• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

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

Status
Not open for further replies.
C

cbox

Member
mabec said:
Actually outstanding backgrounds. Iam glad some devs on Steam understand the power of beauty.
Click to expand...

Why thank you!

mStudios said:
Annnnd here she is fighting:

Let me explain you how the battle system works:
The game is a 50% text/story
25% Puzzles
25% Battle

The battles occurs at some key points in the story line. However, this is not just a regular RPG battle, since you don't gain XP, Magic, or LVL up. Some puzzles are optional, however, some of these puzzles when completed grants you special weapon that are needed to kill your enemies. You can also find different weapons investigating the different scenes.

So, its a hard situation for the player, because if you kill an enemy in the alternate world, he/she will also die in the regular world. So you might want to think twice if you really wanna fight them. SO, before you fight make sure to investigate these people at 100%.

There would be an specific time of events that will grant you the "real" ending.

Regular Alice is very bad with weapons, but good a chemistry (that's her major at the university).
Alternate(Cyberpunk) Alice is good with weapons.

Hopefully, before the end of June I can show you a full scene, because all we've got now are mostly placeholders and stuff like that.
Click to expand...

This sounds really cool,
 
M

MrNyarlathotep

Banned
SpacePirate Ridley said:
Oh my, if this would work on unity, it would be the perfect thing for us.
Click to expand...

AFAICS from the youtube video, it just assigns sprites as textures to quads then lets you place them with snapping turned on to make them auto align.

You could probably get a similar setup going within unity with a custom inspector and editor scripts.
Would probably be nowhere near as nice, but should be doable.
 
M

missile

Member
mStudios said:
... Hopefully ...
Click to expand...
The battle system and that alternating stuff sounds really interesting.


gooey said:
...
@missile:
All that hot tech you're working on would be so perfect for an old school SHMUP.
Please work on a SHMUP...
I'll shred some cheesy guitar riffs for free!
Click to expand...
Cool, bro! The game, Superstall, I'm working on will be based on old school
tech where the action will also manipulate the tech. Yet I don't know how much
SHUMP will be in there. If you have some cool riffs, you are welcome! :+
 
ZehDon

ZehDon

Member
Guiberu said:
8bbnsew.gif
Click to expand...
That's looking very, very cool - much more impactful than the pixel art style.

I downloaded the alpha and took it for a spin, and you've done a really good job. It's an interesting little wave based shooter, though I wasn't very good at it. I'm interested to play it with the new art style though! Also: loved being able to go from one side of the screen to the other.

A quick couple of suggestions: on my 360 controller, the player character didn't seem to have a movement speed cap - so I was zipping all over the map, which made it a bit difficult to control. It also felt like it took too long to bring down a bad guy, maybe up the damage a bit? My 2 cents worth.

Look forward to the next iteration!
 
Yoshi

Yoshi

Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
Is Alice supposed to be a "weak fighter" also wrt in-fighting? Because from that position it looks like she will deal out one really weak punch. Arm position and wrist angle seem to be in a position one would not want to use when initiating a punch.
 
D

Dewfreak83

Neo Member
Paz said:
I've been slaving away on a new trailer for the past few weeks and it's finally finished! Thank god YouTube supports 60fps now because it feels so much more like the actual game.
Click to expand...

Wow this looks so nice. How big is your team? And how long did you spend on the trailer?
 
M

mStudios

Member
SpacePirate Ridley said:
.
Click to expand...
You're right. I wanted the player to have a good look at the weapon, since I haven't draw it yet I don't know how its going to look.

ConvenientBox said:
.
Click to expand...

missile said:
.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

Yoshi said:
Is Alice supposed to be a "weak fighter" also wrt in-fighting? Because from that position it looks like she will deal out one really weak punch. Arm position and wrist angle seem to be in a position one would not want to use when initiating a punch.
Click to expand...
What does wrt means?

Regular Alice is weaker, she uses a Long Knife as her main weapon, and also can use chemistry for her attacks (Acid, Bombs, etc)(That what she studies). Alternate Alice uses Fire-arms(so its stronger) and Techs. Her best friend, Miranda, Uses a staff-like weapon, because she used to be a martial art artist.

I want each character to have a weapon related to their "in real life" skills.
 
G

GulAtiCa

Member
Ah. One step closer to getting my Tower Defense game, ZaciSa: Defense of the Crayon Dimension! out in Europe. Already submitted it to Nintendo of Europe. Now my fun job is to do all the asset submitting. Boy did they decide to make it complicated & complex compared to how NOA handles assets..

For example, here is the filename format required: "XXX_X_XXXX_ZaciSaDefenseOfTheCrayonDimension_MiiverseGeneralCommunityBanner3DS_ALL.jpg". Hope they like the long names. lol

The NA patch I've been trying to submit for 6 months finally looks like its way to approval. Can't wait to finally get that out there. Improves my game so much. Spent so much time making sure to not only add new stuff, like Online Leaderboards, new mode, new maps, new etc, but improve the game heavily. Game goes from 20ish FPS to stable 60FPS.

I learned the hard way that I should have split the patch into smaller componenets. Since all the new stuff, specifically Online Leaderboards & Miiverse posting really gave me trouble. But worth it in the end.

Along with working on a new game, which working for a possible Fall release, going to start working on DLC for my 1st game. Got ideas for big maps to pull off.
 
P

Paz

Member
Candescence said:
Holy crap, looks amazing. I'm really impressed! Soooo jealous of what you've achieved, I love it.

Also, I knew you were Australian as well (and in a state next door from me, too), but I didn't realize what studio you were with - I knew the 'Witch Beam' logo looked familiar, but it didn't take me long to realise that it's the same studio joined by the creator of Dragon Tails (RIP, incidentally, to that wonderful webcomic). That's pretty awesome. Or I could be rather mistaken, but oh well.
Click to expand...

Haha you are correct - Tim Dawson is our one man animator, artist, programmer, director, EVERYTHING :) He's an incredibly talented individual and was pretty passionate about Witch Beam so we just went with that when the three of us formed up - Though he's the only connection to past works under that name.

P.S I've played the Dragon Tails adventure game prototype he made and would love to revisit that one day, but it can be hard to work on something so dear to one person and give up control to newcomers so I'm not sure if that'll happen any time soon.

Dewfreak83 said:
Wow this looks so nice. How big is your team? And how long did you spend on the trailer?
Click to expand...

We're a team of three and everything in the game comes from us including art/programming/audio/etc, though 2 of the 26 stages in the game had their art done by a friend of ours when we were really stretched thin at one point in development (Credit where it's due!).

Once we decided on a firm direction for the trailer I think it was around 1.5 weeks of work, mostly my time in picking the shots and then capturing them/prototyping things to show to Jeff and Tim, then Tim would work on the non-gameplay segments like the title screens and Jeff got to work on making slight edits to the Venom boss theme used as the main musical piece in the trailer. My early versions were horrendous hacks of that track to make the timing work and he made it sing :)

It's kind of a big time investment really but you also never know where a trailer is going to end up!

All edited in Blender, output merged through Virtual Dub, and then encoded down using Handbrake. Tim did use 3DS MAX for the title screens and I think Jeff used Reaper for the audio (Which is cheap or free depending on your project budget) but I've been really impressed with the quality of open tools out there for making videos these days.
 
F

friken

Member
missile said:
I came to realize (from experience) that artists do favor the effect more than
technically drilled people do. Anyone? A friend of mine is a professional
photographer and he as well likes the effect because of what you said. But in
the end, I think, it really boils down to what Absinthe hinted at, that many
of the effects are simply abused beyond believe.
Click to expand...

I agree fx are highly abused in games. I admit to being guilty. Sometimes it is easier to shader-up than make the original art look good enough to stand on it's own.
 
P

Paz

Member
ConvenientBox said:
I must commend you on using Blender to edit video, I can't even imagine how that works!
Click to expand...

It has some performance issues with some formats where they don't have hardware accelerated decoding (like mp4's which premier has an expensive solution for) but overall it's a pretty great NLE, much better than the other free solutions I tried.
 
P

Pixel Samurai

Member
Hi! Full disclosure: I'm helping out the devs of this game :)
w8AWy3t.jpg

Home Improvisation: It's a game about assembling modular furniture without instructions. It's super whacky and fun and launched on Steam Early Access today!

It's 2-8 players co-op and has a bunch of customization options like colorizing your creations. Check it out!
iPXFfkf.gif
ma4Nsd6.gif
kOIXDzV.gif

http://store.steampowered.com/app/357670/
 
J

Jacksinthe

Banned
Hey guys n gals, out of my own curiosity, which video game features the largest cast of cameos from other developers?

I'm just curious at the number.
 
J

JulianImp

Member
liliththepale said:
Bit Trip Runner 2 and Super Meat Boy have a bunch of cameos in them too.
Click to expand...

I love that SMB has Ogmo as a playable character, since it happens to be from a game series (Jumper) that was Meat Boy a decade before Meat Boy even existed (and created by Matt Thorson of Towerfall fame).
 
L

liliththepale

Banned
JulianImp said:
I love that SMB has Ogmo as a playable character, since it happens to be from a game series (Jumper) that was Meat Boy a decade before Meat Boy even existed (and created by Matt Thorson of Towerfall fame).
Click to expand...

Maybe it's just been forever, but I don't remember the Jumper games having wall riding. Otherwise, yeah, really similar concept.
 
J

JulianImp

Member
liliththepale said:
Maybe it's just been forever, but I don't remember the Jumper games having wall riding. Otherwise, yeah, really similar concept.
Click to expand...

Jumper 1 had just basic jumping, but Jumper 2 added skid jumps and wall jumps. I remember using the level editor to death, and participating in the Jumper Community Forum and the level-creation contests they often held. I particularily remember one about automated levels that was quite fun to create.
 
L

liliththepale

Banned
JulianImp said:
Jumper 1 had just basic jumping, but Jumper 2 added skid jumps and wall jumps. I remember using the level editor to death, and participating in the Jumper Community Forum and the level-creation contests they often held. I particularily remember one about automated levels that was quite fun to create.
Click to expand...

Gotcha. Maybe that's the only one I played, although I knew there were several.
 
J

JulianImp

Member
liliththepale said:
Gotcha. Maybe that's the only one I played, although I knew there were several.
Click to expand...

In case this jogs your memory, Jumper 1 had lots of MIDI versions of famous games' music in its editor (ie: Kefka's theme or the Mute City BGM), and wacky Ogmo skins (including a super banana from outer space).

Jumper 2 was a lot better than 1 in nearly everything (more moves, more levels, more game elements), but then I felt like Jumper 3 was way worse than the others with all the different Ogmo forms (one with gliding, one that slid as if on ice all the time, one with a double jump that went straight upwards but had invincibility, etcetera).

I think Jumper was the very first game I played that I knew was made by an indie developer, and that was when I first learned about GameMaker and got into it.
 
L

liliththepale

Banned
JulianImp said:
In case this jogs your memory, Jumper 1 had lots of MIDI versions of famous games' music in its editor (ie: Kefka's theme or the Mute City BGM), and wacky Ogmo skins (including a super banana from outer space).

Jumper 2 was a lot better than 1 in nearly everything (more moves, more levels, more game elements), but then I felt like Jumper 3 was way worse than the others with all the different Ogmo forms (one with gliding, one that slid as if on ice all the time, one with a double jump that went straight upwards but had invincibility, etcetera).

I think Jumper was the very first game I played that I knew was made by an indie developer, and that was when I first learned about GameMaker and got into it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I remember it headlining on the YoYoGames sandbox for quite a while. I was in awe at the time of the apparent prowess he and similar devs had. Whereas now I take being able to design a simple platformer for granted :p
 
B

BomberMouse

Member
JulianImp said:
I love that SMB has Ogmo as a playable character, since it happens to be from a game series (Jumper) that was Meat Boy a decade before Meat Boy even existed (and created by Matt Thorson of Towerfall fame).
Click to expand...

I had no idea he created all of those games. Great to see so many indie devs from game maker make it big afterwards.
 
P

Paz

Member
anteevy said:
I've created a trailer for the upcoming Greenlight campaign of ROLL PLAYING GAME. It's not final yet - feedback is appreciated! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDKlUcBqOyg

01m.jpg
Click to expand...

Really good, loved the outro scene composition and the call to action in terms of what you want people who watch it to do.

I thought the first 10 seconds or so were the weakest part of the trailer because I didn't know what to focus on, I get the 'calm before the storm' feeling you're going for but it just left me feeling a bit lost and lasted longer than I would have thought a segment like that would.

Oh and this is a personal thing but the whole prefacing footage with warnings stuff puts me off, but I think I'm in the minority on that because loads of successful trailers do it (I like stuff to just stand on its own really).
 
J

JulianImp

Member
BomberMouse said:
I had no idea he created all of those games. Great to see so many indie devs from game maker make it big afterwards.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it was really cool when I heard he was actually a well-known indie dev several years later. To think he used to go by the nickname YoMamasMama (or was it "Momma"?)...

He also made other platformers such as Cashseize, FLaIL (with gravity flipping), a fairly fun metroidvania called An Untitled Story and I think Broken Cave Robot way later as well (a metroidvania-ish platformer with a time limit where you had a persistent map you could draw). I used to follow him a lot as he was the very first time I had come across some guy who was actually making fairly good games all by himself. He also used GameMaker for quite a long while, so it was interesting to see his games and thinking "so I can do that with it!".

Edit: Here's his web page, in case anyone wants to look at his past works or download them (most of them are actually free!): http://www.mattmakesgames.com/

So, how about we talk a bit about the first indie game or dev we ever came across, or what things made us finally get into making games? I think it'd be cool topic to discuss, at the very least.
 
C

Candescence

Member
Paz said:
Haha you are correct - Tim Dawson is our one man animator, artist, programmer, director, EVERYTHING :) He's an incredibly talented individual and was pretty passionate about Witch Beam so we just went with that when the three of us formed up - Though he's the only connection to past works under that name.

P.S I've played the Dragon Tails adventure game prototype he made and would love to revisit that one day, but it can be hard to work on something so dear to one person and give up control to newcomers so I'm not sure if that'll happen any time soon.
Click to expand...

Geez, the guy really is multi-talented, it's crazy. Still, the workload must be bloody intense if he's doing so much.
 
A

Adam_Roman

Member
Would I be able to pick up some basic aspects of coding from the Unity 5 tutorials on their site, or should I use some other resource before trying to jump into those? I'm more well-versed in animation and modeling, but I want to learn a bit of code to be more well-rounded.
 
S

SpacePirate Ridley

Member
gooey said:
I'm sure it exports to a .fbx or something. Don't see why you wouldn't be able to use it, unless you actually need to build inside of Unity.

@missile:
All that hot tech you're working on would be so perfect for an old school SHMUP.
Please work on a SHMUP...
I'll shred some cheesy guitar riffs for free!
Click to expand...

mmm, interesting. Was trying to look to what is saves but doesnt have any info, or maybe im overlooking something.
And you cant save in the trial version.

We have a randomizer factor, so maybe is not that good for our project, but is really cool nontheless.

mStudios said:
You're right. I wanted the player to have a good look at the weapon, since I haven't draw it yet I don't know how its going to look.
Click to expand...

Oh its an object hit? Then i think its good like it is right now, thought it was a punch.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Solo developer behind The Falconeer and Bulwark explains why Game Pass is so great for indies:
2
54
2K
chakadave replied
NEW Xbox Indie Game Fest Demo Event: 35 new demos
11
1K
Punished Miku replied
Indie GAF: Speed Rivals anime racing game
Game Dev Indie
0
483
BioFan replied
Capcom is holding a game development competition for Japanese students using its RE Engine
Game Dev
11
814
Dacvak replied
Amazon is working on an upcoming UE5 game with veterans from EverQuest, PlanetSide, H1Z1, and Free Realms
Rumor
2
332
Little Mac replied
Top Bottom