-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay
- Thread starter Jacksinthe
- Start date
- Status
Testing some of the new animations. I'm trying to make them a little more expressive, let's see if I can get rid of that stiff look...
^ that's really cool, honestly, but looking at it makes me long for a new start when I can make everything simpler character-wise and focus instead on the form and motion. That detail is such a high burden.
Diablohead
Member
I love how the sword swing makes her hair swish about a bit, looks lovely.
I've been forgetting to post in this thread recently, but I'm making a ton of progress on a vertical slice for Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. I'm hoping to have that milestone wrapped up by the end of next week, with a playable test build to follow as time permits.
looks awesome! <3 palette fades
where will you be sharing the playable build?
So you wan't to make a simpler character in your next game? I think that's a good choice, and that I'll probably follow if I ever get out of this project alive. The next thing I'd like to do is a zelda like game set in the ancient greece, and I'd like to pursue a simpler art style that would allow me to focus on those aspects as well, instead of detail (mostly to become a better animator).
About the level of detail, I guess it's all about layering. When I work in a new animation, I don't put that much detail on it from the beginning, I start just by animating the body, without the accesories, the skirt, the long hair, etc. Once I figure out that and I have all the different frames ready, that's when I start caring about all the detail, one by one. It's a lot of extra time, sure, but if you're a good animator (as it is in your case) you shouldn't worry about it affecting the outcome.
Testing some of the new animations. I'm trying to make them a little more expressive, let's see if I can get rid of that stiff look...
The art looks impressive and the small details like the hair following up the motion are awesome, but I think it looks a bit stiff as you say. Maybe you should change the pose to make her bend the knees a bit and bend the body forward. Even when she opens her legs they´re totally straight. it gives her a look of "cold, methodical" warrior, but I think it´s too much.
Anyway realy impressive art, it must´ve taken ages to animate.
liliththepale
Banned
Testing some of the new animations. I'm trying to make them a little more expressive, let's see if I can get rid of that stiff look...
Keeping her feet so close to each other is not a very stable stance, and is not one that most trained fighters will take. She can't possibly perform full range of motion when standing so still. It makes her feel reserved, like she's more concerned with standing straight than with putting any heft into her attack.
Find a model sword or a stick or a bat or something. Move to an open space, then stand straight up like your character is and try swinging your sword (or sword analogue) as hard as you can. You'll probably fall over, or deliver a really weak swing, or both.
Now try again swinging as hard as you can, but this time let your body and legs do whatever feels right. Notice how much they move?
platforming gameplay looks and feels better (imo) with a narrow stance.
I think the best thing is to have a separate stance for in combat and out of combat. that's what I'll be doing.
It's a bit tough to answer without really knowing more about the whole setup, but normally you would want to be able to include multiple providers and geographical effectiveness is also something you might have to cover at some point. But I think (I don't really work on that stuff since we have a proper marketing department) Chartboost should be just fine for a single implementation. Just remember to include them at points where it feels as natural pacing for the player, like when returning to the world map or whatever.
Looks like I'll be missing out on GGJ since I still have a lot of stuff to catch up after moving to Germany, but I wanted to say that working for a bigger mobile company has definitely been an eye-opener and I have certainly enjoyed my days there so far (lots of fun working and fantastic people). So I'll probably stay lurking here mostly, but the last few pages have been really awesome so keep it up all!
yeah, something more cel shaded looking.
^ not that, that was just an experiment, but something more in that vein
Something like Hollow Knight, maybe?
Oh, I forgot to say, thats only one of three different "idle" stances, concretely, the one that shows when there are no enemies around, therefore, Hibari adopts this quiet/still stance.
I mean, that "attack" animation is not supposed to be directed at enemies, but rather to be used as a generic slash animation (lets say you want to cut grass or hit a destructible wall, well, I found the regular attack animations too "aggressive" for that purpose).
Any time an enemy gets near the player, her stance changes to another one, this time her legs more open. This "battle" stance changes depending on the weapon you're currently wielding. The attack animations are also different. I think I showed some of them back in the day: https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/CGM2Sk9WIAAiJlS.mp4 (these are the old ones, all of them have changed).
I'll try to make some gifs in the following days to explain this. Sounds confusing but it feels really natural in-game and adds some variation to the character body language.
Think of how Link reacts when he spots enemies in Twilight Princess, and how his idle stance changes when you Z-Target.
liliththepale
Banned
I opened up GM and poked around a while ago -- making a small tutorial game -- and was surprised by how needlessly obtuse a lot of stuff seemed to be.
shrug.. a lot of people seem to like it, though.
I use the default room editor. It's not that bad. The tile editor has a lot of potential (mostly I use tilesets).
In order to set all the collisions, I just use blocks, it's pretty easy to resize them so you can avoid placing too many instances.
That's for 2d, of course. For a 3d game I'd have no idea (but if you're planning to make anything 3d related with GM I'd suggest to move onto another platform).
Do you have any specific concern about the room editor?
tamaster92
Member
I got this finished (ish) today:
https://gfycat.com/LeanHastyKissingbug
Ignore the obviously placeholder everything, i'm just happy I got a ledge climbing system working in one day
https://gfycat.com/LeanHastyKissingbug
Ignore the obviously placeholder everything, i'm just happy I got a ledge climbing system working in one day
You can get stuff up and running pretty quickly. The built-in language (GML) is very abstracted, but easy to learn and powerful and tailored for game making. But many of its tools leave a lot to be desired. And the IDE is quite buggy and sluggish. The object oriented design works well for a lot of things, not so well for others. But you pretty much gotta develop your own set of tools and use external level editors etc. if you want maximum flexibility.
Yeah, not being able to change level design at runtime. Also, it's pretty buggy and lacking in features. I don't know how people design and test their levels (unless they're completely procedural) when every little change requires the game to be re-compiled.
liliththepale
Banned
I rolled my own. I'm on mobile now so it would be hard to explain, but I can go into more detail later.
Oh, yeah, thats probably the shittiest thing about GM, not being able to change anything during runtime.
Gameplay-wise you can always make your own debugging system + level editor thing in GM, but yeah, being able to change stuff without having to compile again would be neat.
Luckily, compiling doesn't take too much time.
Yeah, dealbreaker for me. I'm so concerned with flow in my level design and the tiniest change can affect that. It's a constant back and forth between playing tiny bits and adjusting them ever so slightly. Re-compiling every time would be a massive time waste for me. Although I suppose this does have to do with the kind of game I'm making too.
I've been using Inkscape for level design and a simple XML parser I wrote to interpret them into something GM can use (all the tiling and much of the drawing is automated/procedural, so I don't place actual visual elements in my levels).
Here's what they look like in Inkscape:
The game itself looks like this:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=534653006
Thanks to this approach any change I make to a level is instantly reflected in the game, as I play/test. I can also scroll through levels with my mouse wheel and place the player where I want while in-game.
Definitely curious!
el_Nikolinho
Neo Member
I could absolutely try that. Pretty early on in developing it, not quite sure what it will end up like
That looks franckly good. How far into development are you?
And yeah, if you're making that kind of precise platforming, you'll definitely need to tweak your level design during runtime a lot. It seems like you chose quite a sophisticated way to do it
. I'd just make my own simplified in-game level editor.That looks franckly good. How far into development are you?
And yeah, if you're making that kind of precise platforming, you'll definitely need to tweak your level design during runtime a lot. It seems like you chose quite a sophisticated way to do it
I was debating for a long time whether to make my own level editor or not. Obviously that's the best approach. I was afraid it would be a massive time sink for me. Fortunately my game requires no complex scripting or hand placed tiles, so Inkscape ended up working out very well.
I'm about 70% done. Hoping to release later this year.
PirateHearts
Neo Member
Thanks! The palette fade was a fun challenge to implement.
The playable build will be up at http://gunmetalarcadia.com/ whenever it's ready, and I'll probably also link it on here, on Twitter (@PirateHearts), my Patreon, the TIGSource forums, Reddit /r/gamedev or /r/playgamegame, and anywhere else I can think of.
Awesome! Looking forward to it.
I've been forgetting to post in this thread recently, but I'm making a ton of progress on a vertical slice for Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. I'm hoping to have that milestone wrapped up by the end of next week, with a playable test build to follow as time permits.
I'm a big NES fan, so this looks pretty awesome to me. I'll be keeping an eye on it.
liliththepale
Banned
So there are a lot of interlinked parts. First I have the level editor object which handles most of the actual functionality. Then I have a bunch of objects which represent an entire class of assets. Then I have a couple parent objects which hold all of the basic functionality of an editable object (one for gameplay items and another for decor).
So for example, let's look at the different kinds of flowers I can put in my game. (Still on mobile, so I can't link screenshots atm). Certain flowers you pluck and harvest for usage in brewing potions. There are seven different of these flowers and they each belong to the same class. In the level editor, this is represented by an object I've titled xFlower. xFlower is a child of xParent. xParent is responsible for responding to mouse and keyboard input in conjunction with the level editor singleton. xParent also draws the object's UI when appropriate. So then all xFlower does, after inheriting xParent's behavior, is define the class specific attributes. Things like how I don't need it to rotate ever (so disable the rotate tool when an instance of xFlower is selected) nor do I want it ever be scaled, and also I need to be able to select one of the seven flower types.
There's also other flowers in the game, like some of the weeds/grass class. Since that counts as decor, I have yGrass which extends yParent. yGrass can be scaled but not rotated, and then it also has attributes determining which type of grass/weed/flowers to use there, and also the density. xParent and yParent are almost the same functionally, but I keep them separate for classification reasons to make it easier to have a setup where I'm only either editing decor or gameplay objects, not both, which I can toggle with Tab.
To save a level, I iterate through all of the editable objects and save their raw attributes. It looks something like this:
do
switch i
case 0: n = xCrate
case 1: n = xFlower
default: n = noone
write string version of n
write count of n as real
with n
write values of x, y, xscale, yscale, rot, flipped, plus any other attributes
i++
until n = noone
Then I just do the inverse when loading objects back into the game. A sample of the level file might look like this:
xFlower
2
120 1080 1 1 0 1 0 0
360 1080 1 1 0 1 0 3
yGrass
1
0 960 4 1 0 1 0 3 4.5
When I want to turn these edible objects into playable objects, and start actually running the game part of the game, I run a user event zero on all of the editable objects. This way they all get triggered at the same time, and they can each decide what to do at that moment. For example, xFlower uses a switch statement based off of it's type attribute to determine whether to spawn an instance of oNightlily, oThewsong, or one of the other pickable flower objects.
Anyway, that's the basic gist of it. There's a whole lot of nuance to the implementation, but I think you get the picture
Thanks for the replies regarding advertising.
To expand a bit more, the game has a minimum possible play time of ten seconds (each round has a timer counting down, easy mode is 20 seconds, normal is 15 and hard is 10) but real game time is probably a minutes or so per game. It really is designed to jump in and out of. It isn't in any way that sort of game, but I was really inspired by the short game times of Super Hexagon that I used to play on the way to work.
Right now I have a simple static interstitial after ever every other game and I expect some people to hate that. I like the idea of a video ad every so often. Maybe Every third ad could be a video one.
I've been a bit ashamed really discussing the game with people as it is so utterly, utterly basic. I occasionally tell myself "well so is Tetris at heart", but I can't shake the feeling. I work in a rather niche part of the games industry and my friends know I am working on it, but I have been too embarrassed to show them. I really need to work on my confidence.
this is also why I haven't posted any screenshots here. Maybe I should.
To expand a bit more, the game has a minimum possible play time of ten seconds (each round has a timer counting down, easy mode is 20 seconds, normal is 15 and hard is 10) but real game time is probably a minutes or so per game. It really is designed to jump in and out of. It isn't in any way that sort of game, but I was really inspired by the short game times of Super Hexagon that I used to play on the way to work.
Right now I have a simple static interstitial after ever every other game and I expect some people to hate that. I like the idea of a video ad every so often. Maybe Every third ad could be a video one.
I've been a bit ashamed really discussing the game with people as it is so utterly, utterly basic. I occasionally tell myself "well so is Tetris at heart", but I can't shake the feeling. I work in a rather niche part of the games industry and my friends know I am working on it, but I have been too embarrassed to show them. I really need to work on my confidence.
this is also why I haven't posted any screenshots here. Maybe I should.
I really need to start the marketing and awareness of a VR game that I been working over the past year. I have gotten press written about the game from Indiecade East(when it nothing more then tech demo really) and it won award at indie expo at Atlantic city.
The huge problem I keep on running in that Screen shots and video do not sell the game well at all. I am in the process of drawing out storyboards for a live action teaser trailer for the game.
The game still has loads of programmer art in it that is getting replace slowly as there is two artist along with sound/music designer on the project now.
Any advice on how to tackle this issue at hand would be great.
The huge problem I keep on running in that Screen shots and video do not sell the game well at all. I am in the process of drawing out storyboards for a live action teaser trailer for the game.
The game still has loads of programmer art in it that is getting replace slowly as there is two artist along with sound/music designer on the project now.
Any advice on how to tackle this issue at hand would be great.
For my current game I plan on making a full level editor, in fact it´ll be part of the game but at first it´s going to be more simple while I make the story mode.
For the last game I made (8 years ago) I used a sort-of hybrid system, where some of the level data was saved in text files and there was a big room initialization script where all the details of the rooms were set, like for example if it was an underwater stage initialize the surface that would do the water effects, lighting, the main background, default tiles and such things. The level geometry and "special" tiling itself was done in the room editor, as well as some initialization for special elements (like setting the initial speed of moving platforms). This worked pretty well thanks to the levels being small (usually one single screen, it was a metroidvania-ish game) but for bigger levels I don´t think it would work so well. Besides, after using Mario Maker all GM editor´s flaws have become even more apparent to me, so I´m aiming for something like that.
As for the number of instances, I think that as long as you don´t use code in the blocks and deactive instances outside the iview it shouldn´t be a problem.
I also use a GameController object which can be used to tweak variables, pause the game or advance frame by frame, restart and stuff during gameplay but of course you have to program it before, everything you didn´t account for means going back to GM, changing things and recompiling.
Does anyone here know if this book on Game Programming patterns is any good? http://www.amazon.com/dp/0990582906/?tag=neogaf0e-20
or know any other good resources for something similar?
or know any other good resources for something similar?
I was going to say there is this website I liked...but then I realized it's the same thing.
http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
You can read the entire thing on the official website for free, as well as buy it in physical and PDF form.
I was going to say there is this website I liked...but then I realized it's the same thing.
http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
You can read the entire thing on the official website for free, as well as buy it in physical and PDF form.
I was thinking of getting a physical copy to read in the little spare time I have. Good to know you like the content.
fengshuifever
Member
http://webmshare.com/wNZr8
I was toying with the shader
today as well as messing the with normal map depth and I really really like how it's turned out.
I might leave it for a while and run with this.
Also, I've been deliberating for a long time whether to make this third person or not and I think I've committed to it.
I was toying with the shader
again
I might leave it for a while and run with this.
Also, I've been deliberating for a long time whether to make this third person or not and I think I've committed to it.
I will miss you First Person view
TheHollowNight
Member
Giant mining lasers, every planet needs 'em
I've been forgetting to post in this thread recently, but I'm making a ton of progress on a vertical slice for Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. I'm hoping to have that milestone wrapped up by the end of next week, with a playable test build to follow as time permits.
Looking great, ever consider an NES version?
I do use the built in level editor? What's wrong with it regarding the type of game you're making?
EDIT: hmm, did read your following messages and I guess you are pretty good with Inkscape and your parser..
liliththepale
Banned
Another look at the cutscene before its done:
That looks great! I love when games have traditionally animated cutscenes in them.
fengshuifever
Member
Trigger Warning : Bright as the sun (I overlit just for testin')
Finally starting to get the boss room together as well as the rest of the level properly laid out.
Daaaaamn, this looks great.
I love that little delayed flip with the left character. So good
Finally starting to get the boss room together as well as the rest of the level properly laid out.
Another look at the cutscene before its done:
Daaaaamn, this looks great.
I love that little delayed flip with the left character. So good
Question for those using Game Maker: how are you handling resolution? I was using 1280x720, but changed the view port size because it was too zoomed out to 640x360 so everything is 2x bigger and now small gaps show between tiles :S Everything is 32x32 so it shouldn´t be a problem to scale up x2...
liliththepale
Banned
I've seen someone with your problem who eventually found a fix, but it's not very straightforward unfortunately. It was something along the lines of leaving the first view's viewport at the 1:1 size, copying the application_surface (backbuffer) to memory, then drawing a scaled version of the surface in the draw GUI event.
Myself, I'm rendering 1080 native. I have no idea if it even works on larger or smaller screens. I'll save figuring that out and fixing it for the final stretch of development if I can.
hobblygobbly
Member
Been playing around with graphics ideas. Not sure how viable it is but I think it's kind of cool?
Low resolution rendering + wireframe shader (there are multiple ways to achieve a wireframe but shaders are the most efficient). There is an angle where it can be a bit obscured but I can clean that up.
They're spaceships, the first one is one I got off opengameart, second is one I tried to model, I have very intermediate knowledge when it comes to 3D modelling so it was just something I threw up in 3-5 mins.
Low resolution rendering + wireframe shader (there are multiple ways to achieve a wireframe but shaders are the most efficient). There is an angle where it can be a bit obscured but I can clean that up.
They're spaceships, the first one is one I got off opengameart, second is one I tried to model, I have very intermediate knowledge when it comes to 3D modelling so it was just something I threw up in 3-5 mins.
I like. Has potential!Been playing around with graphics ideas. Not sure how viable it is but I think it's kind of cool?
Low resolution rendering + wireframe shader (there are multiple ways to achieve a wireframe but shaders are the most efficient). There is an angle where it can be a bit obscured but I can clean that up.
They're spaceships, the first one is one I got off opengameart, second is one I tried to model, I have very intermediate knowledge when it comes to 3D modelling so it was just something I threw up in 3-5 mins.
Implement a form of depth-cue, i.e. shade the lines with respect to the
distance from the screen. You can also try to skip pixels from the lines with
distance (removes clutter). And there is another cool way to draw wireframe
graphics when hidden-line/surface removal is activated, i.e. by cutting those
wires a lil shorter which go behind another object. This reduces clutter as
well and also enhances the perception of individual objects when drawn as
wireframes. If you can reduce the clutter (as described above) you may also
turn off that crappy anti-aliasing algorithm. Basically, you need an anti-
aliasing algorithm which won't kill your shades of the lines esp. when
animated, one which is specifically tailored to lines. The standard hardware
anti-aliasing filters are pretty crappy. You may try one of the pre-filter
anti-aliasing techniques which try to keep the shades uniform along the line
and also gives much better anti-aliased lines overall. You may try this one,
with GPU source;
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter22.html.
And that's the result you can expect
giving you very nice lines improving you wireframe graphics in orders of
magnitudes. :+
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
Yeah, her legs are too close together for an action movement.
I think you just made me settle on an art style.
I think you just made me settle on an art style.
thomasmahler
Moon Studios
Been playing around with graphics ideas. Not sure how viable it is but I think it's kind of cool?
Low resolution rendering + wireframe shader (there are multiple ways to achieve a wireframe but shaders are the most efficient). There is an angle where it can be a bit obscured but I can clean that up.
They're spaceships, the first one is one I got off opengameart, second is one I tried to model, I have very intermediate knowledge when it comes to 3D modelling so it was just something I threw up in 3-5 mins.
The wireframe'ish look can look very cool if you just look at assets - but try to put that look together in a game and you'll quickly see that it sucks. Once you're flying around in a wireframe environment like that you have no idea where the walls are, everything's super hard to read, you don't have a lot of power to visually differentiate one thing from another, etc.
There's a reason why even the fairly early polygonal games didn't use this look for all too long, even though it's cheap in terms of perf - There was even a terrible Virtual Boy Starfox clone that used this look and it was complete garbage.
It´s a weird problem as horizontally the tiles are good, but vertically they show a 1 or 2px gap. Everything else is scaled correctly. This looks like a very obvious bug in GM, I mean, I´m just using basic stuff.
I guess I´ll have to use surfaces then, Thanks!
BTW I didn´t know now GM draws by default to a surface, that´ll save a lot of work.
- Status