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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor

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H

Hinomura

Member
My #screenshotsaturday contribution (Space Crawler):

iwqIxap0v5d9E.png
Click to expand...
 
C

chubigans

y'all should be ashamed
Thanks everyone for the support, really appreciate it!

I'll be updating the OP later today with Construct and Game Maker on Steam, but if anyone is interested doing a PSMobile section, that would be awesome since it's live now. I was going to write one but I don't have any hands on experience, and I'd rather it be from people who know the program well than someone (me) skimming off info from sources.
 
M

missile

Member
Nihilo_3dengine.gif


After getting rid of all the adverse forces in life hindering one in
developing video games, I'm now entirely on my own journey and have started
programming a prototype of a concept of a video game, codename: Ex Nihilo.
Ex Nihilo puts the player into a fast-paced, surreal, adrenaline amplifying,
and unforgivable environment that will put the players senses to the test.

The prototype will be build on some very small systems first under very
limited system resources to focus only on the core gameplay and to program
different backends to scatter the prototype around showing that its gameplay
is system independent. After that, the prototype will grow to more advanced
systems to use their computational abilities to compute complex shapes,
structures, and sounds forming the essence of the game.

Contrary to the current consensus of how to approach developing video games,
or a prototype for that matter, where one starts on a huge platform using many
different tools, I have decided to strip it all off to an absolute minimum.

The animation above shows the first version of a 3d engine, running on the
dcpu-16 (v1.7), that implements a minimum of graphics algorithms to be able to
render a three-dimensional fly-through environment with the following
characteristics:
- homogeneous local vertex/edge object definition
- homogeneous matrix transformation
- 2.14 bit rotation, 8.8 bit translation
- 8.8 bit perspective projection
- bitmap font renderer
- Bresenham line rasterizer
- integer iterative Cohen-Sutherland 2d line clipping
- 8.8 bit Cohen-Sutherland 3d line clipping

Display characteristics:
- video adapter: NYA ELEKTRISKA, LEM1802, id: 0x7349f615, ver: 0x1802
The LEM1802 is a 128x96 pixel color display adapter made up of 32x12 16 bit
addressable cells. Each cell is a portion of video memory 4x8 pixels in size
(2x 16bit) containing one monochrome character out of 128. As such one is left
with a resolution of 32x12 "pixels" (cells) for doing graphics, i.e. low-res.
- video mode: custom built hi-res video mode
Due to special non-linear memory mapping and by tinkering around with the
LEM1802's font map, I was able to built a hi-res video mode that makes it
possible to render arbitrary many pixels at a portion of the native
resolution.
- video resolution: 64x64, 1bpp, 1 color out of 16
- double buffering

Language: assembler

Well, I would be delighted to go on this journey with some more people who
follow a deep interest in developing games. I'm looking for one or two eager
coders that follow an interest in building games and technology from the
ground up on different systems pushing them to the limits. If your are
interested in assembler, c/c++, sound, graphics, math, and various systems
from a low-level and performance oriented perspective, and if you want to pull
all these together into breath-taking games, we may partner. Let me give an
example about what I'm looking for further down the road; say we want to
generate surface patches controlled by tangents which are themselves
controlled by sound, and with the patches textured for example with a 2d flow
based on the patches' curvature - all computed and rendered in realtime. Stuff
like that.
 
N

neoemonk

Member
KodeAndGame said:
There are tools in the OP that require no programming to render. Something like construct technically requires no programming (it still helps to have a programmers brain). Try some of those out
Click to expand...

Yeah, I read it. I can code, I just have no graphics programming experience.
 
G

Genji

Member
#screenshotsaturday

nK1gr.png
Click to expand...

Been working on a top down 2d shooter that controls similar to the old internet game SubSpace. Started off in XNA but got cold feet during the MS Build conference that introduced Windows 8 with the uncertain future of XNA and the lack of portability (which monogame actually seems to resolve).

Switched over to Marmalade, which is a C++ SDK using OpenGL that allows you to deploy to various platforms. Got pretty far in it, with polygonal collision detection, a particle engine etc. but the bugs that were released and not fixed with each subsequent update and the lack of community turned me off. SDK has a ton of potential and some great games have been made with it. Hopefully it improves in the future.

Currently I'm using Unity with the 2D Toolkit plugin. Coming from a pure programming background, definitely takes a while to get used to Unity. 2D is a bit funky on it also, so if you're going to do 2D I'd recommend getting one of the well supported plugins such as 2D Toolkit, SpriteManager2 or Ex2D.

In this screenshot I've got randomized tile based levels (way more difficult to make them look organic than I expected) with some parallax scrolling. Lately have concentrated on getting better enemy AI and pathfinding in.

All of the graphics were done using plain old Photoshop.
 
A

Anuxinamoon

Shaper Divine
I've been slowly getting my pixel art skills back by tweaking the standard pixel art of RPG maker vx ace. I hope to convert the whole set. (Their stuff is way too noisy for my tastes)

Screen shot Saturday!
ssss.JPG


Finally finished my custom rocky hill tile. Wooo!
sss.JPG
 
K

KodeAndGame

Member
Anuxinamoon said:
I've been slowly getting my pixel art skills back by tweaking the standard pixel art of RPG maker vx ace. I hope to convert the whole set. (Their stuff is way too noisy for my tastes)

Screen shot Saturday!
ssss.JPG


Finally finished my custom rocky hill tile. Wooo!
sss.JPG
Click to expand...

Gorgeous!
 
G

Genji

Member
chubigans said:
Yup, GM 8.1 to be exact. I'm going to now port it to Studio and build the Mac version by the end of the year.
Click to expand...

Congrats, very polished and quirky! Looks like it'd be a perfect game to play on a tablet. Any plans on pushing it out onto iOS or Android after you port it to Studio?
 
C

chubigans

y'all should be ashamed
Genji said:
Congrats, very polished and quirky! Looks like it'd be a perfect game to play on a tablet. Any plans on pushing it out onto iOS or Android after you port it to Studio?
Click to expand...

Thanks! I definitely plan to bring it to iOS. I just started porting it yesterday and it doesn't look like it'll take me more than a month (gotta redesign all the menus).
 
T

Technobabel

Member
Posted this on screenshot saturday, might as well post it here too. Working on the final boss fight for Dungeon Hearts:

TheDarkOne01.png


Looks much better in motion with all the particle effects flowing through the boss.

Also, some badass artwork:

Dungeon-Hearts-Splash.png
 
W

Wolf Dawgz

Member
Technobabel said:
Posted this on screenshot saturday, might as well post it here too. Working on the final boss fight for Dungeon Hearts:

TheDarkOne01.png


Looks much better in motion with all the particle effects flowing through the boss.

Also, some badass artwork:

Dungeon-Hearts-Splash.png
Click to expand...

I want this game. What platform(s) are you putting it on?
 
P

PetrCobra

Member
I'm slowly learning how to put a game together and I picked Unity as my playground (a guy I know who is a pro recommended it to me, even for 2D games which is what I want to focus on for now).

I'm using Orthello to do some sprite work for me, but I'd like to have pixel-perfect collisions which is not quite possible with Unity colliders.

I was wondering if I could just use an empty polygon or something like that, you know, draw it rougly around the shape of my sprite and make it collide with other objects. Possibly even update the polygon for every frame of animation to match the changes. No idea if that could work at all. Maybe someone from here could help answer that? I tried to search the web but there are no clear pointers, other than switching to another tool. I don't want to end my experiments with Unity prematurely though, I'm starting to kinda like it...
 
M

Margalis

Banned
Pixel-perfect collision is usually not a good idea. Even if you can do it (which can be hard) you often don't want to do it as it can make things less understandable than boxes and also ties the gameplay and balance directly to the art.
 
P

PetrCobra

Member
Margalis said:
Pixel-perfect collision is usually not a good idea. Even if you can do it (which can be hard) you often don't want to do it as it can make things less understandable than boxes and also ties the gameplay and balance directly to the art.
Click to expand...

I'm sure it does, but pixel-perfect collisions look good, which often can't be said about colliding boxes roughly representing non-primitive sprites.

Actually, I'm sure that solving it by box colliders can work well if I only move the sprites in four directions and if I adjust the art accordingly but for slightly more complicated conditions I'd like to have it more precise, and the more I look into it the more it looks like too much work for too little in return (at least in Unity) :)

I still have hope though. For example, 2D Toolkit claims to have the features that I need but it's not free and I don't feel that buying random tools in this early stage of learning is a wise idea.
 
M

Margalis

Banned
If you want to do pixel-perfect collision in Unity I assume you can query the texture that represents your sprite, do some math, ignore stuff that is alpha'd out, etc. 2D texture does support random pixel access. Of course you have to be careful of stuff like the sampling and mip level, adjusting for screen space, etc.

It's probably not that hard. You can do a rough bounds check to see if the polys themselves overlap, maybe do another bounds check based on the the furthest extents of non-alpha pixels, then go from there.

Edit: The performance may be tricky to get right but even that probably isn't too bad, you can restrict your check to the shared area between the two polys. Probably ok unless you have a lot of large ploys that have a lot of alpha int the sprites and don't actually intersect on a pixel level.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
I don't even have anything to show for it, but I finally finished my refactoring of GUI region/widget/style stuff over the weekend, including crazy header file chaining issues which I have cleaned up, and can hopefully implement default style support in the next couple of days. At that point I will try to update my to-do list, and I will hopefully be nearly ready to implement some sort of basic GUI editor.

I'm still occasionally having the weird framerate problem. I'm not sure if it's SFML-related, but my window will be locked at 24 or 30 fps instead of 60 fps with vsync enabled. I know it's not a performance issue, since if I disable vsync it shoots up to 800-1000 fps or more. What's even weirder is that it will keep happening if I close and restart the program...but if I slightly resize the window once or twice, it will go up to 60 fps, and repeated launches of the program will be fine after that. :(
 
M

MikeHaggar

Member
i posted this a few pages back, but didn't get any feedback. just thought i'd try again:

has anyone gone to pax east to demo their game? we're considering going this coming spring and i have questions about renting equipment (lcd displays, tables), getting banners or signs made for the booth, t-shirt printing etc... we'd be flying in from outside of the states so having companies in boston provide those services to us would be ideal.

also, i noticed someone mentioned #screenshotsaturday. was that intended to be for this thread or is it a twitter thing? i'd definitely take part in it here in this thread although i'm limited in what i can share since the game hasn't been officially announced yet.
 
C

Crazymoogle

Member
MikeHaggar said:
also, i noticed someone mentioned #screenshotsaturday. was that intended to be for this thread or is it a twitter thing? i'd definitely take part in it here in this thread although i'm limited in what i can share since the game hasn't been officially announced yet.
Click to expand...

It's a twitter thing, has been going on for quite awhile. Just post images on twitter with that hashtag and you're golden.
 
G

Genji

Member
PetrCobra said:
I'm sure it does, but pixel-perfect collisions look good, which often can't be said about colliding boxes roughly representing non-primitive sprites.

Actually, I'm sure that solving it by box colliders can work well if I only move the sprites in four directions and if I adjust the art accordingly but for slightly more complicated conditions I'd like to have it more precise, and the more I look into it the more it looks like too much work for too little in return (at least in Unity) :)

I still have hope though. For example, 2D Toolkit claims to have the features that I need but it's not free and I don't feel that buying random tools in this early stage of learning is a wise idea.
Click to expand...

2D Toolkit can definitely do what you need for a single sprite. While you can either use the standard box or sphere colliders with a sprite, it also allows you to create a custom polygon collider. It's built into the tool, which makes it very easy to setup.

Check out the documentation on it here.

However, I don't think you can do this currently for animated sprites. I seem to recall that it's something that's planned for a future update, but not positive on that.

You can also do all this without 2D Toolkit of course, but it is a nice tool and the author is very prompt in replying on the support forum.
 
I

Ihateyouchris

Member
MikeHaggar said:
i posted this a few pages back, but didn't get any feedback. just thought i'd try again:

has anyone gone to pax east to demo their game? we're considering going this coming spring and i have questions about renting equipment (lcd displays, tables), getting banners or signs made for the booth, t-shirt printing etc... we'd be flying in from outside of the states so having companies in boston provide those services to us would be ideal.

also, i noticed someone mentioned #screenshotsaturday. was that intended to be for this thread or is it a twitter thing? i'd definitely take part in it here in this thread although i'm limited in what i can share since the game hasn't been officially announced yet.
Click to expand...

I haven't ever gone, but here's an article that might be useful:
http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/132809/indie_exhibitor_lessons_learned_.php
 
D

desverger

Member
Lots of good stuff going on in this thread :)

I've been trying to find out the differences between RPG Maker XP and VX Ace, but haven't really found out definite answers. Does anyone know if XP poses any limitations to your game, seeing as it's a lot cheaper than VX Ace?

On the surface it seems like they are really similar, but I guess you could go around the differences with scripting as well?
 
T

Technobabel

Member
Ranger X said:
Damn, I would play that if it'd run on my Ipod4. :(
Click to expand...

The game currently requires a lot of screen space to play, it would require a significant redesign to fit on a smaller screen. I have some ideas on how to make it work, I'm just waiting to see how it performs on iPad/Mac/PC first. If it does well then I'll roll it out to as many devices if I can. If not, then I'd rather spend my time working on the next game.
 
C

Crazymoogle

Member
desverger said:
I've been trying to find out the differences between RPG Maker XP and VX Ace, but haven't really found out definite answers. Does anyone know if XP poses any limitations to your game, seeing as it's a lot cheaper than VX Ace?
Click to expand...

(Merging what I used to know about VX with how it works today...)

Basically, VX was much more newbie friendly but had some severe limitations (such as tilesets) that XP did not. VX Ace solves most of those problems.

Based on some googling these issues come up:

XP:
-Spotty compatibility for 64-bit Windows
-Some sprite framedraw issues

VX Ace
-Max Resolution is technically a bit worse than XP
+Mostly seeing folks saying to run this and forget about the others
 
bumpkin

bumpkin

Member
neoemonk said:
When the Playstation Mobile stuff came out I downloaded it and read the tutorials, but when it came time to actually try my own hand at something I honestly had no idea where to begin.

A guy at work told me to look into XNA, as there are a lot more tutorials and things out there. I really know nothing about graphics programming at all, so I quickly went from "I want to make a game!" to "how do i draw something on screen?" It took the wind out of my sails a little. I'm really impressed at how many people are working on games, as graphical programming seems very impenetrable and intimidating.
Click to expand...
Well, Noogy went from never having programmed before to developing his XBLA game, Dust: An Elysian Tale. Granted, he gave a lot of credit to XNA's frameworks for a lot of the basic building blocks, but he also did a lot of his own graphics programming and a bunch of logic too, I'd wager. It really just depends on how much time you're willing to invest; it's not something that you can learn overnight or even in a few days.

Speaking of which, I made some progress with my collision detection troubles this weekend. I don't have time to detail my changes this very minute -- heading out shortly -- but I'll definitely follow up later and share.
 
P

Platy

Member
Very interesting game jam coming next month :

http://fuckthisjam.com/

Fuck This Jam is a jam centered around the theme of making a game in a genre you hate.

Through utter ignorance for conventions and hate for the established rules of a genre, beautiful things will happen.
Click to expand...

So indie game gaf ... wich is the genre you hate most ?
 
W

Warm Machine

Member
Our office got broken into and around $1500 worth of stuff was stolen. Mostly Xbox consoles, headphones, and other stuff that was lying around.

PCs, TVs and drives still here thankfully.
 
D

Dead Prince

Banned
Warm Machine said:
Our office got broken into and around $1500 worth of stuff was stolen. Mostly Xbox consoles, headphones, and other stuff that was lying around.

PCs, TVs and drives still here thankfully.
Click to expand...

lol Xboxes > PC

sorry to hear. hope you had the serial number written to contact microsoft and track it down.
 
P

Platy

Member
Nemo said:
Ahahaha, how many FPS will come from this I wonder
Click to expand...

From the people commenting on twitter, I expect more sports games than FPSs ....

Still would be hilarious to see a FPS game where you are at your home and then wen you walk in a lego brick, your vision becomes insanely red and shaky from a while xD
 
S

Sadsic

Member
Hello, I am Sadsic, I make electronic music (http://sadsic.bandcamp.com/), and am interested in making music for video games; I just composed a bunch of music for a video game made by some GAFfers and really enjoyed it and wouldn't mind composing for other small projects like I'm seeing. Is anyone in need of audio here?
 
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