Support NeoGAF

[Jacksinthe]

At least some of the cons associated with Flixel are mitigated by using Haxeflixel which is still under active development and isn't irrevocably attached to Flash - it might be worth linking as an alternative for Flixel, or as a suggestion in its own right?

By all means if you have a writeup for Haxe you can PM me!

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

By all means if you have a writeup for Haxe you can PM me!

I'm by no means familiar enough with it to personally endorse it I'm afraid, but AFAICS it is to Flixel what monodevelop is to XNA so someone picking something up for the first time would be better off going with Haxeflixel than O.G flixel - especially given it has stuff like native GPU support for mobile devices included which is probably the thing that kills off flixel from being a viable choice for most indies nowadays.

 

[Jacksinthe]

I'm by no means familiar enough with it to personally endorse it I'm afraid, but AFAICS it is to Flixel what monodevelop is to XNA so someone picking something up for the first time would be better off going with Haxeflixel than O.G flixel - especially given it has stuff like native GPU support for mobile devices included which is probably the thing that kills off flixel from being a viable choice for most indies nowadays.

I've never used it and don't know much about it. Most if the Toybox section was information pulled from the previous thread. I have PMd a few for updates and never heard back. If Flixel us used in a limited fashion nowadays I'll pull it from the thread. No sense in keeping it as a recommendation if its not a popular choice.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

I've never used it and don't know much about it. Most if the Toybox section was information pulled from the previous thread. I have PMd a few for updates and never heard back. If Flixel us used in a limited fashion nowadays I'll pull it from the thread. No sense in keeping it as a recommendation if its not a popular choice.

I'm not sure if its the nature of the GAF indie userbase, or the "this must have a personal testimonial" requirement for OP recommendations that sprang from OT1, but I know flixel is / was used by folks with an Actionscript background because it does most of the heavy lifting.
I'm not sure if any of the regulars here use anything other than Construct or Unity nowadays tbh.

EDIT:
Maybe just an infodump of engines / tools with a link to their respective homepages might be better than the 'testimonial' / pros + cons of each engine? I remember in the last thread I was surprised to see someone posting that after reading the OP they'd come to the conclusion that they were best off using Unity for mobile and then rewriting everything in C4 Engine based on its glowing recommendation

EDIT2:
and SORRY! you did great work on OP, don't want to come across as attacking your work on it!

 

[nitekrawlwer]

Ahhhh, mecanim. I don't know if you are rolling 2D or 3D so I'll give you my dirty 2D solutions.

Forget exit times, never trigger an animation from Any State, there's no need to use layers and just control entering/exiting animations from code. That is where you will have the most control. Also, how are you triggering your animations? Are you creating Parameters and using those to control entering/exiting?

The dirty is I used to have so many issue with animations using mecanim - probably because I never really understood it 100% - and I prefer to do everything i possibly can in code - so mecanim just serves as means to organize and set up parameters under which my animations trigger via my code. It's probably unorthodox but I had some major hangups with holding over frames if an animation ends in case I ever wanted it to, finding the current frame of animation for reference, if needed, etc.

So I just work with the bare minimum in Mecanim. No exit times. Just parameters to move from one animation to another. All controlled with code so I can adjust speed, timings, etc right through code and change up how and when they play and for how long without ever needing to touch mecanim after it's setup.

That's just me though. Mecanim has always been my Achilles heel in Unity

Edit: If it's 2D and you aren't using any blends - I have even dirtier solutions that are even simpler than Mecanim but still use Mecanim for a few things

I should have mentioned im using 3d models and its a "2.5D" game where everything is just 0 on the Z axis. I'm definitely considering using as little of mecanim as possible. I just dont understand how I got my first attempt working 90% perfectly in regards to animating but after changing some touch stuff to better capture my touch inputs and adding some more attacks in the exact same fashion only to have this bugginess.

I am using parameters on my transitions. Mostly just state(the current state), previous state, and first frame equals true. I only fiddled with exit time after it was suggested as a fix for making sure the animation plays all the way through when researching on google.

I will definitely try handling as much in code as possible. I was just hoping to get a break from coding after all the complicated touch stuff. I'm really just a designer who wants to show people what I'm talking about when I say touch controlled games can be elegant and deep without covering all of your beautiful assets.

 

[Jacksinthe]

I'm not sure if its the nature of the GAF indie userbase, or the "this must have a personal testimonial" requirement for OP recommendations that sprang from OT1, but I know flixel is / was used by folks with an Actionscript background because it does most of the heavy lifting.
I'm not sure if any of the regulars here use anything other than Construct or Unity nowadays tbh.

EDIT:
Maybe just an infodump of engines / tools with a link to their respective homepages might be better than the 'testimonial' / pros + cons of each engine? I remember in the last thread I was surprised to see someone posting that after reading the OP they'd come to the conclusion that they were best off using Unity for mobile and then rewriting everything in C4 Engine based on its glowing recommendation

EDIT2:
and SORRY! you did great work on OP, don't want to come across as attacking your work on it!

NO NO NO! YOU'RE FINE!

I have no clue what people want from an OP so this is good. I only kept 99% of the info and pro/cons simply for familiarity reasons. I actually wanted to remove them all, personally. Straight info would be better than testimonials, IMO. Doing this would definitely push people interested to do more research on a particular tool vs reading a paragraph and a few +s and -s and making a decision here. I just kept the format for the tools section the same due to familiarity.

I'll rework it today - I have a few things to do this morning but will be back in the late afternoon.

At least that's what I would prefer. Similar to the initial post - I rather prefer a quick consolidation as I did with things like Bitbucket, Trello, Indieteamup, etc in the initial post.

For tools - basically how I wrote the Unity and UE4 sections. I don't think pro/con is a bad idea - but maybe I can list only the top 3 in each category. Hmmmm...

I probably jumped a bit on the tools section, but, again, i just kept it for familiarity.

I should have mentioned im using 3d models and its a "2.5D" game where everything is just 0 on the Z axis. I'm definitely considering using as little of mecanim as possible. I just dont understand how I got my first attempt working 90% perfectly in regards to animating but after changing some touch stuff to better capture my touch inputs and adding some more attacks in the exact same fashion only to have this bugginess.

I am using parameters on my transitions. Mostly just state(the current state), previous state, and first frame equals true. I only fiddled with exit time after it was suggested as a fix for making sure the animation plays all the way through when researching on google.

I will definitely try handling as much in code as possible. I was just hoping to get a break from coding after all the complicated touch stuff. I'm really just a designer who wants to show people what I'm talking about when I say touch controlled games can be elegant and deep without covering all of your beautiful assets.

Hmmm... Making sure animations play 100% are moreso timing related in code than in mecanim i would think. I've had several issues letting mecanim exit an animation for me. You can force an animation to play 100% with 1.0 for an exit time - but you can also make that animation play 100% with an exit time of 0 if you do all of your timings in code. I had issues with being just a few hundredths off between code and mecanim exit times that caused a bit of silliness and would wind up coding an extra few hundredths longer than needed but eventually dropped that method and dropped exit times completely. Then I just trigger most of my straight animations with bools and if a blend is needed for something like a fall/jump animation I use a blend to select sprite based on Y magnitude if needed if I'm using Rigidbody or a float with my own physics.

Like I said earlier tho - i'm not 100% with mecanim - which is why i use my method of controlling all parameters and times in code and never using an exit time. I probably should get into it more than I do but all of its wonderful tricks are better suited for 3D over 2D so it's quite overkill for 2D so I use it as simple as it can be used ha!

 

[educator]

How is Jobbs game coming along? I remember it looking great when I was lurking in OT1 a couple of months ago.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

I have no clue what people want from an OP so this is good.

My indie escapades predate OT1, so I just have a frigging huge bookmarks folder of indie dev related resources from google-fu (many now defunct) but maybe something like:
- engines
- apps / tools
- resources
?

I've definitely found many super-niche but super-helpful tools over the years that have made me go "well why the hell didn't anyone tell me this existed?" which seems the perfect sort of thing for an OP for everyone from newbies to veterans - something like Ludum Dares tools page imo is great for an at a glance list of apps for various game related requirements, albeit a bit lacking on info on pricing / if its still maintained / what limitations the free version has if any / etc

EDIT:
And I'm still SORRY! because this is tuff that should have been brought up before you spent all the time making a new OT, not derailing the new one - SORRY! AGAIN!

 

[ShadowSoldier89]

I've been needing a place to ask this, and you guys seem to be the right people

I work as a web application developer, and without trying to brag I'm really good at what I do. However game programming has just never been able to click with me. I could code systems all day with my eyes closed, but rendering and moving graphics just hasn't clicked.

My biggest problem has been finding good resources, most things want to start from the basics that are just aggravating because I've known for too long I just can't stomach to read through them.

So I've been writing a story for my game concept in spare time, and playing with sprites, but I'm stuck on actually coding it. Anyone have suggestions for resources? (In case the sprite thing didn't give it away I am mainly looking into 2D, even though learning 3D eventually would be a goal.)

 

[Mr. Virus]

Good luck. I'm very curious to see how your game turns out. I experimented with random and procedural levels in early version of Malebolgia, but I didn't really manage to handle it and dropped it in favour of a set level.

Cheers very much . The procedural stuff has worked out pretty well for us, and we're hoping to have enough variation across the potential room layouts so that they doesn't seem overly familiar.

Malebolgia looks really nice. I'm a sucker for cel-shading, so will need to pick it up !

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

I've been needing a place to ask this, and you guys seem to be the right people

I work as a web application developer, and without trying to brag I'm really good at what I do. However game programming has just never been able to click with me. I could code systems all day with my eyes closed, but rendering and moving graphics just hasn't clicked.

Most game engines handle all the 'behind the scenes' stuff like rendering, input management, order of execution and memory management for you, so you could probably do worse than just picking up an engine that has features you want and going through some engine specific game related tutorials rather than getting bogged down in stuff like "what does a boolean mean?" type tutorials.
If you're familiar with Javascript, Unityscript is (with huge caveats) mostly the same, and their scripting reference manual lets you see .JS code snippets as well as c# and Boo so installing Unity and going through some 2D game tutorials would probably be helpful...?

 

[Jacksinthe]

My indie escapades predate OT1, so I just have a frigging huge bookmarks folder of indie dev related resources from google-fu (many now defunct) but maybe something like:
- engines
- apps / tools
- resources
?

I've definitely found many super-niche but super-helpful tools over the years that have made me go "well why the hell didn't anyone tell me this existed?" which seems the perfect sort of thing for an OP for everyone from newbies to veterans - something like Ludum Dares tools page imo is great for an at a glance list of apps for various game related requirements, albeit a bit lacking on info on pricing / if its still maintained / what limitations the free version has if any / etc

EDIT:
And I'm still SORRY! because this is tuff that should have been brought up before you spent all the time making a new OT, not derailing the new one - SORRY! AGAIN!

Its not derailing. An OP should evolve especially over time. I'll get to it in a few hours. Not much I have to do today so I can get on this

I'd much rather like a breakdown vs walls of text for each engine. It should be up to the end user to use basic introductory info and dive into specifics themselves. It serves the reader best IMO.

 

[Davision]

this is cool!

anyone know much about 3d printing? is it sufficient to manufacture small quantities of figures (guess I'd have to hand paint them) or is it too limited? I've heard mixed reports.

I would not want to do that, 12x12x12cm models can take like 20 hours. They are not perfect and always have a slight steps structure. You can use Acetone to make them smooth but that also takes a lot of time. You also have to break off lots of support material when not using a dual extruder. What you can do is going to a printing platform like Shapeways and let it print there. Or find some company in China that produces a batch of 100 figures for cheap (with hand painting).

 

[friken]

Thanks AbsintheGames for the new thread!

For those who have done voiceovers for their games, what are your opinions on reasonable cost usb mics? I picked up a blue yeti mic for xmas, and so far I'm pretty impressed! Of course it's competition prior to purchase was my decade old $5 labtec analog headset/mic

 

[-COOLIO-]

New thread looks great! I can't wait to see all the progress and projects people pursue in the coming year.

So I was working on an old prototype I had abandoned last year.

It was going to have turn based combat. You would act, then the enemy, but only the person at the front of each line. I had ideas for skills, that could cause you to get stuck in a position, poison circles that dealt damage when you hit certain points in the line, healing that worked the same way, the ability to reverse the way the line went or to cause it move through two people at once, and a few more ideas that weren't actually implemented. I was trying to make the combat encounters feel more like puzzles than stat checks, though I never got far enough to really make that a reality.

It's actually an idea I do hope to come back to, but I figured since it's a new year I'd like to work on another idea that's been floating around in my head. In premise, it's a Roguelike with Final Fantasy / Dragon Quest style combat.

I've only had a couple of hours to devote to it this year, but I'm close to having the very basics of combat done.

Neat idea overall. And as for the part about trying to achieve puzzle like combat, I've been hoping to achieve the same with my own game. It's definitely really tricky business.

 

[GulAtiCa]

PEGI payment/materials now fully paid for/sent off. So should get my rating for my Wii U title (ZaciSa: Defense of the Crayon Dimension!) in a few weeks. Sending off paperwork to USK Germany by Thursday as well. Just waiting for the SD card to get here. I plan to submit the game to NOE by end of the month for a possible late Feb/early March release.

This will set me back about $800 ($400ish already paid for for PEGI). So hopefully won't take me to long to get my money back.

 

[-COOLIO-]

totally thought it said KKK

and awesome OP.

Lol nope, but ironically, stormfront and Westboro would fit in really well with the theme of the game.

Looks interesting! Why no rubber duck on the main characters head though?

If only I could figure out some kind of rpg buff for which a duck would be appropriate.

hehehehe

yehaw!

nice!

Thanks man!

 

[Sykotik]

If only I could figure out some kind of rpg buff for which a duck would be appropriate.

Quack medicine/remedies/doctor/science.

May work better as a debuff.

Quack medicine - You kinda think you sort of feel like healing items might be working, maybe.

 

[Sword Familiar]

If only I could figure out some kind of rpg buff for which a duck would be appropriate.

It increases evade.

Spoiler

(Because you duck. .__. )

 

[ShadowSoldier89]

Most game engines handle all the 'behind the scenes' stuff like rendering, input management, order of execution and memory management for you, so you could probably do worse than just picking up an engine that has features you want and going through some engine specific game related tutorials rather than getting bogged down in stuff like "what does a boolean mean?" type tutorials.
If you're familiar with Javascript, Unityscript is (with huge caveats) mostly the same, and their scripting reference manual lets you see .JS code snippets as well as c# and Boo so installing Unity and going through some 2D game tutorials would probably be helpful...?

I know JS, C++, but C# is what pays my bills. Unity has always intrigued me with its C# support, but 2D in unity has seemed frustrating.

Id like to start from the bottom up rendering my own little engine first, even if I don't stick with it I'd like some understanding before moving to an engine.

I know Unity can do 2D games, but its not really meant for it. I saw there were plugins for it to help with 2D, are any of those recommended

 

[Purple Cheeto]

Well, I tried to keep the OP to engines/tools that are friendly to newcomers and still used by the heavy hitters. If you think Cocos should be up there I will gladly add if you PM me some details

Using Blueprint in UE4 reminds me a lot of when I make instruments and things in Reaktor:

I just figure that Cocos2D-X is the most popular completely open source 2D game rendering framework available these days, you'd think it would be worth mentioning over other tools. I get that Construct etc are more use friendly (almost everything is more user friendly than Cocos2D-X) but its still the best option for cross platform 2D game development out there.

And yeah Blue Print is a nightmare. Its too complicated for non programmers and too limited for programmers. And don't even get my started on how awful replication and multiplayer is.

I know JS, C++, but C# is what pays my bills. Unity has always intrigued me with its C# support, but 2D in unity has seemed frustrating.

Id like to start from the bottom up rendering my own little engine first, even if I don't stick with it I'd like some understanding before moving to an engine.

I know Unity can do 2D games, but its not really meant for it. I saw there were plugins for it to help with 2D, are any of those recommended

Unity has built in support for 2D now so you don't need extra plug ins. I still think its poop, but it is a far cry better than what it used to be.

 

[friken]

So I've started work on voicing our alien dialogues. I started by trying with equipment I already had (an ooooold labtec headset mic). It wasn't great but was just good enough to make me think voiceing the game ourselves was doable. So for xmas, santa brought me a blue yeti mic. So far I love it (the mic).

Voiceover test 2: Blue Yeti w pop filter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dKtr4i2e54&feature=youtu.be

VoiceOver test 1: $5 labtec junk headset/mic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz7OIIIVUy0&feature=youtu.be

Here is a pic of the setup:

 

[-COOLIO-]

Quack medicine/remedies/doctor/science.

May work better as a debuff.

Quack medicine - You kinda think you sort of feel like healing items might be working, maybe.

that kinda fits

It increases evade.

Spoiler

(Because you duck. .__. )

lmao

 

[SquirrelWide]

Absinthe, great OP. Whenever you have an extra moment, you may want to consider adding a noteable game made with your example engines. Some of them, like UE, don't need it but it would helpful for others to get an idea of what the engine is capable of. Sure, it's just a google away, but since you're amassing information.

 

[nitekrawlwer]

Directly playing animations via animator.Play() or animator.CrossFade() will override the nice little transitions you set up in the Mecanim controller. Avoid doing this directly if you can avoid it, and instead set the animator parameters (floats and ints and such) and try to let Mecanim handle all the transitions with the pretty little arrows.

Of course, for a fighting game, you might need to call things directly so that animations start super ultra instantly? Not sure.

Eureka. Thank goodness. I had not written any animator.Play() or animator.Crossfade() lines myself, but after a search of my code base for them in MonoDevelop it turns out the addon I'm using did. After commenting those lines out mecanim seems to handle the animations 90% fine. It does get stuck in a few though. Because of those few stuck occasions I might just do it in code but either way understanding why it's been "buggy" is a massive help. When you can at least understand the problem it's so much easier to fix.

Thank goodness for you and AbsintheGames and IndieGAF in general. It's so nice to have people familiar with what I'm doing and the tools I'm using. You guys have made me feel like a welcome member of an outstanding community ^_^

 

[missile]

There you are!

Oh there you are. Hehe. Haven't seen many updates from you recently.

This sux, indeed! xD I didn't posted that much towards the end of OT1,
unfortunately. I would like to comment and write a bit more, but the current
bits and pieces I'm going through take quite some time and on the other hand
won't easily translate into something pleasing to show or to discuss about, at
the moment, unless you guys are interested in talking about vacuum tubes,
amplifiers, heterodyning etc. All this stuff doesn't sound like being related
to video games and may as such not be a good topic to discuss about over here,
yet all these things gave video games its defining character in the first
place, i.e. video. Well, I'm currently quite involved in the video part of
video games so to speak. In about two month time I'm going to fit some of
the pieces together to get something on the screen again.


On another note:
I'm looking for a mathematician who is interested to work with me on video
games technology putting some of the higher equations into action. Basically,
if any of you has some higher knowledge in analysis, numerical computing,
partial differential equations etc., I would be pleased to work with you on
quite some interesting stuff. For example, further down the road I would like
to compute the electron trajectories in a given electrostatic force field,
which isn't too difficult to say at least (equation of motion). What's more
interesting is to actually compute the electrostatic force field of a given
geometry and its boundary potentials. This is a more tough problem especially
considering it is in three dimensions. However, I guess we only need Laplace's
equations to actually get the field (well, it's a potential field after all).
Numerical discretization is another problem. Finite-elements would be cool,
yet finite-difference will do for a start, up until the geometry gets more
curved. Well, if the above makes sense to anyone, and if one is interested in
applying such thing to video games, hit me up!

 

[_machine]

Absinthe, great OP. Whenever you have an extra moment, you may want to consider adding a noteable game made with your example engines. Some of them, like UE, don't need it but it would helpful for others to get an idea of what the engine is capable of. Sure, it's just a google away, but since you're amassing information.

Yup, that or linking to the respective showcase pages like:
http://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery
https://www.yoyogames.com/showcase
http://www.stencyl.com/game/showcase/ (I love that Ghost Song is at the top)
https://www.scirra.com/construct2/games

Though for some of the newer SDK's there aren't any showcase pages so picking individual titles might be better if there are any.

 

[Five]

So I've started work on voicing our alien dialogues. I started by trying with equipment I already had (an ooooold labtec headset mic). It wasn't great but was just good enough to make me think voiceing the game ourselves was doable. So for xmas, santa brought me a blue yeti mic. So far I love it (the mic).

Voiceover test 2: Blue Yeti w pop filter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dKtr4i2e54&feature=youtu.be

VoiceOver test 1: $5 labtec junk headset/mic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz7OIIIVUy0&feature=youtu.be

Here is a pic of the setup:

This is great! The subtle music and sound effects really help, too, but the VO is top-notch.

I got a nice mic myself a while back, but I've only had one small opportunity to use it so far. VO and sfx are always the last thing I work on in a game!

 

[Blizzard]

I forgot to check my Ludum Dare scores. Here is a post-mortem from LD31, which ended up turning into a jam entry for me because I did too much other stuff that weekend and did not finish in time for the competition deadline. Jam entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=12278.

By a tiny bit, this was my highest-rated and highest-ranking entry yet for the "overall" category, at 2.98 / #709. Note that I think this category is individually rated by players, and not an average of other categories. It would be cool if I ever submit an entry that ends up over 3.00 "overall" average.

My personal dream goal is to break top 100 ranking in any one category, some day. I think the closest I have come is 142. I did not even break the top 400 in any category this time, yet my overall ranking was the lowest (lower = better) in my last 3 entries, my average rankings were the lowest in my last 3 entries, and my average ratings (higher = better) were the highest in my last 3 entries. In theory this MIGHT mean my quality averaged between the categories was more consistent this time.

This entry was the highest I've been rated for fun at least in the last 4 entries, which was cool. That is normally one of my worst rated areas. It is nice to see some people had fun, especially since I might some day try to make this sort of idea into a full game.

Here are rating and ranking charts for my last 4 entries (LD26, LD29, LD30, LD31), though the leftmost entry did not have as many categories available to rate.

	Coolness	95%
#418	Theme(Jam)	3.64
#437	Innovation(Jam)	3.13
#475	Humor(Jam)	2.64
#604	Fun(Jam)	2.92
#606	Audio(Jam)	2.37
#709	Overall(Jam)	2.98
#718	Mood(Jam)	2.73
#902	Graphics(Jam)	2.28

 

[plagiarize]

So I've started work on voicing our alien dialogues. I started by trying with equipment I already had (an ooooold labtec headset mic). It wasn't great but was just good enough to make me think voiceing the game ourselves was doable. So for xmas, santa brought me a blue yeti mic. So far I love it (the mic).

Voiceover test 2: Blue Yeti w pop filter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dKtr4i2e54&feature=youtu.be

VoiceOver test 1: $5 labtec junk headset/mic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz7OIIIVUy0&feature=youtu.be

Here is a pic of the setup:

I've been using a Logitech rockband USB mic because *lol*. Honestly, it serves its purpose for what I'm doing (I'm heavily processing the audio atm) but I wouldn't use it for anything that was going to sound natural.

I haven't delved deeply into recording though yet. My script will get fleshed out once the level design is pretty much locked, and then I have to schedule time with my actress who will be replacing all my placeholder bullshit.

I've thought about a better solution, but I think, given that this project is definitely just something I'll be giving away that I'll save any great expenditures until any potential follow up projects... of which I am forming ideas.

I mean, I kind of want to not be getting more ideas, because I need to focus on Primitive, but a pseudo sequel of thoughts is gestating in my brain already. Judging from other people's posts here, that sort of stuff happens a lot.

But I need to get Primitive done. Yes I'm on level 5 of a planned 13, and that feels great, but I have an hour or more of dialogue to write and record (and then rig). I have sound design to tackle. I have progressively more complex puzzles coming up to program in blueprints (which I feel I'm starting to get the hang of the basics of finally). I have an environment to make purely for a trailer.

Lots and lots of work. Too much to be thinking about a follow up at this point. Way too much!

 

[friken]

I forgot to check my Ludum Dare scores. Here is a post-mortem from LD31, which ended up turning into a jam entry for me because I did too much other stuff that weekend and did not finish in time for the competition deadline. Jam entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=12278.

Thanks for the reminder to check scores. I had a blast w our jam entry:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=35030

our results:

Coolness 66%
#17 Graphics(Jam) 4.63
#131 Audio(Jam) 3.64
#178 Mood(Jam) 3.53
#201 Theme(Jam) 3.89
#301 Overall(Jam) 3.45
#312 Innovation(Jam) 3.34
#562 Fun(Jam) 2.97
#643 Humor(Jam) 2.31

 

[Blizzard]

Thanks for the reminder to check scores. I had a blast w our jam entry:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=35030

our results:

Coolness 66%
#17 Graphics(Jam) 4.63
#131 Audio(Jam) 3.64
#178 Mood(Jam) 3.53
#201 Theme(Jam) 3.89
#301 Overall(Jam) 3.45
#312 Innovation(Jam) 3.34
#562 Fun(Jam) 2.97
#643 Humor(Jam) 2.31

I forgot to include the disclaimer, no one is allowed to post scores unless yours are super awful like mine. ;p

I was way cooler though, like 95% coolness! That's what really counts right? Right???

 

[friken]

I forgot to include the disclaimer, no one is allowed to post scores unless yours are super awful like mine. ;p

I was way cooler though, like 95% coolness! That's what really counts right? Right???

Yeah, we weren't cool boooo

 

[cbox]

Sounds great Friken! Really loving the ambiance you're setting up



We met with accountants today, lawyers later this week. I wish I could just buy a biz startup package and be done with it, but ah well - all this running around will be worth it! Unfortunately, I won't be doing any more design work on Shwip until we get our xbone dev kits. It's sad being away from creative tasks.

Last thing i did was modify the W in our logo, it was bothering me for the longest time.

 

[friken]

Sounds great Friken! Really loving the ambiance you're setting up



We met with accountants today, lawyers later this week. I wish I could just buy a biz startup package and be done with it, but ah well - all this running around will be worth it! Unfortunately, I won't be doing any more design work on Shwip until we get our xbone dev kits. It's sad being away from creative tasks.

Last thing i did was modify the W in our logo, it was bothering me for the longest time.

Thanks.

I've just signed all the id program paperwork. What is the rough lead time from signing to getting devkits? I can't wait to get some test builds running on the xbox1.

 

[cbox]

Thanks.

I've just signed all the id program paperwork. What is the rough lead time from signing to getting devkits? I can't wait to get some test builds running on the xbox1.

No idea, we haven't signed anything yet, still getting the biz end set up :|

 

[Jacksinthe]

Alright - made some changes to the list of engines and shortened some descriptions. Added more notable games made with those engines in their descriptions and limited the pros and cons to no more than 3 each.

Other suggestions like HaxeFlixel and Cocos - PM me. I'll be going through and adding others.

 

[friken]

So a 1/2 day w/ the new mic and I'm loving it. For anyone looking to use a Blue Yeti mic, I've found that setting the gain knob waaaaaay down (like 5-10%) removes 90-95% of any echos coming from walls / room without going hardcore and egg-carton foam covering your walls or making a foam closet studio.

Here is our second alien voiced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siU4pV0PMRY&vq=hd720

 

[mantrakid]

So a 1/2 day w/ the new mic and I'm loving it. For anyone looking to use a Blue Yeti mic, I've found that setting the gain knob waaaaaay down (like 5-10%) removes 90-95% of any echos coming from walls / room without going hardcore and egg-carton foam covering your walls or making a foam closet studio.

Here is our second alien voiced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siU4pV0PMRY&vq=hd720

Great sounding VO. tho as a gamer it a pet peeve of mine when the pacing on the voice is super slow... it sounds like you're trying hard to speak clearly... it would be a definite 'skip button' for me.

Just being honest, cuz i kinda love-hate it when peeps do that to me.

 

[Jacksinthe]

So a 1/2 day w/ the new mic and I'm loving it. For anyone looking to use a Blue Yeti mic, I've found that setting the gain knob waaaaaay down (like 5-10%) removes 90-95% of any echos coming from walls / room without going hardcore and egg-carton foam covering your walls or making a foam closet studio.

Here is our second alien voiced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siU4pV0PMRY&vq=hd720

Dude this is FRIKEN AWESOME!

Pro-tip for audio from a former pro-audio guy:
Buy a cheap comforter that is nice and thick. Hang from ceiling in a "C" shape or half-circle. If cannot hang from ceiling, place in corner to form a 3-flat space (45 degrees each angle in corner). Place mic inside half circle with the base of the mic (mic upside-down) at EYE LEVEL. Stand up incredibly straight and chin up towards the mic ever so slightly. This relaxes the vocal chords and provides cleaner output. If sitting, use a STOOL, not a chair. Stools naturally force the sitter to sit upright, chest out, chin up.

Just a test. Open your mouth and and say "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" then slowly tilt your chin upwards whilst bellowing and notice the change in clarity with your own ears.

Depending on the situation, a bit of room noise can be used when recording - but many of the "room" style mics can be emulated via software from the original source and applications like Logic have built-in tools to help emulate this. I find Native Instruments' suite of plugins remarkable in this regard.

Egg cartons also do nothing but diffuse (they are too hard to absorb), scatter sound rather than trap or dampen. They are best used on rear wall or ceiling only to help scatter audio in multiple directions to be soaked up by installments of fibre-glass placements on walls and bass traps in corners. There is also nothing wrong with actually using egg cartons instead of a proper diffuser made of wood or foam. They both serve the same end purpose to scatter audio.

Technically, using egg cartons or diffusers will introduce more noise from various directions if the rest of the room remains untreated.

Edit: Just got flashbacks of producing for record labels. Ick.

 

[friken]

Great sounding VO. tho as a gamer it a pet peeve of mine when the pacing on the voice is super slow... it sounds like you're trying hard to speak clearly... it would be a definite 'skip button' for me.

Just being honest, cuz i kinda love-hate it when peeps do that to me.

Thanks for the input. Pacing is a hard one for me. When I try to speed up the pacing I lose the characterization of the alien and it starts sounding like reading of lines. Learning a little more each try though! I can definitely see skipping slow vos.

Dude this is FRIKEN AWESOME!

Pro-tip for audio from a former pro-audio guy:
Buy a cheap comforter that is nice and thick. Hang from ceiling in a "C" shape or half-circle. If cannot hang from ceiling, place in corner to form a 3-flat space (45 degrees each angle in corner). Place mic inside half circle with the base of the mic (mic upside-down) at EYE LEVEL. Stand up incredibly straight and chin up towards the mic ever so slightly. This relaxes the vocal chords and provides cleaner output. If sitting, use a STOOL, not a chair. Stools naturally force the sitter to sit upright, chest out, chin up.

Just a test. Open your mouth and and say "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" then slowly tilt your chin upwards whilst bellowing and notice the change in clarity with your own ears.

Depending on the situation, a bit of room noise can be used when recording - but many of the "room" style mics can be emulated via software from the original source and applications like Logic have built-in tools to help emulate this. I find Native Instruments' suite of plugins remarkable in this regard.

Egg cartons also do nothing but diffuse (they are too hard to absorb), scatter sound rather than trap or dampen. They are best used on rear wall or ceiling only to help scatter audio in multiple directions to be soaked up by installments of fibre-glass placements on walls and bass traps in corners. There is also nothing wrong with actually using egg cartons instead of a proper diffuser made of wood or foam. They both serve the same end purpose to scatter audio.

Technically, using egg cartons or diffusers will introduce more noise from various directions if the rest of the room remains untreated.

Edit: Just got flashbacks of producing for record labels. Ick.

Thanks for all the tips. I'm having fun learning. I did work for a richmedia marketing company back in the day and we had a couple sound studio closets and worked w pro voice actors. All that said, I was a software engineer working on the email engine -- so anything I learned about the sound part of the biz was via osmosis.

My office / room isn't really ideal. It is a large open room w vaulted 20' ceiling. Hanging comforters, padding walls, etc wouldn't be easy here. Not impossible, but not easy. With the gain on the yeti set waaaaay down (like 5%) in CARDIOID mode, it is pretty impressive how little room and wall echos I get. It may be a bigger problem if I was voicing something without any effects at all. I think most/all aliens, I'll be using some pretty heavy filters/fx.

 

[SeanNoonan]

Another pixel daily...

How did I not know that gif's had a bunch of frame rate limitations ?

 

[Pehesse]

Colored animations in situation! Still testing stuff, the dialog doesn't use the fading display for instance (and is not actual dialog anyway) but the general idea is there.

Somewhat faster to do than battle animations, but there are a lot more to make because of the number of different characters, so I'll be at it for quite a while :-D

 

[friken]

Another pixel daily...

How did I not know that gif's had a bunch of frame rate limitations ?

neat.. is that candle turning into a snake enemy at the end?


---

And my voiceover work and learning continues. I was really happy when recording this third alien today. My kids were home from school and as other parents will know, that means FAR from quiet house. Even w a bit of kid noise around the house, the mic did well to pick up just me from a few inches away.

Our sentient Shrooms up to no good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF_CAbv_dPY&feature=youtu.be

I can already tell I'll be needing to twist s few friends arms to get them to voice a few of the aliens so I can get a good variety of voice types. Effects are great, but different base voices I think will be a lot better.

 

[Feep]

Eureka. Thank goodness. I had not written any animator.Play() or animator.Crossfade() lines myself, but after a search of my code base for them in MonoDevelop it turns out the addon I'm using did. After commenting those lines out mecanim seems to handle the animations 90% fine. It does get stuck in a few though. Because of those few stuck occasions I might just do it in code but either way understanding why it's been "buggy" is a massive help. When you can at least understand the problem it's so much easier to fix.

Thank goodness for you and AbsintheGames and IndieGAF in general. It's so nice to have people familiar with what I'm doing and the tools I'm using. You guys have made me feel like a welcome member of an outstanding community ^_^

^_^ Glad I could help!

 

[timetokill]

Just jumping in the thread to subscribe. Maybe I'll actually finish one of my own projects this year.

 

[bad guy]

Bravo!
Excellent read.

I'm working on my 2nd game.

MoNkeY MuNCh
You play as a jungle monkey, swinging from tree to tree, collecting fruit from the tree tops. Top down view. 2-4 players local multiplayer.

I have all 4 monkeys working now.
And new leaves..also leaf effects when the monkeys move.
Water and fruit will be done next.

 

[AegisScott]

Thanks.

I've just signed all the id program paperwork. What is the rough lead time from signing to getting devkits? I can't wait to get some test builds running on the xbox1.

Getting PS4 devkits took a few weeks from the first moment to having it in our hands. There was a lot of paperwork stuff to be signed and services to be set-up. The actual shipping took around 1.5 weeks. I imagine if you were on top of it you could cut down on the paperwork time.

 

[friken]

Getting PS4 devkits took a few weeks from the first moment to having it in our hands. There was a lot of paperwork stuff to be signed and services to be set-up. The actual shipping took around 1.5 weeks. I imagine if you were on top of it you could cut down on the paperwork time.

We submitted filled out the web form for ps4 in late october and have yet to hear back I wonder if I should fill it out again.

 

[Jacksinthe]

We submitted filled out the web form for ps4 in late october and have yet to hear back I wonder if I should fill it out again.

It takes a long time