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

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C

Conkersbadfurday

Member
So we have a demo that's done, but we don't actually know the best way to get it out there. Our website is powered by Squarespace, which has a 20 meg upload cap, and the demo is 60 megs.

Wondering where to put it so people can actually play it. Steam has a demo section, but it looks like you can't just willynilly add to it. Which sucks since we paid the money for a greenlight page and whatnot. Thought we'd be able to upload a demo there, but I can't figure out how.

Any of you have advice on this?

Nätso;157857721 said:
You will still have your talent and you will still have your game, even if they say 'no'.

Try not to stress out too much! I know that sounds ridiculous (esp. with money involved!), but if they say 'no', it might be discouraging, but it doesn't mean that your game is bad.

Either way, I sincerely wish you the best!
Click to expand...
Thanks for the encouragement :) Everything you say is true, though it'll suck to get hit with another little setback. Fuck I want this thing done, but it's such a stupid big project.
 
L

liliththepale

Banned
Jobbs said:
show me an example of the perceived problem and I'll tell you.

making alternate flinch animations is one thing, aside from that maybe you could randomize the animation speed or add a tiny random delay before the animation plays and see how that looks.

You could make the first frame of the flinch animation hold for a random amount of time before the rest of the animation plays. That might work. That said, without seeing it I'm kinda flying blind.
Click to expand...

I don't have anything to show just yet. Most of the enemies in my game right now fight you alone, and the only type that doesn't can't be directly attacked. I want to change this up some, though, so I've been studying how other games go about it, with particular interest in Castlevania style games.

Something like this looks fine to me, although I can't quite figure out what's going on in it. I'm not sure if it's the same animation with different timing, or different animation altogether.

ysqseg0mxhmbkjqbiu1k.gif


Probably what I'll end up with is a random scaler on the flinch animation speed.
 
J

Jobbs

Banned
liliththepale said:
I don't have anything to show just yet. Most of the enemies in my game right now fight you alone, and the only type that doesn't can't be directly attacked. I want to change this up some, though, so I've been studying how other games go about it, with particular interest in Castlevania style games.

Something like this looks fine to me, although I can't quite figure out what's going on in it. I'm not sure if it's the same animation with different timing, or different animation altogether.

ysqseg0mxhmbkjqbiu1k.gif


Probably what I'll end up with is a random scaler on the flinch animation speed.
Click to expand...

it sounds to me like you're worrying about something that isn't really a problem at all, but I'd have to see it myself to render a final judgement.
 
H

Hopeford

Member
Pwef7Ap.gif


I'm cautiously beginning to enjoy how the UI is looking. I say cautiously because I'm confident I've stared at this game for enough time those last couple of days that I've long ceased to understand what good actually means.
 
J

Jacksinthe

Banned
Conkersbadfurday said:
So we have a demo that's done, but we don't actually know the best way to get it out there. Our website is powered by Squarespace, which has a 20 meg upload cap, and the demo is 60 megs.

Wondering where to put it so people can actually play it. Steam has a demo section, but it looks like you can't just willynilly add to it. Which sucks since we paid the money for a greenlight page and whatnot. Thought we'd be able to upload a demo there, but I can't figure out how.

Any of you have advice on this?
Click to expand...
Hostgator. Unlimited bandwidth, uploads, sites, databases, etc. Lightning fast servers.

You can even host multiple sites on one account without needing more hosting plans. We have a few we use that aren't subdomains, just point your DNS after you setup the back end and poof. Multiple sites, one account.

No server should ever have an upload cap, bandwidth cap, page limit, etc in 2015. The only choices you should be making are the type of server you want. Shared, dedicated, etc. Most all hosting companies have ditched caps on basic usage.

Then upload anything you like. I haven't had a single issue with Hostgator ever. Zero downtime and really quick servers. Def in the top 5 in the biz if not in the top 2.
 
C

Conkersbadfurday

Member
AbsintheGames said:
Hostgator. Unlimited bandwidth, uploads, sites, databases, etc. Lightning fast servers.

You can even host multiple sites on one account without needing more hosting plans. We have a few we use that aren't subdomains, just point your DNS after you setup the back end and poof. Multiple sites, one account.

No server should ever have an upload cap, bandwidth cap, page limit, etc in 2015. The only choices you should be making are the type of server you want. Shared, dedicated, etc. Most all hosting companies have ditched caps on basic usage.

Then upload anything you like. I haven't had a single issue with Hostgator ever. Zero downtime and really quick servers. Def in the top 5 in the biz if not in the top 2.
Click to expand...
Awesome, thanks. I'll look into this today.

The backup plan is to use Google drive :p
 
C

cbox

Member
Been busy this weekend! I'll probably end up remodelling the greenn bomber. I'm not 100% happy with the cockpit area. Finally got the hang of rigging in blender too, it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. AND, everything finally comes into ue4 properly now, phew.

qRFNWWW.gif

bvYcV93.gif

U1dxYwml.png


Jobbs said:
okay... this is about as good as I can do with old school 2D water and no actual dynamic water physics or anything:

http://www.gfycat.com/ObedientCompetentFinnishspitz

spent a lot of the weekend on this XD
Click to expand...

Stunning, really! Damn Jobbs.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
ConvenientBox said:
Been busy this weekend! I'll probably end up remodelling the greenn bomber. I'm not 100% happy with the cockpit area. Finally got the hang of rigging in blender too, it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. AND, everything finally comes into ue4 properly now, phew.
Click to expand...
Any tips on what you had to change for those of us planning to use UE4 in the future with Blender?
 
C

cbox

Member
fixuis said:
^^ looks great! What did you use to make those?
Click to expand...

Blender through and through.

Blizzard said:
Any tips on what you had to change for those of us planning to use UE4 in the future with Blender?
Click to expand...

Took a few screens from my blender. Before exporting, make sure your scale and rotation are applied and your orientation is as circled in the image below.

qpasZT8.png

QIM97Z0.png


When you bring it into unreal as a skeletal mesh ( If animating or using physics ) click the "reference t0a" pose checkbox. When i drag it onto a scene it's backwards, but when I apply my animation sequence, everything is right in the world.
 
M

_machine

Member
Would you guys allow ranged attack ranges to work like this:
imgo86stk.jpg

In theory it works since it calculates line of sight for the center of a tile, but those disconnect tiles are a pain in the ass to have range indicators for and to clearly explain to the player.
 
T

timetokill

Banned
Jobbs said:
okay... this is about as good as I can do with old school 2D water and no actual dynamic water physics or anything:

http://www.gfycat.com/ObedientCompetentFinnishspitz

spent a lot of the weekend on this XD
Click to expand...

It looks good! th eonly thing that is weirding me out is that it looks like the walls of everything (including outside the water) start distorting and waving as though we're viewing them through water, even though the camera itself isn't. I'd guess you have a screenspace shader applied that just does the whole screen like that when you're in water?
 
H

hobblygobbly

Member
Nätso;157857721 said:
I kinda like what you're doing here.

It's a little hard to read, but I think that might be because the shadows on the model blend in with the shadows of the background.

Does it look better with a bigger contrast in color?

The glow effect on the model's limbs also muddy things up a bit.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's a particle effect, need to use particle effects smartly to have it appear okay and not obstruct stuff too much. Things become hard to read if you don't use lighting/shadows with good attention/care - if you do you can make it legible/clear so if you do a low-res style I guess you have to be very conscious about design that way.

Been playing around with attempting to get dithering, playing around because shaders/post-process effects is not my strong suit, learning slowly but surely though. I'm not even sure if this is what you'd call dithering but it's a start I guess with low res.

Xb7tM3y.png


This is just normal low res rendering + texture (some random royalty free texture I downloaded) + a shitty quick sword model I made:

TXDdj59.png


And this is just simply a particle + greyscale shader + colour ramp

9ZEXCGx.gif


For now it's just a novelty thing, think I'll do something for ludum dare game jam with this aesthetic. It'll work for indoor areas and stuff but when you render in large open spaces the further stuff becomes unidentifiable (due to the low res), so it could work nice as a dungeon crawler like maybe Ultima Underworld but not a large landscape or whatever.
 
SeanNoonan

SeanNoonan

Member
liliththepale said:
Something like this looks fine to me, although I can't quite figure out what's going on in it. I'm not sure if it's the same animation with different timing, or different animation altogether.

ysqseg0mxhmbkjqbiu1k.gif


Probably what I'll end up with is a random scaler on the flinch animation speed.
Click to expand...

In this example it's the poses that the animations target from - one handed, two handed (one weapon) and two handed (two weapons). This is why it looks a lot more natural.
 
J

Jobbs

Banned
timetokill said:
It looks good! th eonly thing that is weirding me out is that it looks like the walls of everything (including outside the water) start distorting and waving as though we're viewing them through water, even though the camera itself isn't. I'd guess you have a screenspace shader applied that just does the whole screen like that when you're in water?
Click to expand...

three points:

1) how dare you criticize me
2) just kidding :D
3) in Open FL it's currently very hard to target shaders like that, but I think that's coming in a future update.
 
M

mugwhump

Member
In Unity should discrete rooms always be in separate scene files?

We're making a roller-coaster/funhouse ride that goes through different rooms on a set path for school, and I'm wondering if I should just slam everything into one scene file.

Pros/cons as I see them:
+ easier to make sure everything's scaled right
+ easier to animate the path of the cart
+ don't have to deal with seamless scene transitions (how hard is this?)
- only one person can work on the scene file at once
- performance penalty for having everything in one room?

What do you guys think?


Also does anyone have any good resources to help with exporting assets from Maya to Unity? I feel unity's documentation is insufficient.
 
A

Apoc29

Member
mugwhump said:
In Unity should discrete rooms always be in separate scene files?

We're making a roller-coaster/funhouse ride that goes through different rooms on a set path for school, and I'm wondering if I should just slam everything into one scene file.

Pros/cons as I see them:
+ easier to make sure everything's scaled right
+ easier to animate the path of the cart
+ don't have to deal with seamless scene transitions (how hard is this?)
- only one person can work on the scene file at once
- performance penalty for having everything in one room?

What do you guys think?


Also does anyone have any good resources to help with exporting assets from Maya to Unity? I feel unity's documentation is insufficient.
Click to expand...

Memory limitations on your target platform should be your main concern with putting everything into a single scene. If you can spare the memory, by all means single scene it. Use Unity's profiler to keep tabs on memory usage.

In terms of performance, there shouldn't be a problem if you're batching mostly static geometry. A lot of moving parts will eat into performance.

Re: only one person can work on the scene file at once: you can separate your "Rooms" into their own game objects and prefab them, that way any modifications only need to be applied to those prefabs and not the scene.
 
T

timetokill

Banned
Jobbs said:
three points:

1) how dare you criticize me
2) just kidding :D
3) in Open FL it's currently very hard to target shaders like that, but I think that's coming in a future update.
Click to expand...

<3

That makes sense. I think the effect is slight enough outside the water that it still looks good, by the way. :)
 
M

mugwhump

Member
Apoc29 said:
Re: only one person can work on the scene file at once: you can separate your "Rooms" into their own game objects and prefab them, that way any modifications only need to be applied to those prefabs and not the scene.
Click to expand...

Ohhh that's clever, cool. What about nested prefabs, though? As in, I want a prefab in the room prefab.
Edit: yeah guess that's not possible. Probably still worth it though.


Any tips for animating the roller coaster? Currently I'm using a motion path in Maya, but having to specify the speed at different parts is a pain. Is there any way to make it physics-driven?
 
L

liliththepale

Banned
Jobbs said:
three points:

1) how dare you criticize me
2) just kidding :D
3) in Open FL it's currently very hard to target shaders like that, but I think that's coming in a future update.
Click to expand...

How limited are you with shaders? You can do a pretty simple fragment shader in GLSL that takes a sampler buffer and determines how much each pixel should distort based off of that.

Code: 
varying vec2 v_texcoord;
varying vec4 v_color;

uniform float time;
uniform sampler2D s_alphaTex;

void main()
{

    float hor = texture2D(s_alphaTex, v_texcoord).g;
    float ver = texture2D(s_alphaTex, v_texcoord).b;
    float wav = texture2D(s_alphaTex, v_texcoord).r;
    vec2 texCoord = v_texcoord;
        texCoord.x = texCoord.x+(cos(texCoord.y*18.0+time*0.05)*0.05*wav)+hor/20.0-0.025;
        texCoord.y = texCoord.y+(sin(texCoord.x*32.0+time*0.05)*0.05*wav)+ver/20.0-0.025;
        
    gl_FragColor = texture2D(gm_BaseTexture, texCoord);

}

This is doing a couple things, so I'll break it apart. The green and blue values in the sampler buffer are horizontal and vertical displacement buffers respectively. The red value is a sine/cosine height value to mimic shimmering water or uniform heat haze. For reference, a completely neutral sampler that evokes no distortion would have every pixel be #007F7F; (except GameMaker for whatever reason flips r and b so it's $7F7F00).

Here are some example textures that I'll draw into the sampler buffer to get some displacement. The first one simulates the look of a divot by pinching in everything toward the center and the second one creates smoky undulations when spun around. The third one is a hitspark effect that only lasts two frames.

EMNHaXv.png
GSTahDa.png
4GDHOXD.png


This is a mockup, but it's close to what my sampler buffer looks like when the protagonist beset on an island between two pools of magma has just defeated an enemy that vanishes in a smoky haze. The pink parts undulate in a uniform manner and the rest gets displaced depending how far off teal it is.

QUpHjEp.png
Click to expand...
 
N

Nätso

Member
hobblygobbly said:
For now it's just a novelty thing, think I'll do something for ludum dare game jam with this aesthetic. It'll work for indoor areas and stuff but when you render in large open spaces the further stuff becomes unidentifiable.
Click to expand...

Hmmm....What if you outlined everything in black? Cel-shaded games tend to do this, as does the 3DS version of Super Smash Brothers.

2307925-632937_20130926_002.jpg


It could help to make everything more legible.
Might also work as something top-down/isometric (maybe???)


hobblygobbly said:
9ZEXCGx.gif
Click to expand...

That's really nice!
 
J

Jobbs

Banned
liliththepale said:
How limited are you with shaders? You can do a pretty simple fragment shader in GLSL that takes a sampler buffer and determines how much each pixel should distort based off of that.
Click to expand...

I really like the concept behind that sort of displacement and it's something I definitely am interested in doing. the problem is the current version of Open FL (at least the current version Stencyl is on top of) does not allow you to apply shaders targeted only to one object, you can only put them on the full screen at once.

From what I understand in the upcoming version of Open FL (Open FL "Next" I believe) you'll be able to do this and more, so some cool new possibilities will open up.

In the future, after Ghost Song, I may be interested in trying to learn some programming (In Stencyl I use programming techniques in the visual programming system, but I don't do programming in the traditional sense) and looking into Unity or UE4. Stencyl has been amazing for letting me do things I never thought I could, but there are certain limitations (right now, at least) that it'd be nice to shed.
 
L

liliththepale

Banned
Jobbs said:
I really like the concept behind that sort of displacement and it's something I definitely am interested in doing. the problem is the current version of Open FL (at least the current version Stencyl is on top of) does not allow you to apply shaders targeted only to one object, you can only put them on the full screen at once.

From what I understand in the upcoming version of Open FL (Open FL "Next" I believe) you'll be able to do this and more, so some cool new possibilities will open up.

In the future, after Ghost Song, I may be interested in trying to learn some programming (In Stencyl I use programming techniques in the visual programming system, but I don't do programming in the traditional sense) and looking into Unity or UE4. Stencyl has been amazing for letting me do things I never thought I could, but there are certain limitations (right now, at least) that it'd be nice to shed.
Click to expand...

The effect I described isn't per-object, it's a post-process applied to the screen buffer. What I do is I have a separate surface that I draw the displacement map to and then feed that into the shader.

I'm reading through www.stencyl.com/help/view/shaders and it seems like Stencyl automatically handles the texture passing, which would be a problem. You need the ability to tell the shader where in memory the displacement map is. Hmm.

I wouldn't worry too much, though. Your game is gorgeous!
 
J

Jobbs

Banned
liliththepale said:
The effect I described isn't per-object, it's a post-process applied to the screen buffer. What I do is I have a separate surface that I draw the displacement map to and then feed that into the shader.

I'm reading through www.stencyl.com/help/view/shaders and it seems like Stencyl automatically handles the texture passing, which would be a problem. You need the ability to tell the shader where in memory the displacement map is. Hmm.

I wouldn't worry too much, though. Your game is gorgeous!
Click to expand...

I'm gonna bring this up with the stencyl gurus and see what I can learn about this. thanks :)
 
B

BriareosGAF

Member
Jobbs said:
I really like the concept behind that sort of displacement and it's something I definitely am interested in doing. the problem is the current version of Open FL (at least the current version Stencyl is on top of) does not allow you to apply shaders targeted only to one object, you can only put them on the full screen at once.
Click to expand...

You can't set a stencil write per draw and then apply stencil test during your full-screen warp pass? Hm, reading up on OpenFL that looks outside the architecture, it's a flash library built around sprite/bitmap animation/blits. You can set stencil on the GL context attributes but none of the blit API seems to support setting a ref value.
 
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