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GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay
- Thread starter Jacksinthe
- Start date
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I would if I had the specs :/ And a HMD.
I've been getting back to my Unity course on Udemy the last two days, working the graveyard shift at work has its perks :lol I finished my Number Wizard coding project and I'm almost done with an Arkanoid clone, and I started yesterday :O I have two more 12 hour nights this weekend so I'm gonna get a lot of coding done haha. While I'm not at work, I'm trying to figure out my level design in Skyrim and doing some decorating there.
ChronotriggerJM
Member
Can't code either, look into UE4! I can't recommend it enough for people who find writing code daunting / boring.
VR is what got me into gamedev too, being able to make your own worlds and then be in them is way too alluring to pass up. Plus hopefully maybe it will be profitable at some point
Definitely! I want to make a "game" that lets you ride a stationary bike through alien world's with cosmic views and things of that nature. Not sure how to start though lol
Will definitely check out Unreal though! Thanks for the advice.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
My friend had a a leftover occulus rift devkit he was going to let me have, then he's just sort of forgotten over and over again I guess. I've reminded him several times but It's gotten to the point when I don't want to nag and act needy and no longer really care anymore. So I'm not going to develop for the rift currently anyway. I own a gear vr and have been considering doing something with it, maybe i'll throw together a flappy bird VR clone or something, who knows. I'm honestly not into mobile development in general but I wouldn't be against doing some gear vr stuff. I just have to wrap up this current project. VR is definitely an endgame goal for me though.
Yeah my game will be VR compatible when it's out but I've decided that it will be an addition rather than only VR like previously thought.
NipplesAndToes23
Member
Can you tell me more about what Blueprints is?
Michael Armbrust
Member
Yeah my game is PSVR compatible. It's a first person cube fighting game so you "sit" in the cube and get a tank like feel that really helps with motion sickness. Turning is restricted to 90 degree snaps which also helps for most people.
It's certainly hard to remember exactly how VizionEck's spelled, but I have at least enough web presence that the most common misspellings already direct to my game over anything else.
You both like Cube Royale so I'll be sticking with that in some form. Probably VizionEck: Cube Royale, Cube Royale: VizionEck, or just Cube Royale will be what I go with. Thank you both for your feedback!
Yup, my game (Horizon Vanguard) is VR-only for now. The Oculus DK2 (seems so long ago) was a huuuuge revelation for me and pushed me from messing with smaller-scale projects into working on my first real game. I've been developing for the Vive and Touch since I could get my hands on them and would love to mess with PSVR down the line.
The specific flavor of game I wanted to play most didn't exist and nobody else was gonna make it, lol.
ChronotriggerJM
Member
VR really seems to spark ideas into developers (and non lol) minds. I'm always just so taken aback by the scale that VR can project.
It's grows inside me wanting to have an artist able to draw 2d cockpits for my
game. Hmm...
Would kill the pun.
Doesn't look to bad. I would make the transition a lil fuzzy.......
Dang, I wish I had something new to post for a change, but I'm still stuck knee deep (or is that wrist deep?) in out-of-context animation. And today, not even that, since my drawing hand has been covered in bandages for a week, that kind of messes up my lines :-/ (life hack: try not to crush the glasses you're attempting to wash when doing the dishes)
Still, we're reaching the end of an era, so good tidings, old thread, and looking forward to the new :-D
Still, we're reaching the end of an era, so good tidings, old thread, and looking forward to the new :-D
I finally got over my fear of "game is going to be awful and nobody will like it, but I can never be disappointed in it if I don't finish it" by thinking about my fear rationally and coming to the conclusion that, yeah, nobody will like it...except me. And that's more than okay. End of the day I started making this dumb little thing because it's the kind of game I always wanted to play but that didn't exist, and that's what I'm getting at the end. I'm gonna be astounded if this thing sells more than one copy that a friend of mine buys, but that's okay with me. Like it's the nichest of niche things, and I'm cool with that.
Making an adventure game/murder mystery VN mix where the player plays as a dude helping an AI figure out how he was killed before he became an AI. Gonna be honest, it's not exactly looking like it's gonna set the world on fire. But I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out at the same time, if that makes sense.
Gonna learn a bunch of lessons from this once it's over(hopefully around mid-September) and then start a new game that will hopefully be better haha.
At this point I want to finish this because I think it will be good for me to have something finished, even if the result is the nichest-of-niche murder mysteries that nobody is gonna care about except for me. At least I'll finally finish this and it won't be haunting me in my nightmares, dammit.
Making an adventure game/murder mystery VN mix where the player plays as a dude helping an AI figure out how he was killed before he became an AI. Gonna be honest, it's not exactly looking like it's gonna set the world on fire. But I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out at the same time, if that makes sense.
Gonna learn a bunch of lessons from this once it's over(hopefully around mid-September) and then start a new game that will hopefully be better haha.
At this point I want to finish this because I think it will be good for me to have something finished, even if the result is the nichest-of-niche murder mysteries that nobody is gonna care about except for me. At least I'll finally finish this and it won't be haunting me in my nightmares, dammit.
Chris Murphy
Member
Yeah maybe, I haven't decided yet what the camera position will do when the player is right on the surface. It's actually quite difficult to get into a position where you can see the water surface intersect the camera view but I'll probably have to do something there to make it look a bit better. But really I need more game in my game to see what would be best from a gameplay perspective.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
Why would no one like this? Sounds a lot like the great Ghost Trick.
Fully agree.
Good grief, does that single blueprint house all the logic for the game?
Blueprint is a visual programming concept used in Unreal 4. Cryengine has its own system, and you can buy an addon for Unity as well. Instead of writing code as usual, you instead link different graphical nodes together to make stuff happen. It's a visual interface designed to hide the actual code. Think of "connect the dots" and you're more than halfway there already, you literally draw lines between nodes to get them to talk to one another.
tamaster92
Member
#screenshotsaturday
Moving onward with my little racing thingamajig I add lap timing and fastest lap keeping per session.
debating whether to keep building the hot-lap type gameplay or move on to basic races with other vehicles right away, thoughts?
EDIT: Also I know the HUD for the lap times sucks it is very basic atm and blends with the sky!
Moving onward with my little racing thingamajig I add lap timing and fastest lap keeping per session.
debating whether to keep building the hot-lap type gameplay or move on to basic races with other vehicles right away, thoughts?
EDIT: Also I know the HUD for the lap times sucks
it is very basic atm and blends with the sky!I have a question if anyone can help me. What's the animation rigging style that makes the player look like he's all physics based? Like Grow Home, Gang Beasts, or Human Fall Flat. Is it procedural generated or something? I can't really find information about it and I'd like to learn how to rig a model to work that way (Or if it's harder/more time consuming than hand animating). I'm also wonder what the proper term for it is.
edit: If I had to guess how to do it, I'd say you put physics on individual bones and apply forces to keep them up right? Then when you say want to move forward, you'd apply a certain amount of force for left leg, head, ect.? That doesn't really seem right to me though.
edit: If I had to guess how to do it, I'd say you put physics on individual bones and apply forces to keep them up right? Then when you say want to move forward, you'd apply a certain amount of force for left leg, head, ect.? That doesn't really seem right to me though.
shysaursoft
Member
In just one month in 2014, iOS had as many game releases as the entire last 38 years of six console generations.
Never played those games, so I don't know if the link helps. Are you talking about something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1tDjbFXeOo
It looks like it. I'll check it out, thanks.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
This is really damning for indie developers imo. I would not target such an extremely quick moving market without any marketing budget.
timetokill
Banned
Yeah seriously, that sounds like a fun game concept to me
shysaursoft
Member
These days, marketing budget includes paying a Chinese rating farm to try and get your app into the top 10 lists. >..> Either that, or just making a clone of something popular and hoping people mistake your game for the thing they heard about. ("Does our app have a screaming face and 'Clash' in the title? Perfect!")
Browsing the Google Play store these days is like the fleamarkets I used to go to back in the old country, with all the bootleg NES carts.
It'd be hilarious if it weren't sad how effective this kind of thing ends up being.
Depends on what direction you want to take the game into, I'd say. Time attack is 100% competitive (if you use leaderboards), but there isn't much to do for players who aren't into optimizing the hell out of lap times, while having multiple vehicles racing at once errs more towards a racing game more people are likely to enjoy, but at the cost of having to develop a decent racing AI.
If you end up deciding on the race concept, I think rubberbanding mechanics (to a varying extent) are a necessary evil to keep players in the game. After all, a race where you're too far ahead would become little more than a time attack, and one where you're hopelessly behind is likely to feel bland and boring as well.
tamaster92
Member
I suppose I could always include both but focus on time trial first (since it's easier)
Nothing stopping me adding AI and racing later on once it's a bit more polished and formed
Still, I'd probably suggest that you design the game around the features, rather than just adding them later in development because you can. Might as well try having a single AI opponent up and running early on in development if you want to go that route and then slowly polishing it alongside the other features, rather than only starting development on AI racers once you've already fully polished the other aspects of the game.
Execution, mostly. Ghost Trick had a lot of gameplay that was evenly spaced and was really good. For this the game is structured as 3D Adventure->VN sections->Choices that influence plot->3D Adventure->Phoenix Wrightish conclusion, and repeat for 3 different murders. I think the gameplay isn't spaced out enough at times.
Plus the plot is very reliant on murder mystery talk, like discussing old writers from the Golden Age of mystery fiction that I think not a lot of people care about aside from me. And since this would be living and dying on its writing...
It might not be as ignored as I'm expecting it to be, but in the moment assuming that no one will ever give a crap about it is somehow making working on it a lot easier haha.
I'm doing my first game right now (doing prototypes for the different aspects, really), so I'm not one to tell anybody how to do games. Now, in my opinion, it's best to have all basic systems working first, then expand and polish.
tamaster92
Member
You both make very good points, i've started work on a basic AI racer who just races the track alongside you for now, once that is working i'll look at figuring out placements etc
EDIT: Well that was easier than I hoped
enjoy 1 AI racer + debug info! It does break the fastest lap thing however, but since that will only be for time trial with no AI, don't see the point in fixing it (yet)
While I think you're absolutely right to set your expectations as low as possible, your description definitely catches my interest - and for reference, on mobile/super low res, the gif above looks straight out of the PS1 golden days (a combination of the scaled down artwork+pixellized font), makes for a pretty interesting (alluring?) look... but I'm looking forward to it either way :-D
Regarding the writing: do you work with anyone else on that front? Do you have prior writing experience (for games, or not)? If it's your first go at it, my main recommendation would be to NOT underestimate the need you'll have for at least one dedicated editor (no, unfortunately, subsequent readings by yourself won't do), and ideally have your script accessible externally from the game so it's possible to read/fix without needing to play the game, or go in engine. I'd also highly recommend having lots of options for players to speed up text (don't underestimate people's reading speed) and even outright skipping it, as you never know when people will want to replay specific scenes, and in my experience, if that feature isn't in early, it's a hard one to put down the line. One other thing that could make for "more engaging" reading (beyond having a good script) is the use of dynamic lettering, ie bolding/italic/moving and rhythmic letters to translate emotions (see: PW, Undertale, etc). If you can afford it, another appreciated feature is a choice of fonts/font colors, to account for dislexia/color blindness, and other accessibility issues (I found this dyslexia font to be excellent, even for non-dyslexic readers: https://opendyslexic.org/). Of course, any of those won't save poor writing, so make sure to get that editing done first and foremost, as many times and early as you can, during the whole development!
One last thought: if your game features dialog that lead into menu-based choices, make sure to have some form of block off to prevent players mashing the "pass dialog" button and inadvertently make a selection in a menu. I tried a number of things in Honey to prevent that, and... it still happened, lots, so beware! (for instance, Phoenix Wright uses a rather large blocked input time when menus appear to account for that, which works because of the whole experience's generally slow rhythm and its overall excellent production values including menu appearance animations, but you'll find some players can be *very* vocal regarding the use of blocked input time if your game isn't highly polished in all other respects, so I'd advise against extreme uses of it, and to instead focus on making as much of the overall navigation/reading experience as snappy as possible and finding other ways to account for players mashing buttons)
NipplesAndToes23
Member
That sounds great for me, but I don't have a PC than can handle Unreal Engine 4 and can't afford anything right now so the Unity one isn't an option either. I'm also trying to learn Pico-8 and probably should stick with one thing before I move to another.
Thanks, that's pretty encouraging
I have some friends proofreading it, but I'm considering actually hiring an editor once everything else is done. I got some writing experience(I wrote a couple books, never published them though) but yeah I know I definitely need some heavy editing on this since it's going to be full of writing. Thanks for the font link, that actually looks really cool! I got the text speed set as a user variable in the options menu, but I think I could probably implement a key to speed it up as well.
My script can definitely be easily corrected. This is the one thing in the game that I'm proud of. I got the external script stored in a doc file, with some tables to organize things by speaker/etc. I made a small program that converts the script into actual code and then saves it straight to my Unity folder(with backups), so my workflow is pretty simple. I can even trigger transitions/sprite changes from the word document, which saves me so, so , so, so much time.
Plus one more thing I found is that back when I was trying to write straight into the code my writing got a lot worse. I think I was stuck in coding mode and my brain didn't really get in gear for writing. I don't know, I might be a little weird in that department.
I really hadn't thought about people mashing the dialog button, thanks for pointing that out, I had done like literally zero prep about that and it could have been a huge issue. Hmm, I think for major "will change the rest of the game" decisions one thing I could do is have a confirmation screen show up and the confirmation key being different from the dialog key.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
My game is still SO far from resembling what it's supposed to actually be, but I figured I'd better start at least posting for #screenshotsaturday. So I'll post it here to keep you all up to date on how things are going as well. I got the hunter class' arrow ballistics implemented and tracking correctly this afternoon.
This is the gif I wanted to use for screenshotsaturday but sadly it was .8MB too big
So this is one I went with.
Honestly I'm pretty happy with development overall. I've been pouring a lot more effort into getting things done and things have been progressing a lot more quickly as a result (zomg, how intuitive). The 2 classes shown are the fighter and hunter classes decked out in randomly generated gear with randomly assigned stats but since I haven't gotten around to creating an enemy class yet, I just have parties of fighters and hunters all fighting each other for testing purposes. Watching massive 200 parties of 5 battles is fun in it's own right though. At least one enemy of some sort will probably be my next major development.
This is the gif I wanted to use for screenshotsaturday but sadly it was .8MB too big
So this is one I went with.
Honestly I'm pretty happy with development overall. I've been pouring a lot more effort into getting things done and things have been progressing a lot more quickly as a result (zomg, how intuitive). The 2 classes shown are the fighter and hunter classes decked out in randomly generated gear with randomly assigned stats but since I haven't gotten around to creating an enemy class yet, I just have parties of fighters and hunters all fighting each other for testing purposes. Watching massive 200 parties of 5 battles is fun in it's own right though. At least one enemy of some sort will probably be my next major development.
Michael Armbrust
Member
I realised how nice it'd be to have Unity automatically track dev time, so I wrote a basic extension for that.
...
Just make a "dev_tracking.cs" file in the Editor folder and copy that code if you want to use it. Everything else is automatic.
Lots of room for improvement but it's more or less good enough for my needs so I wanted to share it. I've never made an editor window before so that could use the most changes. It also only tracks time you're active developing. IE if you just leave the editor idle or alt tab, it stops recording. These values could definitely be tweaked.
I've only messed around with it for a few hours so let me know if you notice any glitches. Please share if you make any improvements.
EDT: I removed the code from this post since it was a pain coming back here and updating it. PM me if you're wanting to use it.
...
Just make a "dev_tracking.cs" file in the Editor folder and copy that code if you want to use it. Everything else is automatic.
Lots of room for improvement but it's more or less good enough for my needs so I wanted to share it. I've never made an editor window before so that could use the most changes. It also only tracks time you're active developing. IE if you just leave the editor idle or alt tab, it stops recording. These values could definitely be tweaked.
I've only messed around with it for a few hours so let me know if you notice any glitches. Please share if you make any improvements.
EDT: I removed the code from this post since it was a pain coming back here and updating it. PM me if you're wanting to use it.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
I don't want to take that away from you, but I will just say, it sounds interesting to me at least.
shysaursoft
Member
Some humour for the day:
Not that I know opengl - the last time I did any graphics programming was when you had to do this:
asm
mov ax,13h
int 10h
end;
Not that I know opengl - the last time I did any graphics programming was when you had to do this:
asm
mov ax,13h
int 10h
end;
Graphics programming has changed a lot. xDSome humour for the day:
Not that I know opengl - the last time I did any graphics programming was when you had to do this: ...
Those were the times. I still have an old 32/16-bit PC around with all
the devtools from like Borland, Watcom etc. doing some c/asm etc. at
times. That era in time is full of treasures for graphics programmers
(../programming/msdos/) even today. Anyhow.
Here is a first attempt getting some volume rendering in my game.
Well, I had to skip the idea of integrating over the sphere at each sample
point along the sampling ray, because I couldn't find any quick solution for
the problem I talked about last time. I tried random but it would need very
small steps size and comes with a lot of noise, producing a complete mess.
However, I got a couple of ideas while dealing with that problem, which I may
try in OT3, to try to compute some volumetric color bleeding reflecting off
from objects. So I had to call out a light source (point light source) to
actually get something useful on the screen and have integrated the volume
properties like scattering, extinction and the phase-dependency (0.2
Mie/Nishita in the animation above) across the volume dictated by the volume
rendering equation (single scattering here) with a few tricks like no volume
banding despite the volume resolution is utterly low, just 10 slices. xD
However, I will improve on it a lot! I just wanted to have something running
in realtime getting a feel how it may alter the game. But one really cool
feature you see in the animation is that the objects get globally shaded
seeing the volume as a light source.
So it's not a faked fog or anything, it's the real deal so to speak, which
will allow me to create some really cool ambients, I guess, by just
varying the color of the light source and the scattering, extinction, phase,
and spatial/temporal density of the volume. Next I will try some different
setups and see what comes out of it.
Don't mind the low volume resolution. That's going to change in the future. I
haven't made any optimization whatsoever, yet, it's a plain straight forward
implementation in software. I hope you like it nevertheless.
OT2 was cool! Had lots of pleasure!
Well, I had to skip the idea of integrating over the sphere at each sample
point along the sampling ray, because I couldn't find any quick solution for
the problem I talked about last time. I tried random but it would need very
small steps size and comes with a lot of noise, producing a complete mess.
However, I got a couple of ideas while dealing with that problem, which I may
try in OT3, to try to compute some volumetric color bleeding reflecting off
from objects. So I had to call out a light source (point light source) to
actually get something useful on the screen and have integrated the volume
properties like scattering, extinction and the phase-dependency (0.2
Mie/Nishita in the animation above) across the volume dictated by the volume
rendering equation (single scattering here) with a few tricks like no volume
banding despite the volume resolution is utterly low, just 10 slices. xD
However, I will improve on it a lot! I just wanted to have something running
in realtime getting a feel how it may alter the game. But one really cool
feature you see in the animation is that the objects get globally shaded
seeing the volume as a light source.
So it's not a faked fog or anything, it's the real deal so to speak, which
will allow me to create some really cool ambients, I guess, by just
varying the color of the light source and the scattering, extinction, phase,
and spatial/temporal density of the volume. Next I will try some different
setups and see what comes out of it.
Don't mind the low volume resolution. That's going to change in the future. I
haven't made any optimization whatsoever, yet, it's a plain straight forward
implementation in software. I hope you like it nevertheless.
OT2 was cool! Had lots of pleasure!
tamaster92
Member
I always loved this one personally
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