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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor

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Not open for further replies.
Raonak

Raonak

Banned
Mikado said:
cn_714c3560.gif


Is 'dat sum #screengifsaturday?

I updated the player's model and redid her running and dodging animations for Canto this week. Feels much better already.

This upcoming week is combat animation overhaul (maybe I'll finally get rid of the sailor-moon twirl attack my partner has been razzing me about for a year now hah).
Click to expand...

holy jesus.
 
S

Servbot24

Banned
Mikado said:
cn_714c3560.gif


Is 'dat sum #screengifsaturday?

I updated the player's model and redid her running and dodging animations for Canto this week. Feels much better already.

This upcoming week is combat animation overhaul (maybe I'll finally get rid of the sailor-moon twirl attack my partner has been razzing me about for a year now hah).
Click to expand...

holy cow man.

does the camera adjust to your enemy? if it does that's fine, but if the camera is like that for the whole game it'd be annoying.
 
W

wiggleb0t

Banned
Feep said:
It's almost ludicrous for me to give a critique on such an absurdly beautiful game, but if anything, I would tone done those leaf explosion footsteps. There aren't any leaves on the ground, and those things are rocketing upward. Maybe for the roll it's okay.
Click to expand...
I love the look but who am I? Not a game developer. Would like to see that effect + some when the boss initiates the dash/slide transition aswell as the dust/dirt kickup effect.
That game looks damn right gorgeous!
Don't like to see to much of games before playing them but wow, can't believe how awesome all the projects you indie peeps in here are creating. Don't want to threadcrap, so will just say keep up the fantastic work ladies and gents and yeah it's inspiring and something to look forward to playing/experiencing one day. :)
 
Mikado

Mikado

Member
Servbot24 said:
holy cow man.

does the camera adjust to your enemy? if it does that's fine, but if the camera is like that for the whole game it'd be annoying.
Click to expand...

Funny you should mention that :) Currently, the player has control over the camera (using the RStick or KB/M if they swing that way), but it doesn't do much dynamic adjustment of its own. We've noticed during playtests that the additional "pilot workload" of managing the camera in addition to running, attacking, using items
and not-getting-eaten-by-monsters
is a bit too much for new players, who spend a lot of time looking at their feet. Or the sky.

This gif is somewhat cropped from the original (I cut out some various HUD stuff at the top) which throws off the framing a bit. Also as the player, I aimed the camera for filming so it would be more dramatic than practical!

Making a pass on camera controls is definitely "on the list". We did a short internal jam in a different setting (indoors, sci-fi) and we got a pretty good camera logic out of that. Might be able to integrate it.

Thanks for all the great comments. Lots of things to add to our backlog!
 
H

Heart of Black

Member
Figured I'd throw up some late #screenshotsaturday stuff. (quote for full res)

punkngene.png
Click to expand...

Two enemies up to no good.

lisaguff.png
Click to expand...

Lisa, one of the three protagonists, about to take a stand.

lisaattack.png
Click to expand...

Lisa knocking back CT Punk with a swift mid kick.

Feels weird posting after such badass 3D animation running around, but room for all styles, right?

This is for my game Treachery in Beatdown City.. coming soon to Playstation Mobile, and in the future... to other things...
 
C

Chris_Bischoff

Member
I wrote a small review on the engine I am using for my game, STASIS. With Adventure Games back on the map, Im sure that someone out there could use this engine to make 'the next best thing!'

http://www.stasisgame.com/visionaire-engine-powering-stasis/

The engine is extremely artist friendly, with the ability to slide easily into a production line. All images are read from external files, so updating any graphics is as easy as copying files in Windows Explorer. Simply replace the old frames in the directory, and they are automatically updated in the game.

As a single developer, this small feature is an incredible time saver, allowing me to very quickly make changes to the game. Often, I will have Photoshop open on one monitor, and Visionaire open on the other – instantly updating backgrounds, or animations.
While PNG is generally the recommended format, Visionaire allows use of multiple file formats in the engine. Applies not only to images, but to Audio (ogg, wav, mp3) , as well as Video (mkv, wmv, avi).

Visionaire is also set up in such a way that you can easily customise all aspects of your game. While it is exclusively an ‘Adventure Game’ engine, there are still many different ways that you can set up the mechanics.
Adding in extra actions (such as the classic Push, Pull, Look, Lick (??) ) is very easy, allowing for interactions to be as complex, or simple, as you need. Its this ease of use that really allows for experimentation. If you need a specific action for a puzzle, you can add it in. If its not working, you can easily remove it without having a cascading effect of breaking the game.

Adding in objects is done through a very simple WYSIWYG interface, that belies the complex interlinking actions you can create. When creating STASIS, there haven’t been many instances where I have had to resort to code to get a complex interaction in place. But if more complex puzzles or interactions are required, you have full access to a LUA scripting system inside the engine.

But the best part of using Visionaire is that the creators have the advantage of working on an engine that is currently in use by professional developers, and it shows. The features that get updated are things that you WILL USE in production. Recently, the focus for the dev builds has been on core stability, and compression, with the end goal to be able to export to Android and IOS tablets and devices. With the same technology that VLC uses, you have access to a plethora of different formats and ways to display your game.
High resolution, parallax scrolling, a tight memory management system, and an upcoming feature list longer than my arm makes Visioniare the EASY choice for any upcoming Adventure Game developers! And the best part, you can try it out RIGHT NOW for FREE.

The free version of Visionaire is completely functional, with the exception of building your game as an EXE. But honestly, at 35,00 EUR its a steal!

http://www.visionaire-studio.net/shop/article/visionaire-studio-3-adventure-game-engine.html
 
B

Bamihap

Good at being the bigger man
1377418_652983588068803_939386855_n.jpg


Check out this screenshot from the intro of Castaway Paradise . The player is all covered in seaweed after they got shipwrecked on the island. Luckily mayor Viktoria finds the player and gives them a tent to stay in for a while.

Do you think we're using enough seaweed to cover the player in?
 
B

BurritoBushido

Member
Chris_Bischoff said:
Recently, the focus for the dev builds has been on core stability, and compression, with the end goal to be able to export to Android and IOS tablets and devices. With the same technology that VLC uses, you have access to a plethora of different formats and ways to display your game.

http://www.visionaire-studio.net/shop/article/visionaire-studio-3-adventure-game-engine.html
Click to expand...

Killer. Do they have any kind of ETA or is it like, "we're working on it, stay cool"
 
J

Jobbs

Banned
Heart of Black said:
Figured I'd throw up some late #screenshotsaturday stuff. (quote for full res)



Two enemies up to no good.



Lisa, one of the three protagonists, about to take a stand.



Lisa knocking back CT Punk with a swift mid kick.

Feels weird posting after such badass 3D animation running around, but room for all styles, right?
Click to expand...

Nice work, is this a double dragon type game? looks great.

You guys need to start saying what your agme is when you drop screen shot bombs. :)
 
E

Exuro

Member
Sorry if this is an extremely noobie question, but how do you make smooth movement? I've tinkered around with c++ and sdl trying stuff out but movement always looks like its skipping/jerky. I've read that storing velocity/position as floats/fixed point helps but I don't see how. I've tried looking around for the "why" of this but I haven't had a lot of luck.
 
O

OccamsBlender

Member
Mikado said:
cn_714c3560.gif


Is 'dat sum #screengifsaturday?

I updated the player's model and redid her running and dodging animations for Canto this week. Feels much better already.

This upcoming week is combat animation overhaul (maybe I'll finally get rid of the sailor-moon twirl attack my partner has been razzing me about for a year now hah).
Click to expand...

I hear a lot of footsteps. I believe it's the sound of Capcom running for their money after hearing a 5 dev team is kicking their arse at Monster Hunter. Well done!
 
H

Heart of Black

Member
Jobbs said:
Nice work, is this a double dragon type game? looks great.

You guys need to start saying what your agme is when you drop screen shot bombs. :)
Click to expand...

Thanks.

Oh yeah, game name is Treachery in Beatdown City

It's a side scrolling real time brawler with heavy turn based elements.

Use more FP to use stronger moves, can use up to 3 moves per go.

I explain quite a bit about the system here.

We're nearing completion of our first episode release for Playstation Mobile, and gearing up for a crazy few months following that.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
Exuro said:
Sorry if this is an extremely noobie question, but how do you make smooth movement? I've tinkered around with c++ and sdl trying stuff out but movement always looks like its skipping/jerky. I've read that storing velocity/position as floats/fixed point helps but I don't see how. I've tried looking around for the "why" of this but I haven't had a lot of luck.
Click to expand...
I had something like this in C++ and SDL maybe, or OpenGL. No matter what I tried, it could still happen. I think sometimes it depended on the computer too.

I've had something similar happen with TF2, where it claims to be rendering at 60 fps but feels like 15-30 fps. Sometimes when I would do smooth scrolling it would jump. A reboot would fix it.

It might have something to do with certain games messing with the system timer resolution since I think a racing game once caused my game to start acting strangely when I played it afterwards.

Double precision floating point might help but I'm guessing timing might be off.

You can try turning vsync off to see if that's part of it too.

Another thing might be if you are locking your images to pixel boundaries rather than rendering on floating point boundaries so that pixel blending is done. If something is locked to pixel boundaries, then it will jump from pixel to pixel.

I don't know much, but these are some things which might be involved! I long for perfect smoothness but I'm not sure it's always possible.
 
E

EDarkness

Member
My game is coming along well, and it's good to see others coming along as well. Anyone interested in what I'm working on can visit http://skullforge.omc-games.com. I wish we had some screens, but everything is too rough around the edges. Maybe in a couple of months. Right now I'm just doing the blog to give a bit of insight into the development process.
 
F

Five

Banned
Exuro said:
Sorry if this is an extremely noobie question, but how do you make smooth movement? I've tinkered around with c++ and sdl trying stuff out but movement always looks like its skipping/jerky. I've read that storing velocity/position as floats/fixed point helps but I don't see how. I've tried looking around for the "why" of this but I haven't had a lot of luck.
Click to expand...

Using floats, compared to ints, means you can have movement in non-integer amounts at a regular step. Say you wanted a character to move 2.5 px per step; with ints, you would need to alternate between 2 and 3 per step, which looks jerky to some.

I suspect that's not what you're seeing. You haven't provided a lot of details, though. What framerate are you rendering at? What's the hertz of your screen? If you have multiple objects moving at different rates, do they all hiccup at the same time or is it irregular? Are you single, double or triple buffering? Can you run other C++/SDL projects fine? Can you run other games fine?
 
C

Chris_Bischoff

Member
BurritoBushido said:
Killer. Do they have any kind of ETA or is it like, "we're working on it, stay cool"
Click to expand...

Its currently a 'were working on it' thing, because the guys are only part time developers. But with the current build I'm working on, the speed and size enhancements have been amazing, so it will be sooner rather than later!
 
B

Bollocks

Member
Can you add a noise function to the animation curve in Unity?
For some reasons I thought you could but I don't see it?
Well it's probably best anyway to animate in a 3D suite.

Also is the Mecanim stuff useful for first person view? (Have yet to watch the video)
 
R

razu

Member
Exuro said:
Sorry if this is an extremely noobie question, but how do you make smooth movement? I've tinkered around with c++ and sdl trying stuff out but movement always looks like its skipping/jerky. I've read that storing velocity/position as floats/fixed point helps but I don't see how. I've tried looking around for the "why" of this but I haven't had a lot of luck.
Click to expand...


If you have vsync turned on and don't drop frames, and move something the same amount each frame, it'll be smooth. Because the object will move the same amount every frame.

If you want to work without vsync then you have to multiply your movement by the time taken between the last frame and this. But that's a bit sketchy.

The most robust system is to generate two keyframes. One in the past, and one in the future. You then look at the current time, generate new keyframes until the the second is in the future, and then interpolate the keyframed values just before drawing the game. This decouples your update from the real clock, and you can update your game logic at a completely different rate to your rendering. The awesomeness is that you then run your update at a fixed timestep, so you know your simulation will work nicely, and if you make your simulation deterministic, you can replay your game by resetting the state of the game to how it was at the beginning and replaying the inputs, (which you can compress right down - good for ghost laps, etc...).

It's kinda complicated. To begin with, try vsyncing to 60Hz and make sure your game updates and renders in a frame!

Good luck!! :D
 
A

Ashodin

Member
So I'm putting the mobile version on backburner because I think the game will get more press and reach if I work on the PC version. This means inputting the stuff I did on the mobile version, but that won't be very hard. Just tedious

Anyway, I've been working on the layout some more thus far, and I made a breakthrough on using sprite fonts for Construct 2 (some nice chap made a program to make it easy!)

Here's the result thus far:



I'm planning to have an enemy turn UI, so you can see what's coming next and plan in advance, basically. Should be pretty awesome.
 
F

Feep

Banned
Ashodin said:
So I'm putting the mobile version on backburner because I think the game will get more press and reach if I work on the PC version. This means inputting the stuff I did on the mobile version, but that won't be very hard. Just tedious

Anyway, I've been working on the layout some more thus far, and I made a breakthrough on using sprite fonts for Construct 2 (some nice chap made a program to make it easy!)

Here's the result thus far:



I'm planning to have an enemy turn UI, so you can see what's coming next and plan in advance, basically. Should be pretty awesome.
Click to expand...
My standard UI nitpicking: the red button is flush with the slightly darkened area beneath it, the green button is not.

FIXFIXFIX
 
S

Servbot24

Banned
Yeah, they should be flush with the letter buttons, and should also have some clearing on all sides of them. Don't press things up against edges. Same goes for those skill buttons, they should be lined up with the letter buttons and not be pressed up on the edge.
 
A

Ashodin

Member
Feep said:
NO I LIKED THEM FLUSH
Click to expand...

Servbot24 said:
Yeah, they should be flush with the letter buttons, and should also have some clearing on all sides of them. Don't press things up against edges. Same goes for those skill buttons, they should be lined up with the letter buttons and not be pressed up on the edge.
Click to expand...

5bn6Szu.png


Should be right.

When you submit or clear a word (tied to Left Trigger and Right Trigger), the buttons will flash to know you've done so.

Otherwise you can just use a mouse.
 
F

Feep

Banned
Sweet! I didn't mind the skill buttons being offset from the game board, it showed they were "something else", but it's fine either way, I think.

If we're being hyper nitpicky, the green button appears to be one pixel lower than the red.

#youcanneverwinwithmeseriously
 
A

Ashodin

Member
Feep said:
Sweet! I didn't mind the skill buttons being offset from the game board, it showed they were "something else", but it's fine either way, I think.

If we're being hyper nitpicky, the green button appears to be one pixel lower than the red.

#youcanneverwinwithmeseriously
Click to expand...

Hey I think you're right
 
S

Servbot24

Banned
Feep said:
Sweet! I didn't mind the skill buttons being offset from the game board, it showed they were "something else", but it's fine either way, I think.

If we're being hyper nitpicky, the green button appears to be one pixel lower than the red.

#youcanneverwinwithmeseriously
Click to expand...

Also the white gradient on the right side is one pixel down.
 
C

charsace

Member
In unity Debug can really kill the framerate in certain situations. I am working on 2d aabb collisions and when I run:

Code: 
void OnTriggerStay(Collider other)
	{
		AABB2D tem = other.GetComponent<AABB2D>();
		bool isCol = aabb.IsIntersecting(tem);
		//Debug.Log(isCol);
		if(isCol)
		{
			Vector2 mtv = aabb.GetMTV(tem);
			
			if(mtv.x!=0f)
			{
				Debug.Log(gameObject.name);
				Debug.Log("MTV: "+mtv.x);
				float sign = Mathf.Sign(mtv.x);
				transform.Translate(new Vector3((Mathf.Abs(mtv.x)+ skin) * sign, 
					0f, 0f));
			}
			if(mtv.y!=0f)
			{
				Debug.Log(gameObject.name);
				Debug.Log("MTV: "+mtv.y);
				float sign = Mathf.Sign(mtv.y);
				transform.Translate(new Vector3(0f, 
					(Mathf.Abs(mtv.y)+ skin) * sign, 0f));
			}
			//Debug.Log(aabb.Position);
			
			//transform.Translate(new Vector3(mtv.x, mtv.y, 0f));
		}
	}

The calls drop my frame rate into the single digits. When I comment out the debug call my frame rate is 70+.
 
G

GulAtiCa

Member
I'm so close to being done with my game! At least with the coding. I'm currently doing some final game balance test and editing to make sure the game plays just right as well as difficulty isn't too hard and not easy. Going a little more testing to do before I move onto my next task. I still plan to test test test the difficulty over and over before release though.

After that is done, I plan to put the game back available online via the web. Should be easy for most part, as I abstracted the Wii U functionality away from the main code, allowing it easily to be ported. I also did it that way to make things more easy to handle even if it stays on Wii U (which it likely will) Only issue might come from browsers won't be as fast as the Wii U, so will have to force the FPS to be lower. That and screen sizes, I'll prob reduce the size with a zoom <100%

After that is done and online so anyone can try out, I'll begin work on doing graphics and finding music/sound effects for the game (finding it online and/or hiring someone to make me some music). At same time, this weekend I plan to officially send off a letter to ESRB to get my game company registered with them so I can get my game rated.

I really look forward to doing graphics, as then I can finally start to show off my game!
 
R

razu

Member
charsace said:
In unity Debug can really kill the framerate in certain situations. I am working on 2d aabb collisions and when I run:

Code: 
void OnTriggerStay(Collider other)
	{
		AABB2D tem = other.GetComponent<AABB2D>();
		bool isCol = aabb.IsIntersecting(tem);
		//Debug.Log(isCol);
		if(isCol)
		{
			Vector2 mtv = aabb.GetMTV(tem);
			
			if(mtv.x!=0f)
			{
				Debug.Log(gameObject.name);
				Debug.Log("MTV: "+mtv.x);
				float sign = Mathf.Sign(mtv.x);
				transform.Translate(new Vector3((Mathf.Abs(mtv.x)+ skin) * sign, 
					0f, 0f));
			}
			if(mtv.y!=0f)
			{
				Debug.Log(gameObject.name);
				Debug.Log("MTV: "+mtv.y);
				float sign = Mathf.Sign(mtv.y);
				transform.Translate(new Vector3(0f, 
					(Mathf.Abs(mtv.y)+ skin) * sign, 0f));
			}
			//Debug.Log(aabb.Position);
			
			//transform.Translate(new Vector3(mtv.x, mtv.y, 0f));
		}
	}

The calls drop my frame rate into the single digits. When I comment out the debug call my frame rate is 70+.
Click to expand...

Yep, console output can be slow. But that's not a unity thing especially.

What may also happen is that the delay may cause the game to do another iteration of the fixed update. It'll only do an 'update' when it thinks it's up to date. The update loop is explained here: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/ExecutionOrder.html. Which is like the system I described earlier, (and used in the earlier Codemasters games I worked on).
 
B

Bollocks

Member
Can a smart person please explain this gem:
Code: 
Vector3 dir = Quaternion.AngleAxis(90, cam.transform.right) * hit.normal;
I know this rotates the normal vector 90° around the right axis and it does what it should but I want to know what exactly is going on here.
Quaternion.AngleAxis(90, cam.transform.right) makes me go
214x700px-LL-1ecb6496_JackieChanMindblown.jpeg
 
V

V_Arnold

Member
Bollocks: I know that people love to shit on Wikipedia, but it is actually helpful this time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion

I had this in my view history when I was looking for camera angles as well.

If you do not understand any of this, then study the following:
- Vector algebra
- Euclidean planes
- Axioms of N, R, then the introduction of Complex numbers
- Anything related to Determinants+Matrix operations
- Linear mappings (up till eigenvalues and eigenvectors)

Then you are set to go, and will not have to worry about vectors anymore :D
 
W

Water

Member
Bollocks said:
Can a smart person please explain this gem:
Code: 
Vector3 dir = Quaternion.AngleAxis(90, cam.transform.right) * hit.normal;
I know this rotates the normal vector 90° around the right axis and it does what it should but I want to know what exactly is going on here.
Quaternion.AngleAxis(90, cam.transform.right) makes me go ...
Click to expand...
I find it's easy to make sense of this at a high level without understanding the specifics of the math. All you have to know of the theory is
1) Every rotation in a 3D space can be represented with a quaternion. (For various reasons, it turns out that quaternions are usually the best way of representing rotations.)
2) There is an operation that applies a quaternion to a vector and gives you a rotated vector.

Quaternion.AngleAxis(angle, axis) is a static helper function that gives you a new quaternion that represents an [angle] rotation around [axis].

In Unity, the operation that applies a quaternion to a vector and produces the rotated vector is denoted by *.
 
D

Diablohead

Member
With all of you guys trying out wii u dev stuff and these game delays for ps4 and xbox one, I am really tempted to buy a wii u this christmas now.
 
J

JulianImp

Member
By the way, has anyone used that DSi app, Petit Computer? It's one of the things I'm absolutely going to buy once I get my hands on a 3DS, and I'd like to know how versatile and/or useful it can be for hobbyist game creation on the go.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
JulianImp said:
By the way, has anyone used that DSi app, Petit Computer? It's one of the things I'm absolutely going to buy once I get my hands on a 3DS, and I'd like to know how versatile and/or useful it can be for hobbyist game creation on the go.
Click to expand...
It's really neat and I think some crazy things have been done with it like a Megaman clone. However, I think you probably have to be pretty dedicated and a pretty good programmer to get that sort of thing going. It's perhaps best for simpler playing around, but if you want to go further, go for it!
 
V

Vard

Member
So I've been working on a sidescroller that is using the Impact Engine. I remember several pages back someone was also interested in it so let me know if you have any questions.

So far it's been pretty great - the game is performing better than we expected it to and the engine is more flexible/robust than we first thought.
 
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