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[superNESjoe]

I just launched a Kickstarter for my next game, Abacus. I put together a video that demonstrates some of the mechanics of the game (it isn't representative of what the final game will look like, it's too early along for that).

I've never really had success on Kickstarter before, but I'm hopeful that having two console releases and an existing relationship with Microsoft and Sony will help instill some faith. I've been spreading it to every contact I have, but I'm sure lots of people here are familiar with just how hard it is to get anyone in the media to cover your game. I'm hoping enough people find something interesting about Abacus to check it out.

 

[neko.works]

Well deserved! Congrats . I love the chibi characters and I'm looking forward to playing it on my ps4.

Thanks!

Congrats! Though what does that mean in practical terms? I'm not really familiar with what the Square Enix Collective is about or how it works, so I'd love to hear more details about it from you since you have first hand experience now!

The Collective is a Square-Enix backed program that help indies getting feedback on their pitch, where the community can vote YES or NO if they would support the project, and they can post comments too.

So, this is just for getting early feedback and crowdfunding expectations, in my case this is really important as my game's target is basically the Square-Enix community! As it's an old school JRPG.

If the feedback is positive, they can help you on your KickStarter and eventually on publishing your game.

 

[Pehesse]

Thanks!



The Collective is a Square-Enix backed program that help indies getting feedback on their pitch, where the community can vote YES or NO if they would support the project, and they can post comments too.

So, this is just for getting early feedback and crowdfunding expectations, in my case this is really important as my game's target is basically the Square-Enix community! As it's an old school JRPG.

If the feedback is positive, they can help you on your KickStarter and eventually on publishing your game.

I see! Thanks a lot for the explanation, and it sounds like a great success indeed, then, so again, congrats :-D

I just launched a Kickstarter for my next game, Abacus. I put together a video that demonstrates some of the mechanics of the game (it isn't representative of what the final game will look like, it's too early along for that).

I've never really had success on Kickstarter before, but I'm hopeful that having two console releases and an existing relationship with Microsoft and Sony will help instill some faith. I've been spreading it to every contact I have, but I'm sure lots of people here are familiar with just how hard it is to get anyone in the media to cover your game. I'm hoping enough people find something interesting about Abacus to check it out.

Good luck with the KS!

 

[Unain]

Actually I just realized the change happened in 4.11. That quote was from the 4.11 release notes. It's a miracle any of my animnotifies worked at all up until now.

I'm on version 4.12.3 right now and I was previously on 4.11. I didn't start noticing stuff breaking with AnimNotifies until 4.12.3 though.

I updated for bugfixes / performance improvements. My game is small enough in scope that I can usually fix anything that breaks due to an engine update in a single day. So I've been keeping my game updated with the latest engine version. (I always keep backups of previous versions though of course, just in case)

Did you figure it out yet?
I think you can still use notifies with https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/API/Runtime/Engine/Animation/FAnimNotifyQueue/index.html

 

[KOCMOHABT]

I just launched a Kickstarter for my next game, Abacus. I put together a video that demonstrates some of the mechanics of the game (it isn't representative of what the final game will look like, it's too early along for that).

Good luck!

The Square-Enix Collective feedback campaign for Light Fairytale just ended, at 93% YES!

The game is the 7th most popular on the platform, and 6th most discussed.


Feedback was positive overall, but I still feel that the game is not yet ready for the funding phase, and can be improved a lot more. The current plan is starting the KickStarter around this October, with a new trailer, and a playable demo.

Sounds like great news for you! Hope that motivates you a lot

 

[Situacao]

The Square-Enix Collective feedback campaign for Light Fairytale just ended, at 93% YES!

The game is the 7th most popular on the platform, and 6th most discussed.

This feedback phase was really helpful, for instance, I now know that putting the PS4 version as a stretch goal was a mistake: I will add it to the base goal of the KickStarter.

Feedback was positive overall, but I still feel that the game is not yet ready for the funding phase, and can be improved a lot more. The current plan is starting the KickStarter around this October, with a new trailer, and a playable demo.

Congrats!

As for us, we finally got "The Awakening" done. It will still be tweaked, but the main idea is there now.

And yes, we watched way too much Sailor Moon/Evangelion to do this

 

[Theanine3D]

Did you figure it out yet?
I think you can still use notifies with https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/API/Runtime/Engine/Animation/FAnimNotifyQueue/index.html

Yeah. Turns out the problem I was experiencing has to do with a bug in State Machines in general rather than with Notifies. I managed to get notifies working again, but the state machines in all of my AnimBlueprints still randomly stop updating globally across the entire game.

Fortunately I've narrowed the problem down to only a specific level in the game. As long as that level isn't played during the game session, the problem doesn't happen anywhere else in the game.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a workaround, so it's likely going to require me to scrap this specific entire level and redo it. I'm looking at the bright side though - in the process of all this, I came up with a better idea for the design of this level than the one I originally made, and now I have a reason to do it.

 

[Minamu]

The Square-Enix Collective feedback campaign for Light Fairytale just ended, at 93% YES!

The game is the 7th most popular on the platform, and 6th most discussed.

This feedback phase was really helpful, for instance, I now know that putting the PS4 version as a stretch goal was a mistake: I will add it to the base goal of the KickStarter.

Feedback was positive overall, but I still feel that the game is not yet ready for the funding phase, and can be improved a lot more. The current plan is starting the KickStarter around this October, with a new trailer, and a playable demo.

Cool, congrats! I was supposed to help Palindrome Interactive with Aversion: Sunrise and do level design for them but my schedule has been too busy They're at 83% right now. I wish you the best of luck!!

 

[superNESjoe]

Good luck with the KS!

Good luck!

Thanks!

 

[ephemeral]

Thanks!

Good luck. I like the original concept, very creative to come up with something like that.

 

[RelentlessRolento]

Havent posted in a while (been busy running multiple things as well as my Kickstarter), but good news today:

Wotan got Greenlit!

The Kickstarter still is up with a week to go, but I'm doing as much as I can promoting it.

If the Kickstarter dosn't pass, I may hire a programmer if I can find one, but that has yet to be decided.


as for everyone else, though I'm behind on happenings, keep up the awesome work!

 

[superNESjoe]

Good luck. I like the original concept, very creative to come up with something like that.

Thanks! I've been mulling it around for a long time now, just waiting for the right time to dig into it. I'm very excited about it.

 

[mStudios]

Havent posted in a while (been busy running multiple things as well as my Kickstarter), but good news today:



Wotan got Greenlit!

The Kickstarter still is up with a week to go, but I'm doing as much as I can promoting it.

If the Kickstarter dosn't pass, I may hire a programmer if I can find one, but that has yet to be decided.


as for everyone else, though I'm behind on happenings, keep up the awesome work!

I just launched a Kickstarter for my next game, Abacus. I put together a video that demonstrates some of the mechanics of the game (it isn't representative of what the final game will look like, it's too early along for that).

I've never really had success on Kickstarter before, but I'm hopeful that having two console releases and an existing relationship with Microsoft and Sony will help instill some faith. I've been spreading it to every contact I have, but I'm sure lots of people here are familiar with just how hard it is to get anyone in the media to cover your game. I'm hoping enough people find something interesting about Abacus to check it out.

Best wishes with the KS, I know how hard is it to run one.

 

[Fou-Lu]

I am really not one for art, but I find translating my ideas to bad pixel art slight easier than drawing them out. So here is my concept idea for the main character of my current game idea:

From left to right is what he looks like at the beginning of the game, then what he looks like after an early event that leads to the bulk of the game mechanics and ideas.

 

[TheHollowNight]

One of our new enemies, the Chilopod has been rigged and animated!
(the animations are sped up for the gif)

 

[Makai]

woahhhh

 

[electroflame]

One of our new enemies, the Chilopod has been rigged and animated!
(the animations are sped up for the gif)
[Snip]

Wow, that looks great.

 

[HammerOfThor]

I think it comes down to what you know and how dedicated you are to learn new languages. I'm speaking from pretty limited knowledge, but based on my limited knowledge, Unity seems like a lot of people's go-to because you can deploy one codebase across multiple platforms. Unreal Engine 4 is popular because of its reputation for being widely used by AAA dev studios. Game Maker is geared towards users who don't necessarily have a programming background. I can't speak to others like Stencyl (what Jobbs is using for Ghost Song).

Me? I've just got a big ego and want the experience of doing it myself, so I'm building an engine from scratch using C++ and SDL (libsdl.org). Doing it this way, I'll only have the features I need and since SDL is multi-platform, I should be able to use most of the same codebase and build it for both Mac and Windows.

Thanks.

I'm struggling to to pick either Unity or Unreal. I'm a software developer by trade so the programming portion doesn't phase me. I'm just brand new to game dev.

 

[liliththepale]

I love drawing things that are equal parts geometric design and freeform art, like this spiral staircase. I always go into it super unsure of how it'll turn out, but then eventually it all comes together and something beautiful arises.

One of our new enemies, the Chilopod has been rigged and animated!
(the animations are sped up for the gif)

Those animations are fantastic! Did you use a lot of reference material? ♥

 

[missile]

I am really not one for art, but I find translating my ideas to bad pixel art slight easier than drawing them out. So here is my concept idea for the main character of my current game idea:

From left to right is what he looks like at the beginning of the game, then what he looks like after an early event that leads to the bulk of the game mechanics and ideas.

Look promising already. So the elder one got his red eyes from staring on the
TV for too long? xD

One of our new enemies, the Chilopod has been rigged and animated!
(the animations are sped up for the gif)

...

Looks ugly, but in a good way!

... I'm struggling to to pick either Unity or Unreal. I'm a software developer by trade so the programming portion doesn't phase me. I'm just brand new to game dev.

I think any engine etc. isn't really what matters while starting into gamedev.
The message can only be; keep it simple (and than simpler!). Things go out of
hand pretty quickly esp. while using many of the cool tools, options, features
around. But if you ask me straight, I'm with bumpkin on the "... experience of
doing it myself ...". Basically, I find it very interesting to work with a
limited set of possibilities while creating the most out of it by recombing
the few things I got in different ways.

 

[mabec]

AGH dont give me arachnophobia even if its not a spider

 

[correojon]

There's a big but to this approach, and it's that your system is not only frame-dependent (so using Time.deltaTime in Unity for player movement, for example, would screw up with your playback), but also requires the whole game to be entirely deterministic, foregoing randomness (or storing the random seed coupled with a custom RNG to avoid it desynching across different hardware if possible) and having a deterministic physics engine as well. Most games made in Unity, for example, would fail those two tests because they tend to be built for frame independence, and the physics system doesn't appear to behave in a really consistent, deterministic way either.

Also, for storing flags C# supports the [Flags] attribute to enums, meaning you can code stuff such as:

[Flags]
public enum ControlFlags
{
    Jump = 1,
    Attack = 1 << 1,
    Left = 1 << 2,
    Right = 1 << 3,
    Up = 1 << 4,
    Down = 1 << 5
}

Yeah, I already mentioned that if you use randomness without seeds you won´t be able to replicate the same game as the player. As for the delta.time thing, I use GM so I work in steps, but anyway you could just change the frame counter for a miliseconds counter and work with that.
Flags could be a way to work with inputs, I´m using an array and constants which allows me to work with all inputs easily:

input[UP] = keyboard_check(vk_up);
input[LEFT] = keyboard_check(vk_left);
...

//Calculate current input value to save
var i;
inputValue = 0;
for (i=0; i<nInputs; i++) inputValue += (2^i)*input[i];

Anyway, I´m using this method of saving the replay and I hope it´ll allow me to get much more quantity and specially quality of feedback, nothing beats watching someone play your game IMO. As a side effect, with this method I´ve been able to easily replicate some messy circumstances that triggered unexpected bug, helping me solve some problems that had been flying around for months. So I think that it really pays off to go the extra mile and try to make this system or something similar work.

 

[mStudios]

I love drawing things that are equal parts geometric design and freeform art, like this spiral staircase. I always go into it super unsure of how it'll turn out, but then eventually it all comes together and something beautiful arises.






Those animations are fantastic! Did you use a lot of reference material? ♥

Has GM gave you any performance problem so far or not?

 

[HandsomeCharles]

So, replay systems eh? Hopefully I can make a contribution to this.

I needed to make a replay system for my game, similar to the one present in Super Meat Boy. Here is the end result.

Unfortunately when it came to implementation, I found that the topic of creating replays for games is woefully under-doccumented.

The general consensus seemed to be that the most efficient system is to record player input (And timestamps for when that input happened), and "play it back" at the appropriate intervals. However, as I am using Unity, this approach is no-good as Unity does not have deterministic physics. that means that whilst two iterations through a game scenario might be very, very similar (when given the same inputs), they can not be guaranteed to be identical. This has the potential to cause issues when dealing with a replay system as the user may view something in a replay that quite simply didn't happen in-game.

After reading a few papers, I settled on an approach similar to the one used in Braid. Braid, due to the player being able to rewind to any point requires the storage of game state. The disadvantage of this is that (comparatively) the memory requirements will be very high, but it has the advantage of being incredibly accurate, and fairly "simple".

It should be noted that in my game operates with a semi-fixed timestep. Time for physics updates/logic etc is all fixed, whilst rendering is not. In laymans terms that means that things such as my character movement all works in "Units per Update", rather than "Units per second". So, if You had two versions of the game with different update timesteps (Say 60u/s and 30u/s), the latter would operate half a slow as the former.

Having a fixed physics update was fairly essential for this system, as what I would do is record the state of my character at every tick, and store it. I take a timestamp of the "update iteration", as well as details such as the position, rotation, current animation (I had to build a system to handle that) etc. Note that if the state has not changed in any way (e.g the player has just left the controller on the floor and walked away) then I do not record the state for that update. This helps to optimise a bit.

Then, when it comes to playing back the replay I simply iterate over the recorded "actions", and "restore" my character to whatever state the action tells it to be in. During replays, all physics interactions are turned off and what you see is not interacting with the game in any way.

Now, this solution is fairly specific to the needs of my game, and I will have to expand upon it later so that elements other than my player character can be recorded if necessary, but I think it works quite well for what it is.

Sorry that this hasn't really been a technical summary, but if anyone has any questions or is encountering any problems with their own system then feel free to ask and I'll see if I can shed some light on it.

 

[correojon]

So, replay systems eh? Hopefully I can make a contribution to this.

I needed to make a replay system for my game, similar to the one present in Super Meat Boy. Here is the end result.

Unfortunately when it came to implementation, I found that the topic of creating replays for games is woefully under-doccumented.

The general consensus seemed to be that the most efficient system is to record player input (And timestamps for when that input happened), and "play it back" at the appropriate intervals. However, as I am using Unity, this approach is no-good as Unity does not have deterministic physics. that means that whilst two iterations through a game scenario might be very, very similar (when given the same inputs), they can not be guaranteed to be identical. This has the potential to cause issues when dealing with a replay system as the user may view something in a replay that quite simply didn't happen in-game.

After reading a few papers, I settled on an approach similar to the one used in Braid. Braid, due to the player being able to rewind to any point requires the storage of game state. The disadvantage of this is that (comparatively) the memory requirements will be very high, but it has the advantage of being incredibly accurate, and fairly "simple".

It should be noted that in my game operates with a semi-fixed timestep. Time for physics updates/logic etc is all fixed, whilst rendering is not. In laymans terms that means that things such as my character movement all works in "Units per Update", rather than "Units per second". So, if You had two versions of the game with different update timesteps (Say 60u/s and 30u/s), the latter would operate half a slow as the former.

Having a fixed physics update was fairly essential for this system, as what I would do is record the state of my character at every tick, and store it. I take a timestamp of the "update iteration", as well as details such as the position, rotation, current animation (I had to build a system to handle that) etc. Note that if the state has not changed in any way (e.g the player has just left the controller on the floor and walked away) then I do not record the state for that update. This helps to optimise a bit.

Then, when it comes to playing back the replay I simply iterate over the recorded "actions", and "restore" my character to whatever state the action tells it to be in. During replays, all physics interactions are turned off and what you see is not interacting with the game in any way.

Now, this solution is fairly specific to the needs of my game, and I will have to expand upon it later so that elements other than my player character can be recorded if necessary, but I think it works quite well for what it is.

Sorry that this hasn't really been a technical summary, but if anyone has any questions or is encountering any problems with their own system then feel free to ask and I'll see if I can shed some light on it.

Very cool solution! I thought about saving the game state, but it was much more complex than saving user input in my case. I´m making a Mario clone-ish with a strong focus on platforming and big levels, so I have many moving elements and things that like to go their own way, while something like Braid just had a few enemies and moving platforms. Managing all this would be a lot of work for something that could be easily done with user inputs. In fact, I intend to make something similar to allow a time reversal mechanic for a level, but I still haven´t given it much thought as it´s fairly far from where I´m in development.

Anyway, in a case like yours where user input won´t work it´s a very nice solution. If you have any links on the issue I´d love to take a look at them.

 

[liliththepale]

Has GM gave you any performance problem so far or not?

It was, yeah. I switched to Unity a few months ago.

 

[mStudios]

It was, yeah. I switched to Unity a few months ago.

I KNEW IT. Gamemaker is TRASH

 

[Pazu]

Havent posted in a while (been busy running multiple things as well as my Kickstarter), but good news today:



Wotan got Greenlit!

The Kickstarter still is up with a week to go, but I'm doing as much as I can promoting it.

If the Kickstarter dosn't pass, I may hire a programmer if I can find one, but that has yet to be decided.


as for everyone else, though I'm behind on happenings, keep up the awesome work!

Wotan got featured in the Kickstarter Loves Games email newsletter, hope that helps out. GL!!

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

Hmm, so I have this weird plan for my Unity project... (it has to do with battles, and future script recycling if it works out)

The plan: Same script. Same function calls/variables to the animator, which may be for a completely different sprite set. (Don't worry, triggers in the animators share triggers, so there's that)

At least three different sprite/animator sets.

"Visible" sprites are actually compromised of 2 distinct GameObjects, with the real sprite being a child of the shadow sprite.

Want to be able to end up having the sprites loaded correctly when the battle scene loads, based on the contents of the player's party (so people are in the right positions, if they're there in the first place)

Would the same "trick" that worked with portraits work here, too? I think in this case I'd want to swap out the Animator instead, right?

 

[correojon]

I KNEW IT. Gamemaker is TRASH

Why is that? i´m using GM and am very happy with it.

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

Why is that? i´m using GM and am very happy with it.

I'd love to hear about your experience with GM

 

[liliththepale]

Why is that? i´m using GM and am very happy with it.

It's not trash. It's just not designed for handling thousands of huge assets. For smaller games or pixel-art games it's fantastic.

 

[Jobbs]

Neither is stencyl

:: constantly worried ::

 

[correojon]

I'd love to hear about your experience with GM

Before making the game I am doing now I spent almost ten years without using GM, but before that I used it A LOT. I went as far as to translate the whole manual (with other people´s help) to spanish and I got a 2nd prize with a game in a competition organized by Mark Overmars, the original creator of GM, so I can say I was very experienced with it. I think it was a solid program back then and now, even though I´m a bit rusty and there are many functionalities I still have to learn, it´s improved a lot. You have to know what the program´s meant for and use it for that, just as you wouldn´t use a hammer to cut down a tree. So if you use the program in that scope, I think it´s a very good one. But as I said it´s been 10 years since I used it regularly (not counting the last 6 months), so I don´t know of any flaws it may have that I still haven´t come through, that´s why I am asking.

It's not trash. It's just not designed for handling thousands of huge assets. For smaller games or pixel-art games it's fantastic.

Have you tried loading the resources externally? I remember GM having issues with huge assets, but by managing the loading of external resources you could control what was loaded into memory at any moment, that improved performance a lot. I don´t know if it´s possible anymore (I suppose it is) as I still haven´t found any issues in that front and haven´t investigated it, but my game doesn´t use big assets atm.

 

[liliththepale]

Have you tried loading the resources externally? I remember GM having issues with huge assets, but by managing the loading of external resources you could control what was loaded into memory at any moment, that improved performance a lot. I don´t know if it´s possible anymore (I suppose it is) as I still haven´t found any issues in that front and haven´t investigated it, but my game doesn´t use big assets atm.

From my understanding loading resources externally is even worse because there's no texture batching, every different sprite you load becomes its own texture page, so to make it performant you would have to roll your own atlasing/organizing scripts.

And for what it's worth there are some options to control asset batching and loading from withing GameMaker for runtime assistance, but the IDE loads all of them regardless and doesn't have well-optimized caching. For example, it rebuilds all the texture atlases in a given batch even if all you do is change the origin coordinates on a single sprite.

 

[RelentlessRolento]

Wotan got featured in the Kickstarter Loves Games email newsletter, hope that helps out. GL!!

Awseome, didn't realize that, I think I need to check my spam e-mail for that one >_<

also, Gamemaker user here. Wotan is being made in Gamemaker with Flash assets imported though vector assets can become a pain as the previews can be messed up most of the time, especially if you use transparencies and gradients like I am >_<

 

[superNESjoe]

I built GunWorld 1 and 2 in Game Maker Studio, and i'm building Abacus in it as well. I love it, the coding language is easy to learn and the toolset helps you put things together really fast.

I want to move to Unity, but I'm terrified because the only coding language/experience I know is in GML. I don't use any of Game Maker's default variables or physics or drag-n-drop stuff, I do everything in GML. I have no idea how that will translate to Unity or having to learn a real language.

 

[Jumplion]

I built GunWorld 1 and 2 in Game Maker Studio, and i'm building Abacus in it as well. I love it, the coding language is easy to learn and the toolset helps you put things together really fast.

I want to move to Unity, but I'm terrified because the only coding language/experience I know is in GML. I don't use any of Game Maker's default variables or physics or drag-n-drop stuff, I do everything in GML. I have no idea how that will translate to Unity or having to learn a real language.

So long as you know the fundamentals like if statements, loops, data types, object oriented programming, etc... I'd imagine you'd be fine, especially since you're already used to doing everythign through code. From what I remember of me using GML back in the day it's not all that dissimilar from C#, just much more forgiving on mistakes (remember those == in if statements, yo) and smaller in scope.

 

[HandsomeCharles]

Very cool solution! I thought about saving the game state, but it was much more complex than saving user input in my case. I´m making a Mario clone-ish with a strong focus on platforming and big levels, so I have many moving elements and things that like to go their own way, while something like Braid just had a few enemies and moving platforms. Managing all this would be a lot of work for something that could be easily done with user inputs. In fact, I intend to make something similar to allow a time reversal mechanic for a level, but I still haven´t given it much thought as it´s fairly far from where I´m in development.

Anyway, in a case like yours where user input won´t work it´s a very nice solution. If you have any links on the issue I´d love to take a look at them.

I'm afriad I've long since lost most of the links I used, sorry! Gamasutra has a few articles on the subject though. Here's one of them that I remember reading.

For time rewinding its very likely that you'll have to record the game state, because you'll need random access which recorded input won't give you (unless you quickly replay the level from the start in order to get where you need to be, but that's a horrible idea ) . That said, it doesn't have to be all that costly. If you only need to record the last 10 seconds or so, using a state system is going to be (relatively) trivial, as you won't really have to store all that much data!

But yea, replay systems are a strange beast. There is no "one size fits all" solution. It's highly dependent on what you want your game to do.

Also, congrats to Neko and Rolento!

 

[JulianImp]

A way bigger hurdle with the GM-to-Unity transition IMO is the way Unity handles everything through composition and either passing references around (which is prone to breaking down once you start using prefabs) or getting them by code, which does take a while to get used to without doing awfully insecure things such as declaring every property and method as public.

I think you can actually do great stuff in Unity despite how most of the cooler features are actually on the AssetStore (as in, not part of the engine itself), but I agree that you can still do fine with GameMaker as long as you're aware of its limitations in regards to the size of projects it can handle reliably... which actually applies to just about any engine out there, anyway.

 

[mStudios]

GMS 2.0 was announced in 2014 I think, it's been years withou hearing anything from them. I believe they just gave up

Use Godot, best shit ever.

 

[superNESjoe]

So long as you know the fundamentals like if statements, loops, data types, object oriented programming, etc... I'd imagine you'd be fine, especially since you're already used to doing everythign through code. From what I remember of me using GML back in the day it's not all that dissimilar from C#, just much more forgiving on mistakes (remember those == in if statements, yo) and smaller in scope.

Good to know. My wife has a C++ and C# course I can take for free through her work, I will probably do that and move to Unity after Abacus.

GMS 2.0 was announced in 2014 I think, it's been years withou hearing anything from them. I believe they just gave up

Use Godot, best shit ever.

GMS has a lot of issues with consoles, which is what I develop for primarily, and I don't anticipate them to support Nintendo's new hardware very quickly so I really want to move over.

 

[mStudios]

Good to know. My wife has a C++ and C# course I can take for free through her work, I will probably do that and move to Unity after Abacus.



GMS has a lot of issues with consoles, which is what I develop for primarily, and I don't anticipate them to support Nintendo's new hardware very quickly so I really want to move over.

We bothered to port GM to WiiU just to see that the game wouldn't run more than 10 fps. Regardless of what was on the screen. We tried to optimize it and nothing.

We just gonna port Godot to WiiU, PS4 and XONE.

 

[liliththepale]

From what I can tell, the skeletal animation in Godot doesn't support bone/Sprite deformation, so lots of animation tricks and tools are out of reach. I don't recommend jumping into an engine hoping it eventually supports something some time down the line. But not everyone wants skeletal animation of course.

 

[mStudios]

From what I can tell, the skeletal animation in Godot doesn't support bone/Sprite deformation, so lots of animation tricks and tools are out of reach. I don't recommend jumping into an engine hoping it eventually supports something some time down the line. But not everyone wants skeletal animation of course.

Oh no, is not as powerful as Spine/Spriter2D.

 

[JulianImp]

I know the Godot guy from our local community, and it's really great to see that people are picking it up more and more as of late. The engine's still barely getting started, but he and the rest of the community are working hard on adding new features (I remember reading news about localization and retina display support a couple weeks ago), so you can count on it growing faster than Unity because the added features often get worked into the engine due to it being open source, rather than merely becoming yet another must-buy from the asset store.

I'm still kind of shackled to Unity since I'm used enough to its workflow to whip up prototypes really fast that I wouldn't think about switching engines for the time being. It's still great for anything 3D (or 2.5D), and 2D support is still kind of decent as well, but you might want to get a couple add-ons such as Ferr2D to make things easier on you and your team.

 

[AusRoachman]

Had a minor win this morning, getting my random rotation script working.Yay for Quaternion.Euler . Gives each unit a bit more life

Double Barrel Eulers

Single Barrel Eulers

Flying Eulers

Glowy Eulers

 

[Jumplion]

Good to know. My wife has a C++ and C# course I can take for free through her work, I will probably do that and move to Unity after Abacus.



GMS has a lot of issues with consoles, which is what I develop for primarily, and I don't anticipate them to support Nintendo's new hardware very quickly so I really want to move over.

Unity's scripting tutorials are really good for a quick introduction to C# and how Unity interacts with it, and this guy, Derek Banas, does excellent programming tutorials for a bunch of languages.

From my own experience, most game engines with their own scripting languages tend towards the C++ family. It's all basically just knowing the specific features and quirks, like the difference between Northern and Southern accents in America. Takes some getting used to, but you figure out how to say the same thing in two different ways.

--

Own question time, when animating in 2D how do you approach animating interacting with objects? Like, say, vaulting over debris or climbing a ladder? Do you keep the animation centered in one area or do you animate it with the entire movement?

Do you animate with the prop the character is interacting with? I'm using Unity, looking around I noticed there's stuff like root motion and the like, I've heard murmurs of using that stuff when dealing with these kinds of animations.

 

[mStudios]

Color next

 

[liliththepale]

Own question time, when animating in 2D how do you approach animating interacting with objects? Like, say, vaulting over debris or climbing a ladder? Do you keep the animation centered in one area or do you animate it with the entire movement?

Do you animate with the prop the character is interacting with? I'm using Unity, looking around I noticed there's stuff like root motion and the like, I've heard murmurs of using that stuff when dealing with these kinds of animations.

The latter for me, mostly just because it's easier to animate and because parts of it are easier to program. You might have to add special cases to your camera following code though, unless it's tracking a bone other than the root.


Really just whatever works though. In the animation linked below, I have the player climbing from one grab point to another. The vanilla animation assumes a uniform distance between grab points (3 tiles), but the programming supports any distance between 2.5 and 5 tiles. For instance, the grab points on the left side are 4 tiles apart instead. I just lerp the root motion in the mean time programmatically.

https://zippy.gfycat.com/RareAliveGar.webm