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[Minamu]

As a designer, a good idea is to write a brief synopsis of the overall design and get the team to agree with it; this gives you a binary 'checklist' to work against as a rule of thumb.

for example, if you have "fast paced gameplay" as a high level goal, then anything that works directly against that goal could be considered feature creep, and shelved or dropped - eg health pickups, regenerating health, timed respawns, cover systems, unlimited time goals, movement inhibiting mechanics, etc.

None of those mechanics are inherently 'bad', but they all work against a 'fast paced' high level goal, so shouldn't be worked on. If it turns out things are too fast paced, then you have a number of 'backburner' features you can draw from.

Yeah, that's smart We've only mainly talked about it, not necessarily writing it down, although we've all been in the clear on what the game is about. Until someone takes matters into their own hands because they got bored one night, or whatever xD Planning is a great thing, until somebody just stops giving a shit and does their own thing outside their jurisdiction so to speak. (which is happening from time to time in this particular project, although I doubt that's how they view their actions)

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

Things like that makes me wonder if having my game project be a solo effort is worth the time spent on it...

Speaking of which, I think I'm getting attached to a placeholder enemy sprite I made for the battle system visual testing. Anyone had that feel where a placeholder end up becoming a final thing?

 

[Minamu]

Things like that makes me wonder if having my game project be a solo effort is worth the time spent on it...

Speaking of which, I think I'm getting attached to a placeholder enemy sprite I made for the battle system visual testing. Anyone had that feel where a placeholder end up becoming a final thing?

Of course it is

This game I'm referring to today is all placeholder cubes. I'm doing my best to make a style out of it, because it's really difficult to find a good artist who wants to do projects in their spare time around here. And the game was conceived at a game jam. In fact, out my 10 projects in my portfolio, only 2 have proper graphics beyond squares and cubes :lol I'd love to change that fact some day but on the other hand, it makes the gameplay stand out more I think. At the very least, it has to hold up better under scrutiny that way.

 

[Theanine3D]

Are there any actual teams in here or are most of you making entire games by yourselves? One of my team's programmers have a tendency to go rogue and add/remove/edit gameplay elements without asking for permission or even discussing if it's a good idea. It's driving me crazy :lol Not sure how to handle it, he has demanded to be named lead programmer in the credits even though there's just three of us, and he's always acting as if he's lead everything :/ Worst part is, the last time we worked together, we made a feature/bug list of things that need to be fixed before we can release a beta, and the first thing he does the next day is to redo an entire player class, which was complete and problem free, so obviously nowhere near said list! Last week I said in our chat that we must avoid feature creep at all costs if we're ever to finish the game, and his response was to make a chat poll asking people to raise their hands if they like feature creeps. Only he himself raised his hand obviously, but went on to creep anyway.

He works as a professional programmer making super serious billing software for companies by day...

No offense to your friend but I would have given him the boot, if after the first several attempts at reasoning with him didn't work and he continued this behavior anyway. You say he's talented and knows what he's doing, which is great, but he has to have a level of discipline on top of that talent too.

There's a reason some people say "Don't work with friends." I had a friend from high school as a supervisor at a job several years ago. The job started out fine but after a "honeymoon" period, she started taking advantage of the fact that we were friends by asking me to work unpaid hours. I refused, and she took it personally. It destroyed our friendship.

Anyway, to answer your first question, I'm working solo on my current project. I've worked in teams before though, on A Hat in Time and a few other indies that weren't as successful. Though the creative freedom that comes from working alone is nice, IMO working in a team is much more fun.

 

[sqwarlock]

I'm assuming the answer is 'no', but is this the right thread to ask for advice on getting back into design? I studied design years ago for my degree, but after not getting a job in the industry it became a latent and outdated skill.

I plan on creating games completely solo. I have good enough art skills, but programming leaves a lot to be desired. Basically I want to start off small and prototype simple 2D and 3D games. Is Unity the best way to go about this for both types? Or should I use Gamemaker for 2D and Unity for 3D?

Basically can someone point me in the best direction to relearn and hone my skills?

 

[JulianImp]

I ended up making a quadtree implementation for optimizing searches around entities in Unity at work, and it's so simple and useful I bet I'll be able to get some use out of the base algorithm on my own projects as well. Using Unity's bounds object to specify each quadrant means checking them is as easy using bounds' built-in Includes method, passing it a bounding box created from the entity's position and a given radius used for the bounds' extents, and later running a Vector3.Distance check since bounds are rectangles and don't work for actual radial distance checks.

The best thing is that going from a quadtree to an octree wouldn't be all that hard in theory, since it'd basically work just the same, only considering a third axis when splitting space into sub-regions.

 

[Pazu]

I'm assuming the answer is 'no', but is this the right thread to ask for advice on getting back into design? I studied design years ago for my degree, but after not getting a job in the industry it became a latent and outdated skill.

I plan on creating games completely solo. I have good enough art skills, but programming leaves a lot to be desired. Basically I want to start off small and prototype simple 2D and 3D games. Is Unity the best way to go about this for both types? Or should I use Gamemaker for 2D and Unity for 3D?

Basically can someone point me in the best direction to relearn and hone my skills?

John Romero thinks you should learn Lua and make simple games

you'll want to learn C# to work in Unity, too. there's a good free book here

 

[LordRaptor]

I plan on creating games completely solo. I have good enough art skills, but programming leaves a lot to be desired. Basically I want to start off small and prototype simple 2D and 3D games. Is Unity the best way to go about this for both types? Or should I use Gamemaker for 2D and Unity for 3D?

Pick an engine, and go through some of the included tutorials for simple games with it, see if you like working with it, and if the workflow makes sense to you / is something you can see yourself working with in future. Then move onto another one and do the same. You probably don't need to go through more than a few tutorials in all of 'the big names' to get a feel for which one suits you best.

The best advice is to get stuck in and start doing; I would suggest however not trying to learn two different engines for 2D / 3D - you can do 3D in Gamemaker (not eye-ball wowing 3D, but certainly enough to prove designs) and you can do 2D in Unity.

 

[JeffG]

So I have been fighting camera and animation during combat this last week and a bit.

Yesterday I had a thought and it worked. Combat didn't feel like total shit. (Its still not perfect...but actually shows promise.)

So tonight I got my first kill. (Enemy still as dumb as a pile of crap...but that is a battle for another day)

https://youtu.be/8nbikJ4s65o


What I was trying to achieve is while roaming around, its is the standard left stick for movement, right stick for camera. But in combat I switch it to left stick is forward/back and strafe side to side. Camera is always behind player (within a set angle anyways) Right stick turns player right/left.

 

[Jobbs]

Look it's my name in print!

From Game Informer magazine

 

[correojon]

Look it's my name in print!

From Game Informer magazine

That´s great! Congrats!

 

[Stuart444]

Not sure if this has been posted here but I found it on reddit:

http://www.gameaipro.com/

Game AI Pro volume 1 is free to download (all in separate chapter form though but you can merge them via this site)

Game AI Pro 2 is pay for (though will be free in April 2017 since after 2 years, the books become free, same with 3, 2 years after whenever it gets release) though it has some sections on AI in The Last of Us if that interests anyone.

So yeah, thought I'd post it for anyone who didn't know about it (or didn't know Vol 1 was free now)

 

[Ito]

Someday I'll finish this game

 

[gingerbeardman]

John Romero thinks you should learn Lua and make simple games

Pico 8 is great fun. Uses a subset of LUA, has its own commands for blitting sprites and tiles. has built in editors for sprites/tiles, maps, sound effects, music. All you need!

Here's a version of Pang (aka Buster Bros) that I made last Saturday afternoon (and then took four evenings this week polishing)

http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3452
Playable in your browser using your keyboard

 

[RelentlessRolento]

Look it's my name in print!

From Game Informer magazine

Wooh! nice!



I'm getting closer and closer to the Kickstarter happening! Just setup most of the greenlight page (thanks everyone here for input), finished my Kickstarter video (I need to look at it later in case cuts are needed), itch.io page setup... etc.

Pretty excited!

 

[Makai]

Look it's my name in print!

neato

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

What art style speaks more to you guys for a game about the creative process?

A) Photo background for reality. Painted art/digital for the scenes inside the persons head.

B) Free backgrounds from free game art sites, etc. to expemplify that indie devs HAVE NO MONEY.

?

I'm brainstorming.

 

[asa]

Finishing work on the Power Hover challenge mode. Here's a little clip from the Distance challenge with a spaceship.

Made the clip for the #screenshotsaturday, the main SSS Neogaf thread is pretty dead. I was thinking that maybe we could post our SSS shots on this thread on every saturday instead. What do you think?

 

[dzelly]

Is it okay to post Screenshot Saturday stuff here?

 

[Jacksinthe]

Is it okay to post Screenshot Saturday stuff here?

You can post whatever you want but there is a dedicated SSS thread listed in the OP.

 

[dzelly]

You can post whatever you want but there is a dedicated SSS thread listed in the OP.

Looks like there hasn't been a post in months over there.

I wanted to share some progress from a game a friend of mine and I are working on. It's a retro-rpg inspired action Mahjong game called Meadhall Mahjong. Overall I'm pretty happy with where we're at after about a week of dev time.

Main Menu

Gameplay

 

[Minamu]

Finishing work on the Power Hover challenge mode. Here's a little clip from the Distance challenge with a spaceship.

Made the clip for the #screenshotsaturday, the main SSS Neogaf thread is pretty dead. I was thinking that maybe we could post our SSS shots on this thread on every saturday instead. What do you think?

Hey, that's pretty cool It's very unusual to be travelling from top-left to bottom-right, to most it just feels weird, but I like it thus far Nice art style too.

Edit: Does anyone know what this is about in Unity? I'm getting some sort of shadowing artifacts or something on my geometry:

http://i.imgur.com/iAw92Io.png

There's nothing wrong with the positioning of objects, I've made sure they fit right next to each other by holding down V when moving them. The material is a standard material I made, so it's not the default one. The artifacts comes and goes with distance and viewing angle I think. I think I've read about htis problem somewhere, a quality setting error maybe? I'm using default settings afaik.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Looks like there hasn't been a post in months over there.

I wanted to share some progress from a game a friend of mine and I are working on. It's a retro-rpg inspired action Mahjong game called Meadhall Mahjong. Overall I'm pretty happy with where we're at after about a week of dev time.

Main Menu

Gameplay

Says i need to sign into slack to view.

 

[More_Badass]

Finishing work on the Power Hover challenge mode. Here's a little clip from the Distance challenge with a spaceship.

Made the clip for the #screenshotsaturday, the main SSS Neogaf thread is pretty dead. I was thinking that maybe we could post our SSS shots on this thread on every saturday instead. What do you think?

Oh hey I started that thread, I thought it was dead. Didn't realize it was listed in the OT here.

I had started my own #SS thread, but it's so image heavy that it becomes practically unusable after a few months
http://neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1165572

 

[Popstar]

Oh hey I started that thread, I thought it was dead. Didn't realize it was listed in the OT here.

I hsd started my own #SS thread, but it's so image heavy that it becomes practically unusable after a few months
http://neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1165572

This reminds me. I should check if Firefox's new WebExtensions API is far enough along for me to port NeoGFY to it.

 

[dzelly]

Says i need to sign into slack to view.

Fixed. Didn't realize the slack links would be unusable. Linked to imgur uploads now.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Finishing work on the Power Hover challenge mode. Here's a little clip from the Distance challenge with a spaceship.

Made the clip for the #screenshotsaturday, the main SSS Neogaf thread is pretty dead. I was thinking that maybe we could post our SSS shots on this thread on every saturday instead. What do you think?

I think it looks great.

 

[superNESjoe]

It's crazy to be back at step one again working on a new game after launching GunWorld 2. Here's Abacus! While still a platformer, it's not based around difficulty, precision, or projectiles. Abacus is more inspired by Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania, but with a more casual and flexible approach to difficulty and a progression system that is based around using different mathematics spells and powers to solve puzzles and defeat bosses.

This is one of the main heroine's major traversal abilities. You can stick into walls using your spear, and then slide and walljump off of them. Gonna be doing a Kickstarter for the game in late June.

 

[Sàmban]

A glimpse of the first area in Asideus for screenshot Saturday!

 

[DNAbro]

Got quite a bit done today. Overworld movement, smooth camera movement, proper scene transitions, and simple dialogue with NPCs. I make real progress when I actually have some time to work on it lol

 

[Jumplion]

Hacking away at my game design document for my capstone project. It'll be a while before I have anything really substantial to show you guys, but hopefully I can take a crack at some (attempted) concept art or something. Professor seems fairly encouraging and I'm thinking of ways to expand it just a bit to some areas I didn't think of before.

I want to take my time, which is hard because I'm an impatient bastard. I might do a small writeup when I have some more substantial stuff done for it, get a read on the vibe you guys give to the project. It'll be interesting to say the least (at least I think it's interesting).

 

[Noogy]

Look it's my name in print!

From Game Informer magazine

Awesome, congrats!

I'm not sure if anyone else does this, but I've collected every print magazine that I could that covered my game.

 

[AzureSkies]

you'll want to learn C# to work in Unity, too. there's a good free book here

Thanks for the free book! I'm reading it now and loving it so far.

 

[shaowebb]

Edit: Does anyone know what this is about in Unity? I'm getting some sort of shadowing artifacts or something on my geometry:

http://i.imgur.com/iAw92Io.png

There's nothing wrong with the positioning of objects, I've made sure they fit right next to each other by holding down V when moving them. The material is a standard material I made, so it's not the default one. The artifacts comes and goes with distance and viewing angle I think. I think I've read about htis problem somewhere, a quality setting error maybe? I'm using default settings afaik.

Are there any overlapping polygons? Sometimes I'd find during construction after boolean work and other stuff that I'd have what I thought was a flat surface but was in fact, like two sheets of paper laying on each other, two seperate levels of polygons that were overlapping. In those instance the light calculates just like it does in real life and the overlapped area doesn't allow light to penetrate as far and ends up with a noticeable variance in light/shadow.

Try grabbing a polygon on that area, lifting it up, then turning xray on to see if there is still a polygon underneath.

 

[LordRaptor]

Been trying to channel Kirby / Steranko backgrounds for my environment textures... not sure if its too 'busy'

 

[Minamu]

Are there any overlapping polygons? Sometimes I'd find during construction after boolean work and other stuff that I'd have what I thought was a flat surface but was in fact, like two sheets of paper laying on each other, two seperate levels of polygons that were overlapping. In those instance the light calculates just like it does in real life and the overlapped area doesn't allow light to penetrate as far and ends up with a noticeable variance in light/shadow.

Try grabbing a polygon on that area, lifting it up, then turning xray on to see if there is still a polygon underneath.

Not as far as I know. I'm just using the standard Unity cubes and placing them next to one another. I noticed that I can make the problem go away by removing shadows from the object entirely so it's definitely related to that somehow. I also noticed that I can phase it out by changing the main directional light's bias. The default is at 0.04 and I had it changed to 0.01, but at 0.1 the problem goes away, at least at close distances. But it seems to vary between different maps, although the cubes are the same. Luckily the game is really, really dark :lol

By Xray, I assume you mean the feature in for example Maya? I don't think that's applicable in this case :/

Edit: If I change my directional light to using hard shadows instead of soft, the problem goes away. Maybe my pc is just too bad for softs? xD It usually complains about me using bounce intensity, saying something along the lines of the pc not being able to handle the shader or something.

 

[SplitYourInfinities]

Any tips to animate characters composed by multiple sprites in Unity? I think I'm doing it wrong.

 

[pixelpatch]

ps. I freaking love indiedevs!

 

[Jobbs]

I'm animating "Roper" right now. He ends up being a bit of a boss encounter, such as they are in this game (I don't do bosses in quite the traditional way that a mega man or metroid game does).

Moving all the little details makes him a bit tedious to animate but it's going well.

You can't tell without any scale but he's actually quite large on screen when in-game.

Awesome, congrats!

I'm not sure if anyone else does this, but I've collected every print magazine that I could that covered my game.

Thanks. I have appeared in two different issues of Game Informer now and I don't have either. XD

 

[correojon]

It´s been a while since I posted anything about the editor, so here´s a short gif:

Some features in the GIF:

• Add lines of blocks with a click
• Autofill of blocks
• Autotiling of blocks
• Autodecorations
• Platforms and Grinders swapping between the different options (still, horizontal, vertical, circular...).
• Circular platforms and Grinders snap together if placed close enough, so they can rotate around the same center.
• Resizable platforms.
• Elements get added to the fast-access palette automatically if there are free slots when first used.

I think it´s coming along pretty well and making levels with it is very easy...but it still has some bugs and issues

 

[Jacksinthe]

First draft of fluid-like explosions.

It's procedural so the amount of pixels that fly out are random each time on each side of the explosion.

I try to simulate the loss of fluid pressure after the initial burst. The burst and the rate at which the pressure drops are also procedural.

I took this a step further by adjusting the stream's pressure either up or down in small increments with each pixel - but on a curve - to give the fluid a chance for a more snake-like appearance as it flows out. This curve moves either up or down and every pass the curve must complete the appropriate number of steps before the curve changes direction - each pass the number of steps is changed based on a set of rules so as not to go from more pressure to less pressure from 1 pixel to the next, the curve is maintained until the generated steps are completed.

Thoughts?

 

[neko.works]

New improved opening + early gameplay video from Light Fairytale:
youtube.com/watch?v=EZCLuSSIYl0

Any thoughts?

 

[Popstar]

So I recently bought a small font bundle with a couple fonts I liked in it. I don't need it for a game project but I got curious how easy and how much it would cost if I were to license it for embedding within a game. I hadn't looked at font licensing for awhile and thought I may as well write something up in case anyone else is interested.

NOTE: this is just about commercial fonts, not freeware fronts. I also won't be touching on places like Monotype that are geared to webfont and desktop font subscriptions.

The base license at most places is mostly known as a "Desktop" license. It usually grants usage for installing on a single machine and creating commercial work such as posters or advertisements. But does not allow embedding within a document or application, or usage on a server to create any sort of on-demand text.

MYFONTS
Offers five different licenses. The relevant license for gamedevs would be the App license. It comes in two variants, an unlimited variant and a per-user variant that requires a new license for every 50,000 users. Unfortunately it is specifically a license for mobile apps – "embed the Font Software into an iOS, Android or Windows Phone Application" – so I would avoid buying anything from MyFonts.

App licenses are priced at 10 times the desktop price.

HYPEFORTYPE
Offers five different licenses including an eBook-App and a Gaming license. I can't say I'm a fan of the actual license text. I found it rather poorly written. As an example in section 1 it says "Under this license you are permitted to use the font software in gaming devices" while under section 7 it says "Use of HFT font software in any of the following circumstances, among others, without limitation, is NOT permitted without first obtaining the appropriate special licensing: a) ALL GAMING USES AND/OR DEVICES." Probably lazy lawyers copy and pasting snippets together without reading the document as a whole. (This is very common in legal documents in my experience.)

Gaming licenses are priced at 20 times the desktop price.

FONTSPRING
Offers four different licenses including an Application license. The license is clear, easy to read and reasonable. I would choose to purchase from Fontspring over MyFonts or HFT based on the license alone.

Application licenses are priced at 10 times the desktop price.

Pricing Comparison:
I found the same font (Corporative Sans) at all three places in order to compare prices. There's nothing special about Corporative Sans, It just happened to be on the front page of one of the sites.

MyFonts: $26 for each variant. $289 for the entire family of 64 (desktop license). $260 / $2890 for App license.

HypeForType: $19.20 for each variant listed price, $23.04 when added to cart (VAT?). $211.20 for family of 64, $253.44 when added to cart (desktop license). $460.80 / $5,068.80 for Gaming license.

Fontspring: $26 for each variant. $289 for enture family of 64 (desktop license). $260 / $2890 for Application license.

It's also worth noting that all the sites have sales and that the discounts apply to all the license types. So you may be able to pay desktop license prices for an application license if you can find a font that's 90% off.

For people who just read all that and are thinking, "but I have no idea what font I want to begin with" why not check out some reviews?

 

[Makai]

I like http://www.losttype.com/

 

[Popstar]

I like http://www.losttype.com/

No application embedding type licenses for purchase unfortunately.

There are a lot of other places that sell fonts. But the ones I mentioned have licences for embedding into games available.

Creative Market has some nice stuff if you don't need App use.

 

[Makai]

No application embedding type licenses for purchase unfortunately.

There are a lot of other places that sell fonts. But the ones I mentioned have licences for embedding into games available.

Creative Market has some nice stuff if you don't need App use.

http://www.losttype.com/images/samples/License_Commercial_Sample.pdf

"You may embed the font in software"

 

[Popstar]

Oh! I just looked at the drop-down for the commercial license and saw it was just differing numbers of users, nothing about embedding in software.

That's pretty surprising you can embed with the cheapest commercial license.

 

[Minamu]

Is there a difference between buying fonts and using for example free creative common ones from like 1001fonts.com or similar? That's what I've been using so far, but I have no idea if that's frowned upon or something.

 

[Popstar]

Is there a difference between buying fonts and using for example free creative common ones from like 1001fonts.com or similar? That's what I've been using so far, but I have no idea if that's frowned upon or something.

Check the individual licences. I clicked on the first few and none of them were free for commercial use.

There is a "free for commercial use" section under Font Categories->Special, but that still might not allow redistribution.

Using free fonts isn't frowned upon. I was just looking at commercial fonts. Google Fonts is a good source of free fonts.

 

[Pehesse]

(animooted version here: https://gfycat.com/QuaintWhisperedAbalone)

Those of you who got their hands on the prototype at one point or another will be happy to know I'm *finally* getting around to making Coach's match!

I had a few scares these past few days with Construct 2's preview mode failing to load more often than not - I assume it's because of the amount of assets the game now has, which is a bit worrying since I still have to pack in a few more before all is said and done. We'll see how that goes... I just hope I don't have to fully export the game each and every time I want to iterate and a small detail, that would become tedious and time consuming as hell.