more post on this. Hopefully I'm getting close to something reasonable, at least for the moment, and can move on to other things.
I recently had this split mode:
Someone elsewhere suggested horizontal bars, so I tried that too. Animated:
Someone also said the numbers were hard to read, so I tried bigger numbers. Currently there is no number if a unit is at full (10) health. Animated:
Any strong opinions one way or another? If not, I'll probably stick with the last two options and allow players to cycle (numbers -> bars -> no overlay) for now.
Personally I'd prefer a single bar for each resource. So one for health, one for energy/mana/whatever. The small square representations are adequate but i liked the bars of your previous post better. The reason being that you process the information without thinking about it. The less intrusive a UI is the better.
Yeah, my concern is just for a very strategy/puzzle-focused game where you're doing an exact amount of damage, you'd want to know the numbers.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Do you mean the object's max health is important or is it important to know the damage done?
Both.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Ideally then maybe you could have a healthbar with number representation inside as well. That way you get the instant recognition of the situation and can delve deeper if the situation calls for it. That might take up more room than you're willing to allocate however.
Here's an early prototype for a health UI for my hero in the game I'm working on that illustrates what I'm trying to say:
Edit: Conversely, perhaps you can just display a bar and then switch to a number display on mouseover? Of course I could just be a very vocal minority. I've been doing a lot of UI work on my own game recently and it has me over critical about everything.
StrangeADT
Banned
Why cant you just have the remote repository stored on drive? Theres nothing sacred about bitbucket or github. I'm pretty sure they just host a bare repository for you and you can totally set up a bare repo locally and just keep that synced to google drive.
This is a decent explanation: http://www.saintsjd.com/2011/01/what-is-a-bare-git-repository/
Sorry if you already knew this and I'm just misunderstanding your post.
Edit: I feel like I should clarify. The workflow I'm suggesting is that you have a bare git repository in location A, and then you work out of a working repository (non-bare) in location B. Location A can be in a folder that you set up to automatically sync with google drive. The bare repo will only change when you push changes from your working repository so you don't need to worry about the constant network updating that would happen if your working copy was in the google drive folder as well. This would allow you to use all those convenient git features without all the overhead of manual backups that you currently endure. Not sure how you put up with that.
Edit2: And here is a link to doing exactly what I suggest (replace "dropbox" with "drive", of course):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1960799/using-git-and-dropbox-together-effectively
Wreck-It Ralph
Member
This is the game I threw together in the last week. It's called Checkmate! It's basically Dr. Mario meets Chess.
I'm collaborating with fellow Gaffer Canti, who did the graphics (and it only took him like a day and a half, which I find absolutely amazing). I hope he doesn't mind me posting this without asking him, but I just got the assets tonight and spent the past couple hours implementing them and was so impressed by the result that I just had to share it.
I can't express how much I appreciate you graphics guys out there. What you do is amazing. The difference between my game pre-graphics and post-graphics is immeasurable. Tonight is the first night I've been able to make something that felt like not just a prototype, but a game.
If anyone's interested in testing it, please shoot me a PM.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
As you said, proper assets truly make all the difference. This is where I'm hit hardest as a solo developer. I suck at art and have no actual interest in developing that skill over programming, so no matter how much I improve, my games will still be lacking.
I don't know how your game looked with programmer art, but it looks like a legit little game from where I'm standing
Congrats
I spent most of the last month preparing a new feature for Cactus - Randomly generated daily challenge levels! Pretty stoked at how it worked out, we ended up using Parse for the leaderboards / seed generation which was tricky to learn and set up but seems to be going great, and we store the steam ID's then convert them back so it just looks like the rest of our leaderboard systems.
Almost feel like a real programmer even though my code is absolutely awful
One more post on this. Hopefully I'm getting close to something reasonable, at least for the moment, and can move on to other things.
I recently had this split mode:
Someone elsewhere suggested horizontal bars, so I tried that too. Animated:
Someone also said the numbers were hard to read, so I tried bigger numbers. Currently there is no number if a unit is at full (10) health. Animated:
Any strong opinions one way or another? If not, I'll probably stick with the last two options and allow players to cycle (numbers -> bars -> no overlay) for now.
I'm not a fan of the numbers, but I think that has more to do with the font not matching the resolution of the pixel art more than anything. Makes them look a bit pasted on. It becomes a bit tougher of a question when you match the resolutions:
With that done, I think I might like the numbers better for the immediacy and clarity of the information. I prefer the red font there too, having a pixel of black separation makes it looks a decent bit less cluttered. You can see where the blue numbers blend into the unit at the bottom without it. Could maybe go a pixel thinner on the font so it doesn't look as bloated, but then you're talking about resizing the black square to keep everything even.
Excellent point, I indeed just put the numbers together by hand to check the size, without making them match the art resolution properly.I'm not a fan of the numbers, but I think that has more to do with the font not matching the resolution of the pixel art more than anything. Makes them look a bit pasted on. It becomes a bit tougher of a question when you match the resolutions:
With that done, I think I might like the numbers better for the immediacy and clarity of the information. I prefer the red font there too, having a pixel of black separation makes it looks a decent bit less cluttered. You can see where the blue numbers blend into the unit at the bottom without it. Could maybe go a pixel thinner on the font so it doesn't look as bloated, but then you're talking about resizing the black square to keep everything even.
Your red number example is good, but I still do wonder if it gets into less readable territory.
The more I think about it, the more I lean back towards option #1, with the visual representation of how many dots are missing, and the ability to catch both lines at a glance. It's a little unique too. Maybe option #1, with a properly sized pixel font as a toggle option then. Thanks for everyone's patience with like four iterations of this. Learning visual design seems a slow process for me.
Massive congrats!
Did we ever come to an consensus on the gif sizes? This is around 9mb so I'll just link it for now: http://abload.de/img/gif_capturetotems7jzj2.gif
Feels to good to have our own office inside the University; no more constant interruptions, much better communication for our 9-man team and off course having a break room just next door is great. I'll try to get a picture of our setup, but right now it feels like it's really, really good for us.
In other news, the Uni is now a PSFirst partner so hopefully I'll be able to take a peek on how the SDK and tools have developed since summer and off course it'd be nice to test Unreal on the platform as well even though our own game isn't really suited for consoles right now.
JODOROWSKY51
Member
My two teammates worked their butts off to make this trailer! May god bless them and their coffee-ridden zombie corpses!
Oh and this is our new game, De Mambo! Enjoy!
https://vimeo.com/116938667
Anyone here apply for a EIN as a corporation not from the US? Having a doozy understanding all the terms. We have an accountant, but I want to have a high level of understanding beforehand.
Whoa congrats!
Whoa congrats!
Nope, seemed really complicated to get an EIN from what I found out. Fortunately, I did not need to provide one as the policy had changed.
Photoshop! Each image is on a separate layer, exported and then played in sequence. You can either use PS's built in tool to preview it as you make it, or load it up in another sequence image player, like Flash - takes a little bit more time as you need to export your stuff once in a while.
Which country are you in?
England.
I don't know if this has been posted yet (and this also serves as a bit of advertising for some friends), but a game called "Inner Space" was successfully Kickstarted a little bit ago and has now gone through Greenlight;
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=329631737&searchtext=inner+space
It's made by a group of students from my university, so I'm both really happy for them and fairly jealous of their success so far.
Some screenshots;
Gawd dayumit I wish I could draw, model, or anything resembling visual artistic skill. All I can do is type stuff to make boxes hit eachother
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=329631737&searchtext=inner+space
It's made by a group of students from my university, so I'm both really happy for them and fairly jealous of their success so far.
Some screenshots;
Gawd dayumit I wish I could draw, model, or anything resembling visual artistic skill. All I can do is type stuff to make boxes hit eachother
nitekrawlwer
Member
Are Unity's animations systems just against cancelling? I really want to be able to cancel a move into itself and legacy nor mecanim are playing nice with this idea. I can see the touch responses firing the input for the move but no animation played if it's already playing. It appears that unless I let it move to another state first I can't play the animation again.
Diablohead
Member
So do you guys like level editors with your metroidvanias?
Thanks for the reply. Another question, do you have to redraw your character body parts for each animation frame? or you use some manipulation techniques to reuse the original drawing. Because there are some programs like Toon Boom Studio That makes animating faster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toon_Boom_Animation.
My two teammates worked their butts off to make this trailer! May god bless them and their coffee-ridden zombie corpses!
Oh and this is our new game, De Mambo! Enjoy!
https://vimeo.com/116938667
Wow, what a crazy cool looking game! Local MP? Is it available for download or anything yet?
No, I wouldn't say you *have* to, it's more a question of which animation aesthetic you wish to achieve, and how you want your work pipeline to be.
I can only speak about how I do things for Honey here, as I don't know that software so I don't know how helpful it can actually be for me, but to be honest I'm not really interested in anything that speeds up/automates the animation process compared to how it works using pen and paper. So in my case, I redraw everything, but that's because of the aesthetic I'm going for - I like how it looks, but it's certainly the slowest method. If you have another one in mind, or have time/productivity concerns, then something like this can help go much faster, I'd imagine!
You could even segment body parts from the original drawing and animate them separately, for the complete puppet style of animation, and not have to redraw anything for a given character - again, aesthetic and technical choice :-D
EDIT: I typed this before watching the video of Toon Boom, and yeah, this is exactly what I talked about above, the puppet style of animation. I believe Jobbs, Abe Bly and Ito use that (at least partly?), so they'll probably be able to give out more detailed answers about their work process for that aesthetic!
JODOROWSKY51
Member
Thanks! Well, we're currently attempting to put an early-ish demo online, which should be on our site at some point soon.
http://thedangerouskitchen.co.uk/demambo/
And yeah it will be local but I can't say when or where it'll be available yet, sorry!
Mr. Luchador
Member
Grats Feeps
plagiarize
Banned
Gawd dayumit I wish I could draw, model, or anything resembling visual artistic skill. All I can do is type stuff to make boxes hit eachother
Hey, boxes can be cool!
There's this: http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Animation.Rewind.html
Though it can look a bit choppy. Personally, what I did... I duplicated the animation and alternated between both. This way I can cross-fade and have smooth yet fast repeats of the 'same' animation.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Grats Das! Glad to hear KS was a success!
I don't know if this has been posted yet (and this also serves as a bit of advertising for some friends), but a game called "Inner Space" was successfully Kickstarted a little bit ago and has now gone through Greenlight;
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=329631737&searchtext=inner+space
It's made by a group of students from my university, so I'm both really happy for them and fairly jealous of their success so far.
Some screenshots;
Gawd dayumit I wish I could draw, model, or anything resembling visual artistic skill. All I can do is type stuff to make boxes hit eachother
This looks rad! Grats to your friends and I'm diggin the art something mad. Looks stellar.
Depends on how you call the animation. If you are using Mecanim - I personally stay away from Exit Times and control timing via code when I need to make sure an animation can break when I say it can break. You can also use layers in Mecanim to override currently playing animations.
So say without an exit time - you control the length of time the animation needs to play through code - more than likely a coroutine. Simply StopCoroutine (only if it were invoked by STRING method - StartCoroutine("FunctionName")) and you can:
StopCoroutine("Function1");
Animator.setWhateverValueYouUseToFireAnimation(false);
StartCoroutine("Function1");
There are other dirty tricks, too. REAL dirty if all else as I've had issues with mecanim. You can always do dumb things like make sure that root motion is applied to an animation on a separate GameObject as a child of the main, flip the main's renderer off and turn on the child game object. You can do this pretty much as fast as your game runs and the animation on the child will run every time the game object is enabled.
I've seen a few friends use this method in 2D fighting games - actually works well. All of your timings at that point are in coroutines but can be treated as switch case as necessary.
Also, I'm not super pro at Mecanim or rigging it properly since I just do 2D work. I just know I hate it sometimes so I forgo exit times altogether and control all of my animation timings in code.
Yeah, I use a lot of puppet animation, although I use Spine instead of Toon Boom. That keeps the file sizes a lot smaller since it's not a new texture for each frame. However, you have to make concessions when you do this. Some types of things simply can't be animated, others can't be animated well, and and most only work decently with the right art style. I'm using a fairly flat art style with limited shading and no outlines, so that helps me hide the hinges a little better.
Jobbs (Ghost Song) starts out with what's essentially puppet animation, but then has to go retouch all of the frames at the hinges that moved too much so that they don't pop as much. I can't remember what Ito's process is.
Gotcha, thanks! I wonder if it's the same for Canada, although I can't find out where it would be.
GAF indies, I need your help!
My game is in beta stage on both Android and iOS, and I'm looking for some feedback.
My previous post was ignored. I know the game isn't much, but come on people, give a little help here.
You don't even need to test the game. Checking if it's not crashing is good enough. This is important mainly in Android with all those different devices.
This is the game logo. I don't want to post gameplay pictures, or else you will run away from this like the plague.
Those who are interested, please send me a PM with the platform you own and the email (so I can grant the access in google play and in the iOS app store).
Note to Android users: I have already a problem reported about an issue with the game speed being too fast making the game unplayable. This is a bug I haven't yet tracked down.
Note to iOS users: if you want to post scores to the leaderboards you will have to enable the sandbox mode for game center. Settings->Game Center->Developer->Sandbox.
Thanks!!
My game is in beta stage on both Android and iOS, and I'm looking for some feedback.
My previous post was ignored. I know the game isn't much, but come on people, give a little help here.
You don't even need to test the game. Checking if it's not crashing is good enough. This is important mainly in Android with all those different devices.
This is the game logo. I don't want to post gameplay pictures, or else you will run away from this like the plague.
Those who are interested, please send me a PM with the platform you own and the email (so I can grant the access in google play and in the iOS app store).
Note to Android users: I have already a problem reported about an issue with the game speed being too fast making the game unplayable. This is a bug I haven't yet tracked down.
Note to iOS users: if you want to post scores to the leaderboards you will have to enable the sandbox mode for game center. Settings->Game Center->Developer->Sandbox.
Thanks!!
I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but this is probably the reason you got ignored. Speaking for myself, I know I'd want an indication as to what the game is about before I drop what I'm doing and give it my time.
Don't be so hard on yourself, good games always appeal to somebody.
But if you really think IndieGAF will hate this game, then maybe IndieGAF isn't the best place to get feedback on it. Or ask yourself why you think IndieGAF will hate it.
Ok, so I'm having some issues with running UE4 and I don't really understand why. I downloaded and installed it a couple of days ago and it ran perfectly. I went back today to mess around and it kept getting hung up during launch and would just freeze, causing me to have to restart my PC. I finally uninstalled it and have now gone to install it again and it only downloads the launcher. I've tried googling around but none of the solutions I've seen assist.
I've installed countless programs and this is the first time I've ever had issues like this. I really want to try it out but this is not very encouraging when I've had zero issues with Unity.
I've installed countless programs and this is the first time I've ever had issues like this. I really want to try it out but this is not very encouraging when I've had zero issues with Unity.
TheHollowNight
Member
omg omg omg, I'm going to be at GDC in March!! I'm so excited holy shit. Now I gotta save up for flights.
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