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GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay

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Popstar

Member
Thanks for your suggestions. The issue is, I need the name to have these two connotations: 1st.- it's some sort of spiritual energy, and 2nd.- It's a small, thin, disperse mass of energy, a residual amount of it.
What kind of feeling do you want to evoke, positive or negative (or neutral), with the name?

Do you want something gritty sounding or something more poetic?

You liked 'Spirit Echoes' so I'm guessing something a bit poetic and more towards a neutral feeling?
 

Ito

Member
Agreed, I entertained you enough :p

Thanks again. You're amazing as a community.

Except Jobbs, your ideas suck. Do you even make games?


Edit after seeing Popstar's post:

Yeah, something neutral and slightly poetic. I don't care about long words as long as they sound good.

But as I said, this is probably getting out of hand and I'm feeling guilty xD
 

Jobbs

Banned
I've forgotten more good names for currency drops than most of you have come up with. I'm just fabulous.

For a long time Ghost Song was going to be called Ghost Vale. I forget why. I think vale is latin for farewell or something like that.
 

Jobbs

Banned
You need a squiggly thing over the e i think. Otherwise it's, like, a valley or something

well, obviously, I didn't go with it because it's not a very good name. :) It was, however, an example of me prioritizing what I thought was good wordfeel over anything else -- And generally I still think this is a good way of approaching stuff like this.
 

SeanNoonan

Member
Last day at Ubisoft tomorrow so the move is starting to feel very real.

With all of my stuff in storage for the next few months I'll be down to just my MacBook Air - thought I could use it as an opportunity to look into learning some Unity, anyone got any advice for someone who has historically spent a lot more time doing design, scripting or art?
 

Ito

Member
You need a squiggly thing over the e i think. Otherwise it's, like, a valley or something

Vale does mean "Farewell" or "goodbye" in latin.

But it isn't pronounced like your english word, "vale" (valley).

It would be something like Wah-leh (the "v" was pronounced like a "w" by the ancient Romans, it's because of the copyist monks in the middle age and the Vatican we think it's pronounced like a soft "B").

MoreYouKnow.png
 
Aesthetically, this is actually reasonably similar to There Came an Echo. Isometric 2-D/3-D blend all that. = D

If you're still getting that billboard clip with the ground, make sure you have soft particles enabled. If it's still happening, since you have an orthographic camera, a little hack would be to move the billboard a unit or two closer to the camera along its local rotation axis to ensure it doesn't clip.

Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.
 
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is build out all with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

Your game looks even better than Transistor. It's seriously gorgeous.
 

Jobbs

Banned
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.

I'm about ready to know what the hell this game is and what it's about.
 
So, do you know when you find a funny-looking wall and you try hitting it with your trusty wakizashi

http://giant.gfycat.com/ThoroughSnivelingElkhound.gif[img]

[/QUOTE]

Does she ever use the sword with the blade like that on the pinky side? When she pulls it out, it's on the thumb side and then she switches it to pinky side for the idle stance and then during the strikes, it's back on the thumb side. It looks a little awkward.
 

mStudios

Member
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.

Magic
 
I'm about ready to know what the hell this game is and what it's about.

You should check out our site, which is a decent introduction to the game!

http://beacon.monothetic.com/

We are currently working on our debut trailer though, which will hopefully be out before August is over.

The team have purposely been very reserved about releasing direct gameplay footage before the debut trailer, preferring to tease with gifs and have only showed off-screen video via vines at events and such. We want the trailer to be as exciting and impactful as possible :)

Also thanks everyone, as always, I appreciate the positivity towards the game!
 

Yoshi

Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
I'd like to name it in a way that suggests these two concepts:

- Spiritual Energy

- Remains, left overs, remnant, residual.

That's why I used sparse (that and because I really like that word).

I know it's no easy task.

Thanks to everyone helping :)

You could still solve it similat to how Rare did it with Banjo-Kazooie, where "Jiggsaw pieces" does not roll off the tongue so much, so they called them "Jiggy" most of the time. So, you could still call it sparse essence, but quickly introduce a short form like sparsies.
 

Noogy

Member
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.

This is sex.
 

_machine

Member
You should check out our site, which is a decent introduction to the game!

http://beacon.monothetic.com/

We are currently working on our debut trailer though, which will hopefully be out before August is over.
As with pretty much everything before, that gif looks awesome, but I also really impressed by the website, has to be one of the sleekest game websites I've ever seen. Again, you have such fantastic art and graphic design direction. I now have very high expectations of the trailer :p
 

mabec

Member
You should check out our site, which is a decent introduction to the game!

http://beacon.monothetic.com/

We are currently working on our debut trailer though, which will hopefully be out before August is over.

The team have purposely been very reserved about releasing direct gameplay footage before the debut trailer, preferring to tease with gifs and have only showed off-screen video via vines at events and such. We want the trailer to be as exciting and impactful as possible :)

Also thanks everyone, as always, I appreciate the positivity towards the game!

The art in this game is to beautiful. Are you planning to sell posters?
Also i JUST downloaded Black Snow by random... what are the odds...
 
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.

That is really cool. Granted, I already figured out that it was fully 3D ages ago, but the perspective spin is sweet.
 

Ito

Member
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.

Oh fuck. That did surprise me. It looks amazing, man. Congrats!
 

Nezzhil

Member
Fighting game. Not revealing anything yet. I will list things I have though.

  • engine
  • first character fully modeled ready for weighting and maps with the 2nd and 3rd characters already partially modeled
  • full design for movesets on multiple characters
  • full game design bible on mechanics
  • UI assets are coming along
  • concept art completed on several cast
  • unique mechanics and some fan favorites
  • a really really good theme

I'm not gonna make the mistake a lot of do with fighters because things tend to wear out before they release these days with long dev times so I plan on having a major push near the completion of the game during the last half year to reveal the full game and its cast to build momentum similar to how NRS does it. Plus the more I have made the higher my odds at landing help from a publisher near the end to cover costs on things like sound design and voice actors.

I don't want to kickstarter for the actual development though. I'd only resort to it if I needed to acquire audio and sound design near the end and even then only after exhausting my resources to secure that on my own. I'll do it myself...I have the time and a career already to pay my bills and QisTopTier wont go hungry because this is just a fun thing for him that no one is betting farms on. This shouldn't be on the wallets of anyone else. This way...we can not compromise our goals and just push for what we wanted until its ready. No pressure on us to force something out that way and it just feels more open and honest for me taking that responsibility.

Anyhow that's all I can say besides dont expect anything major anytime soon. We might try to figure out something we can reveal just to show in dev blog stuff without giving away much though. The branding folks I talked with suggested this as a decent way to legitimize things without wearing out our presence so when there's more we'll look into it.

A fighting game? Amazing! Since now you have my interest, I love that genre (although I'm really bad at it) and develop a small one is an challenge that I want to accomplish in a future. I hope you could tell us more things about the development of it, so we could learn from your experience.
 
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.

I think I knew yoi game was 3d, but thought the trees were 2d for example. But nope, fully 3d modeled branches and all.

You need to make this rotation somewhere into the game after te firts level or something so people blew their minds when theu find is not 2D
 
Would it be ok to post a link to a playable (very) early prealpha in here?

Need to check some lighting changes work well on different types of GPU
 
Ha! The number one comparison we've received at events is Transistor (i think it's the trees or something?) so it's nice to hear a new one :D Both visually lovely games.

I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)

Kk3KOA9.gif


Incendiary grenade fixed!
http://i.imgur.com/0Ar8lYa.gifv

The grenade throw anim is a little janky right now.

This is just stunning. Excellent work.
 
Just who the fuck do you think you are?

Go for it!

http://www.arkrp.com/GameDevStuff/AfterTheEndPreAlpha.7z

It's a pretty small download and like I said, super early but I put in a lighting system and grading system and need to be sure it don't crash on different cards since I only have a 970 in my PC

EDIT: Meanwhile I got bridges working in my second test level :)

http://gfycat.com/ImpressionableSkinnyConure

Lets you cross the rougher substance without losing as much movement. Plus will let you cross unwalkable terrain like rivers etc
 

cbox

Member
Depends on your implementation.

I would do something like this, using this menu flow for the example:
Main Menu -> Mode Select -> Lobby -> Start Game

If you're not using some kind of Menu Manager, then things can get a bit messy. If I was designing a Menu Manager I would have the manager keep a reference to the last active menu when going to a new one, but for the sake of this example I'm going to assume that you're just going menu object to menu object.

Each menu object would need to have a reference to both its next and previous menu (if applicable). So, for example, the Lobby menu would have a reference to both Start Game as its next menu and Mode Select as its previous menu.

From there it would be as easy as grabbing the next or previous menu before you transition.

In code that could look something like this:
Code:
//Declared variables that are set in the Inspector (which is why they're null here).
public GameObject NextMenu = null;
public GameObject PreviousMenu = null;

public void TransitionForward()
{
   //Deactivate our active menu object (which is this gameObject) and activate our NextMenu.
   this.gameObject.SetActive(false);
   this.NextMenu.SetActive(true);
}

public void TransitionBack()
{
   //Deactivate our active menu object (which is this gameObject) and activate our NextMenu.
   this.gameObject.SetActive(false);
   this.PreviousMenu.SetActive(true);
}

Something like that, but probably with an actual transition instead of just deactivating/activating GameObjects. Note that the use of "this" isn't needed, I just added it to make the code a bit more verbose and easier to understand/read.

My setup is similar to what electroflame explained with the menu manager. I'm using NGUI, but uGUI is probably similar.

I have my menu manager load screens from the Resources folder, but you could have them pre-existing if you want. Screens are managed with a stack. Basically each screen tells the menu manger what to screen to show, and the menu manager will deactivate the current screen, put it on the stack, then load the next screen and activate it. If a screen wants to go backwards, it just needs to tell the manager to "go back", which will deactivate the current screen, pop it off the stack, and activate the previous screen.

This way, screens only really need to know what the next screens are, and not what the previous one is. It gets a little messy though, when you need to jump back multiple screens, or change what's in the middle of the stack.

The manager also handles transitions, and blocking inputs while screens are transitioning. You can also build a modal popup system into it as well, and have input to the screens blocked, while a popup has focus.

For a simple menu system, this works alright. I'm interested to hear what other setups people have. Like I said, the stack layout can get a little messy, so for my next project, I might want to try something else.

This is awesome, thanks guys. I'll try and implement something like this. Though firstly, some c# courses!
 

Ito

Member
Does she ever use the sword with the blade like that on the pinky side? When she pulls it out, it's on the thumb side and then she switches it to pinky side for the idle stance and then during the strikes, it's back on the thumb side. It looks a little awkward.

It's hardly noticeable in the gif (and in the game itself since that animation runs at 30 fps) but she does flip the dagger to attack with the edge. It was much more noticeable in previous versions of that animation, but that slight pause made the animations slower and affected the flow of the combat.
 

Water

Member
I think what most people are surprised by is that the game is built out with fully 3D assets, and it's just the orthographic camera giving that faux-2D look we want. Here's a little spin around :)
If you are never going to actually spin the camera around in the game, looks like you could get nice performance savings by simply going through the assets and deleting the backside polys :)
 

Peltz

Member
There's a lot of aerial stuff you can do in the second half of the game. For the hell of it, here's a quick rundown.

Once you get the multijump, you're permitted 3 mid-air jumps. This is pretty straightforward.

However, it's possible to get a 4th by timing your button press properly after a dash ends. You know you got it because the FX trail is red instead of purple.

secret jump: http://www.gfycat.com/SpecificChubbyAmericanwirehair

You can combine this with multijump to get 4 jumps total in the air. However, it's possible to get, in effect, a 5th jump by aiming and releasing the charge blast downward.

5 jumps: http://www.gfycat.com/TenderSpottedGar

Finally, once you get the multidash skill, your dash refreshes every time you dash through an enemy, allowing you to chain through enemies and stay in the air. When combined with your other abilities and even more abilities (not shown yet) and flying enemies, you can skillfully reach great distances or great heights.

multidash demonstration: http://www.gfycat.com/WetArcticIndianringneckparakeet

Oh cool... I played this game at PAX East. It felt good to play and I got some serious Super Metroid vibes from it (in a good way of course). I'm looking forward to the finished game.
 

Jobbs

Banned
Hey guys,
I want your opinion on Alice voice
Line1
Line2
Line3
Line4

Pretty good! 1 feels the smoothest, but honestly, they're all pretty good. I'd have to hear more lines to give a better critique.

Oh cool... I played this game at PAX East. It felt good to play and I got some serious Super Metroid vibes from it (in a good way of course). I'm looking forward to the finished game.

Thanks man. Glad you liked it. :)
 
This is sex.

Looks fantastic!


As with pretty much everything before, that gif looks awesome, but I also really impressed by the website, has to be one of the sleekest game websites I've ever seen. Again, you have such fantastic art and graphic design direction. I now have very high expectations of the trailer :p

The art in this game is to beautiful. Are you planning to sell posters?
Also i JUST downloaded Black Snow by random... what are the odds...

We do plan to sell some posters/prints once we release the trailer, contact press, think about funding again blah blah. We'll make a shop for our site if anyone is interested in grabbing one :)

Ha! Black Snow was a fun little mod we did whilst working on a much larger project (albeit set in the same universe). Sadly I don't think the mod works properly through Steam due to the steampipe update a while back breaking most mods, sorry :/ We've received tons of comments about fixing it, but none of us have any time spare to go back and figure out what broke it. We hopped over to UE4 with the new game but put the project on hold as the scope was becoming something we couldn't manage with our team's size. Some early shots exist on mine and Tay's sites though.

http://aseaton.squarespace.com/#/haven/
https://taychind.carbonmade.com/projects/5287144

We will be returning to it and maybe doing something cool with Black Snow once we've finished Beacon!

That is really cool. Granted, I already figured out that it was fully 3D ages ago, but the perspective spin is sweet.

Are you going to use that twisty magic in the game in some way?

Oh fuck. That did surprise me. It looks amazing, man. Congrats!

I think I knew yoi game was 3d, but thought the trees were 2d for example. But nope, fully 3d modeled branches and all.

You need to make this rotation somewhere into the game after te firts level or something so people blew their minds when theu find is not 2D

This is just stunning. Excellent work.

Wow. Really didn't expect people to like that gif so much! :D Thanks, I speak for the team when I say I'm very flattered by the response.

Sooooo, we do plan to use the spin around for a couple of things, like boss battle introductions and very secret areas. We don't want to use it for everything since it would mean all areas would have to be built out with it in mind (most places don't have geo on the side not facing the camera). But we definitely do want to include it, because it looks real cool :)

Also this is what the game looked like just under a year ago when it actually WAS in 2D!

resample(lanczos).jpeg


We're going to have a big 'ol roundup this weekend of new content, mainly gifs, so I'm looking forward to showing that stuff off!

Thanks again everyone.
 
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