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GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay

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Blizzard

Banned
jesus christ unity 5 makes even the most intolerable programmer art look decent



except perhaps for my 100x300 textures >_>
Just curious, why not use power-of-2 textures like 128x256 or 128x512?

I'm guessing Unity handles this behind the scenes though, or graphics cards don't care any more.
 

Kritz

Banned
Wow so Unity 5 now provides all engine features such as post-processing effects? So you can use OnRenderImage, Graphics.Blit and whatever now? I didn't see that coming.

Yeah, it's crazy. Having full access to the profiler, and post effects... it's the best thing to happen to Unity yet. Unity and UE4 butting heads has lead to fantastic results.

Just curious, why not use power-of-2 textures like 128x256 or 128x512?

I'm guessing Unity handles this behind the scenes though, or graphics cards don't care any more.

cuz this is my workflow making textures

gwIaoA6.gif
 

ryanthelion123

Neo Member
After researching for about two hours Im stuck whether I should go with Unity or UU. (I know this comes up a lot) My main concern is an easier learning curve cause I have a lot on my plate already. Also, I have very little programming experience so I am debating whether to just skip over C# and C++. If I do, which is easier/better Playmaker or Blueprint. Also, can these visual scripting engines create a game by them self.
 

whiteape

Member
Prepare for crazy over the top use of blur, grain and chromatic aberration in unity!
Great news to have all the former pro features in free now. No need for me to upgrade to pro anymore.
 

adixon

Member
Are the profiling features you're talking about pro-only? (that was how I interpreted the feature comparison)

Nope, the profiling is totally freeeeee. Literally every feature of Unity 4 pro is now free, plus all the new engine stuff in unity 5 like realtime global illumination and pbr shaders. It seems like they could have explained this better.

The only things that aren't free are extra tools unity is working on right now, like extra testing tools, analytics stuff, cloud build. And then there's pro editor skin. (That's an expensive skin!)


*Edit* Anyone else see this? Pretty funny/impressive: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/139994-Former-Epic-Games-Boss-Mike-Capps-Believes-Unity-5-Beats-Unreal-Engine-4-For-Indies
 

_machine

Member
After researching for about two hours Im stuck whether I should go with Unity or UU. (I know this comes up a lot) My main concern is an easier learning curve cause I have a lot on my plate already. Also, I have very little programming experience so I am debating whether to just skip over C# and C++. If I do, which is easier/better Playmaker or Blueprint. Also, can these visual scripting engines create a game by them self.
I'd reckon BP is better and more extensive and yes you can make a whole game with just Blueprints. Check out Bears Can't Drift for example. C# on the other hand is imho much easier than CPP.
 
greatesttexturecomposingvideoever.gif

I fucking love this so much

EDIT:
This is a less popular topic, but I think relevant to indie development.

I want to drive down health insurance costs and direct more of it towards game development. I stay in shape, am pretty healthy, and I exercise regularly. If it were completely up to me, I'd just go without the health insurance, but I hear you get penalties for that (live in California). I'm currently paying $200 every month, but since I've now been a full-time indie for more than a year (complete with new low low earnings last year), I think I should now qualify for a cheaper insurance plan. What are you guys using for insurance and how much are you paying?

Quoting for new page - I can't help you as I'm British, so my health 'insurance' comes from extremely high tax rates for my entire working life
 

Fox1304

Member
Yeah, it's crazy. Having full access to the profiler, and post effects... it's the best thing to happen to Unity yet. Unity and UE4 butting heads has lead to fantastic results.



cuz this is my workflow making textures

gwIaoA6.gif

thanks for the good morning laugh :)
 

Blizzard

Banned
This is a less popular topic, but I think relevant to indie development.

I want to drive down health insurance costs and direct more of it towards game development. I stay in shape, am pretty healthy, and I exercise regularly. If it were completely up to me, I'd just go without the health insurance, but I hear you get penalties for that (live in California). I'm currently paying $200 every month, but since I've now been a full-time indie for more than a year (complete with new low low earnings last year), I think I should now qualify for a cheaper insurance plan. What are you guys using for insurance and how much are you paying?
I'm also U.S. and in somewhat the same situation. I'm currently paying just over $300 a month for health, dental, and vision.

I would SUPER HIGHLY recommend not dropping insurance though, even aside from the penalty. All it might take is one unlucky hospital visit or something to put you in crazy debt.
 

anteevy

Member
After a test with some friends, I'm looking for more hardened individuals who'd like to test an alpha version of my game Roll Playing Game and provide some feedback (Windows only for now). It should take around 3h to play through it. And who would be better suited than you guys? :D I've posted some screenshots a few pages back: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=153033737&postcount=2018

If you're interested, just write me a PM. I've prepared a small page with download link and instructions I can then send you. Thanks!!

This is from a small "time travel" level section:
RPG5s.jpg
 
Ported over my fresher movement test project to Unity5, it mainly just broke the existing test scene, so I had to make a new one. Also, the Maximo 'Shadier' shader also sorta broke, so once again my test character's eyelashes are borked. Oh, well. Other than that, no real issues.

Speaking of my project, I've gotten back to trying to fine-tune the shooting before moving on to melee attacking. The dash-attacking is much more fine-tuned and usable, though it's not perfect. I'll save the video blog update for when I have melee attacking and secondary item usage done, and by extension, a test enemy, I suppose.
 

ryanthelion123

Neo Member
I'd reckon BP is better and more extensive and yes you can make a whole game with just Blueprints. Check out Bears Can't Drift for example. C# on the other hand is imho much easier than CPP.

Alright, this is going to be hard to choose then. C# is easier than C++ but Blueprint is better than Playmaker. Is there anything else I should now that might make my decision easier.
 
Alright, this is going to be hard to choose then. C# is easier than C++ but Blueprint is better than Playmaker. Is there anything else I should now that might make my decision easier.

It's so much more than just how easy it is to learn the basics though - there's all sorts of factors like toolchains and development pipelines, what tools are supported and which tools you personally enjoy using, how the editor looks and behaves, weird quirks which annoy you versus things you don't mind... your best fit solution is in the end your best fit solution, so I'd honestly suggest giving them both a try and seeing which if any clicks.
You might find your best solution turns out to be something entirely different in the end!

If you know what sort of game you want to make, try building a basic test version in each, and seeing which one feels 'right' when making it, which one has you fighting the tools and which one just has things working nicely and quickly in a manner that suits you. Think about how you would expand your test version, and how easy it would be to do so with the tools you have, and if that affects your decision.
 
Alright, this is going to be hard to choose then. C# is easier than C++ but Blueprint is better than Playmaker. Is there anything else I should now that might make my decision easier.

As MrNyarlathotep pointed out, there's a lot more to each engine that doesn't make such decisions clear cut. Both are free so I recommend trying to prototype the same small idea/experiments in both and see what you prefer.

I've used both somewhat extensively as a programmer (so I've never used Playmaker and only delved a little with Blueprints), but what I can tell you for a fact is that Unreal has a better out-of-the-box designer workflow with some things. For example it's much easier to build a level in Unreal's editor than in Unity. Unity is rather barebones in constructing level geometry, it really needs a programmer to go and make level/map building tools for Unity for designers and others to use. There are assets you can buy on the store for these editors but I'm not really aware of any that is widely accepted. I'm sure there are, I'm just unaware. For all I know Playmaker may come with one! It's just out-of-the-box with Unity that part isn't so good.

Unreal's isn't the greatest, but at least it has something. For some people it doesn't matter either way because they end up building levels by modelling them their in 3D modeling software of choice itself. If you decide to do that (it's quite common, I don't like it but some do, I prefer building levels with a BSP editor i.e how games like Quake did), but hey, each to their own. If that's the case and you build maps/levels directly in 3D model software and export that as a whole for the engine then whether it's Unreal or Unity doesn't matter.

I'll reiterate what MrNyarlathotep said. You gotta experiment/see what ends up being right for you. That's an important part in engine choice, none are identical and might not suit your workflow or game, so you need to see what does.
 
Been a while since I posted here so... I've been doing a lot of work on the UI for my game COLOR at them moment, wanted to share it here as I'm pretty pround of it:

NiceScholarlyFlycatcher.gif

(sorry the GIF is large, low quality and framefrate :( any tips on making better gifs?)

WebM here for a more smooth version of the above GIF haha :p
http://webmshare.com/play/DGVZX
 

friken

Member
Does anybody have tips or suggestions for commissioning an artist?

get a good one ;)

joking aside, few tips.

Pick your stye first. Then eval artists based on their match to desired style

many artists quote hourly but it is a meaningless quote and a dozen artists w equal quality art will have wildly different time spent to achieve that quality. So do a single asset trial w a number of artists you like. then evaluate their ability to hit style and quality target but also amount of time spent to achieve it.

Also eval their ability and communication ability during a revision request or two.

Get very very clear on tech requirements prior to getting started w artist(s)
 

Jobbs

Banned
Does anybody have tips or suggestions for commissioning an artist?

This is tough because most artists will say they can do absolutely anything, and you can't weed them out until you actually get a test sample made to your spec.

It's just tough in general finding an artist and then working with them. Takes a while to find one you can work with. At least, that's been my experience.
 
Kritz, glad to see you're making some strides after the bad news yesterday and really happy that you now have access to the advanced lighting features! You can fix those shadows now ;)

Primitive carries on albeit at a bit of a slower pace this week. Lots of real world stuff (like getting stuck for hours at work troubleshooting serious IT issues) getting in the way of my game dev time.

I've just about got my head around making this sliding block puzzle work the way I want. Sliding block puzzles I thought, I bet those'll be really easy to implement!

Yeah....

No.

Probably some outside the box thinking could greatly simplify my blueprints, but yeah... no. Handling collision with each other and putting them into channels in the floor that they have to navigate around. Yeah, whoops. That's been complex for me at least.

At least now I truly have something I can take and tweak... but back to it. I've only got one of the three blocks implemented (but at least it works right now!)
 

Ventron

Member
*reads Unity networking docs*
This is going to be fun :/

From what I can tell, Unity really only supports a Client-Server topology rather than Peer to Peer. I need the latter though as I'm going to implement a rollback-based network system (think GGPO).

Are there any example projects or tutorials for networking in Unity (that doesn't use the Network View)? I could only find the Network API reference.
 

Kritz

Banned
*reads Unity networking docs*
This is going to be fun :/

From what I can tell, Unity really only supports a Client-Server topology rather than Peer to Peer. I need the latter though as I'm going to implement a rollback-based network system (think GGPO).

Are there any example projects or tutorials for networking in Unity (that doesn't use the Network View)? I could only find the Network API reference.

spoilers: the server in unity is also a peer
 
It's still uploading so as of posting this, the link probably won't work for the next ten minutes or so, but for anyone interested I'm uploading a video of the WIP level 8 with commentary on the concepts and puzzles. Obviously this 'spoils' the puzzle solutions, and I don't expect many people to actually watch all of this (at 15 minutes or so in length), but putting up proof of continual progress on the game really helps keep me motivated.

The very last puzzle with the pushable blocks is the puzzle that's taken me essentially three days, but it's working almost 100% of the way I want it to now (with one minor problem that I can hopefully fix, but that isn't game breaking enough for me not to move on with the next puzzle tomorrow). It feels like a real piece of actual regular gameplay, with one Primitive esque wrinkle. It turned out better than expected, put it that way, unlike the gear puzzle before it (which I might drop entirely if I can't figure out how to prevent the player easily getting chewed up between the spokes).

http://youtu.be/bHDcF5z7yRo
 

Xtra Mile

Neo Member
For all the Steam Greenlight guys and gals. I'm guessing you can set up a draft project and tweak it until you hit the publish button. Is that correct?
 

Lautaro

Member
For all the Steam Greenlight guys and gals. I'm guessing you can set up a draft project and tweak it until you hit the publish button. Is that correct?

I tried only Greenlight Concepts but yes, you can upload the thing as private.

EDIT: just checked, you can change the visibility to Friends-only or Hidden.
 

CMZinac

Neo Member
*reads Unity networking docs*
This is going to be fun :/

From what I can tell, Unity really only supports a Client-Server topology rather than Peer to Peer. I need the latter though as I'm going to implement a rollback-based network system (think GGPO).

Are there any example projects or tutorials for networking in Unity (that doesn't use the Network View)? I could only find the Network API reference.

What kind of game are you making? You need efficient serialization for GGPO style rollbacks, and C#/.NET can give you problems in this area...
 

Xtra Mile

Neo Member
I tried only Greenlight Concepts but yes, you can upload the thing as private.

EDIT: just checked, you can change the visibility to Friends-only or Hidden.

Thanks. I'm guessing it doesn't affect the "recent submissions" list until it's fully submitted
 

Ventron

Member
What kind of game are you making? You need efficient serialization for GGPO style rollbacks, and C#/.NET can give you problems in this area...

I'm using reflection to read an object's variables and keep their current values in memory. It did work surprisingly well when I tested it.

I can't take screenshots yet as I have no art, but I'm making a kind of dodgeball/Bomberman-esque single-screen combat game. It gets faster-paced and more hectic as time goes on, so I thought rollback would probably be the best method for implementing online.
 

Blizzard

Banned
I updated my walker robot today. My pixel art and animation skills need improving. =P

Old walk:
walk_18tu7n.gif


New walk:
walk_2osujd.gif


*edit*
Adjusted a leg a bit and recorded motion:
walk_3rik57.gif
 

Vazra

irresponsible vagina leak
Been a while since I posted here so... I've been doing a lot of work on the UI for my game COLOR at them moment, wanted to share it here as I'm pretty pround of it:

NiceScholarlyFlycatcher.gif

(sorry the GIF is large, low quality and framefrate :( any tips on making better gifs?)

WebM here for a more smooth version of the above GIF haha :p
http://webmshare.com/play/DGVZX

I use instagiffer for gifs. Decent results really.
gmkco.gif
 
What do you do in it?

It's a puzzle game about additive and subtractive colors in the light spectrum. Essentially you control that snake/line thing and change it's color by passing through the objects on screen - by passing through red you'll turn red, by passing through green you'll turn green, but if you went from red to green the colors would add to create yellow. You have to make your color match that of the goal to pass the level. It's quite hard to explain eloquently, so please do have a look at the website (with more images and a trailer) which explains it much more clearly than I have just now: http://dualstudios.co.uk/color
 
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