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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
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Would be cool having a simple framework which get the job done. Ok, lets do it
with XAudio2 first. Is there a static XAudio2 library I can link against? In
the mean time I will read me into the concept of WASAPI and XAudio2. :+
The versioning for XAudio2 is a bit weird. If you're on a newer version of Visual Studio / the Windows Developer Kit you should have the headers and libraries since it was included with Windows starting with Vista SP1. Otherwise you may need to install the last (June 2010) DirectX SDK.
Here's a sample implementation https://gist.github.com/Ludophonic/7597906 so we have something to refer to.
It's sleep time now for me. I'll check back in ~8 hours.
Here's a sample implementation https://gist.github.com/Ludophonic/7597906 so we have something to refer to.
It's sleep time now for me. I'll check back in ~8 hours.
Comfort Jones
Banned
So I've been wanting to make a game for a while, just got the free version of the unity engine. Any tips for someone getting started? (Besides look at the tutorials on the site of course)
Am going to install and check it all out. Thx!
Just try to do simple things. Make a cube jump by pressing space... that kind of level of thing.. Then make other cubes disappear if you jump your cube into them... Anything! Bit by bit you'll just acquire knowledge.
Just Do It
Sooo... after getting mad at some gamemaker functions, just to discover they're not in the free version, I was considering buying Gamemaker Standard sooner than expected...
If I stand correctly, if I directly buy it from yoyo web I have no discount (I think it'll be discounted in Steam during autumn sales), but it's updated more quickly and I can run several instances at once (very useful imo, checking "what I did there and what I should do here" from several projects). Furthermore yoyo web gives you a Steam key (+1!).
Sooo Yoyo is the way to go?
Since my goal is making PC games, I'm aiming at standard version. Right choice?
Arigato gozaimasu! ^__^
If I stand correctly, if I directly buy it from yoyo web I have no discount (I think it'll be discounted in Steam during autumn sales), but it's updated more quickly and I can run several instances at once (very useful imo, checking "what I did there and what I should do here" from several projects). Furthermore yoyo web gives you a Steam key (+1!).
Sooo Yoyo is the way to go?
Since my goal is making PC games, I'm aiming at standard version. Right choice?
Arigato gozaimasu! ^__^
Comfort Jones
Banned
Just try to do simple things. Make a cube jump by pressing space... that kind of level of thing.. Then make other cubes disappear if you jump your cube into them... Anything! Bit by bit you'll just acquire knowledge.
Just Do It
On it!
I'm a bit more intimidated learning how to do art assets but hey gotta start somewhere.
It's still 3 hours until Saturday for me, but I figured hey why not since I'm at a good stopping point and I'll be working on my char's AI partner all day tomorrow, so now's as good a chance as any.
Gifcam caused a little lag since my laptop isn't particularly up to snuff, but you get the idea:
For more reference, the game is rendering in 1080p natively:
Gifcam caused a little lag since my laptop isn't particularly up to snuff, but you get the idea:
For more reference, the game is rendering in 1080p natively:
Thanks! It's largely skeletal animation with lots of tweening, and it's running at 60fps in game. But to keep it from looking completely like a paper doll, I added a few articulations that can sort of simulate joint rotation on other axes with sprite swaps and dynamic model adjustments.
Loving the animations on this. Nice work!
Brack from Gamemaker
I realized that the functions I was getting mad at weren't in the paid version, I was just following outdated stuff.
Anyway I bought the Standard Edition at Yoyogames page so they got the bigger cut and I'll get a Steam key too (workshop seems at least interesting). Yesterday I went on "playing" with GameMaker until 4:30 AM and today I did some more tests (and it's past 2:30 AM already lol):
- played a bit with 1945 tutorial (vertical shm'up with planes)
- for better smoothness, I set the room speed to 180 (made a couple of tests)
- set the vsync via script (dunno why but it seems smoother than using general setting? probably it's just suggestion)
- got a quite stable 60 fps so I've started doubling enemy planes objects
- save for rare random +1 or -1 fps fluctuations, framerate was stable until 2.048 enemy planes.
- little hiccup from 2.048 to 4.096 enemy planes: 56-59-58 then back to 60fps
- another hiccup and a framerate drop from 4.096 to 8.192: 41-48-47 then about 50fps
- halt and serious drop from 8.192 to 16.384: 4-27-33 then about 34 fps
- went up at last to 32.764 and the framerate dropped to about 22 fps after major hiccup
CPU (i7@860) never budged, stable al 13-15% while doing even other tasks in bg (Win7@64)
GPU (gtx670oc) reached an astonishing 16%, wow!
I'm really curious to test it with Pro + Compiler Module, but I should making a bit of money from GM before buying them
Good night Gaf
I realized that the functions I was getting mad at weren't in the paid version, I was just following outdated stuff.
Anyway I bought the Standard Edition at Yoyogames page so they got the bigger cut and I'll get a Steam key too (workshop seems at least interesting). Yesterday I went on "playing" with GameMaker until 4:30 AM and today I did some more tests (and it's past 2:30 AM already lol):
- played a bit with 1945 tutorial (vertical shm'up with planes)
- for better smoothness, I set the room speed to 180 (made a couple of tests)
- set the vsync via script (dunno why but it seems smoother than using general setting? probably it's just suggestion)
- got a quite stable 60 fps so I've started doubling enemy planes objects
- save for rare random +1 or -1 fps fluctuations, framerate was stable until 2.048 enemy planes.
- little hiccup from 2.048 to 4.096 enemy planes: 56-59-58 then back to 60fps
- another hiccup and a framerate drop from 4.096 to 8.192: 41-48-47 then about 50fps
- halt and serious drop from 8.192 to 16.384: 4-27-33 then about 34 fps
- went up at last to 32.764 and the framerate dropped to about 22 fps after major hiccup
CPU (i7@860) never budged, stable al 13-15% while doing even other tasks in bg (Win7@64)
GPU (gtx670oc) reached an astonishing 16%, wow!
I'm really curious to test it with Pro + Compiler Module, but I should making a bit of money from GM before buying them
Good night Gaf
Brack from Gamemaker
I realized that the functions I was getting mad at weren't in the paid version, I was just following outdated stuff.
Anyway I bought the Standard Edition at Yoyogames page so they got the bigger cut and I'll get a Steam key too (workshop seems at least interesting). Yesterday I went on "playing" with GameMaker until 4:30 AM and today I did some more tests (and it's past 2:30 AM already lol):
I'm really curious to test it with Pro + Compiler Module, but I should making a bit of money from GM before buying them
Good night Gaf
If the number of instances becomes a problem you can always activate/deactivate depending on when you need them.
Sup peeps.
I have returned after a lengthy absence. Just wanted to pop in and say I am pretty good at using Unity now and I am a Wii U developer that has gotten our stuff up and running on Wii U with rendering to both screens, drag and drop using the gamepad touch, networking, etc, so if you have questions about general Unity stuff or Wii U stuff feel free to post in the appropriate channels or PM me or just post here if it's not Wii U specific.
I have returned after a lengthy absence. Just wanted to pop in and say I am pretty good at using Unity now and I am a Wii U developer that has gotten our stuff up and running on Wii U with rendering to both screens, drag and drop using the gamepad touch, networking, etc, so if you have questions about general Unity stuff or Wii U stuff feel free to post in the appropriate channels or PM me or just post here if it's not Wii U specific.
Feel free to hang out in the Wii U dev IRC channel linked from the forums. We're up to 7 or so people who regularly hang out, though we don't talk a lot.
I was making progress on Wii U porting, but then I got distractedy by 3D World this weekend...
Twisted Jenius
Neo Member
Hello everyone,
Twisty's Asylum Escapades is a game that I created as part of a 2 man team (I'm the artist on the project, working with a programmer). This is our first game and it has been in development for over 5 years. The game was created using the Torque Game Engine Advanced.
Twisty's Asylum Escapades is a dark, 3D, single player, action adventure video game that is completely free. You play as Twisty; the floating brain with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth, as he makes his way through this bizarre mental facility, fighting enemies and solving puzzles in order to escape from the asylum.
It's a very unique and fun game with a lot of b-movie style references and atmosphere. The purpose was sort of to invert the whole monster and hero dynamic, having you play as the monster coming up out of a dark "dungeon-like" place, as opposed to being a hero going down into one. It's also designed to be just random, crazy fun and subtly spoofs certain other gaming conventions. I'll also mention that it has a bit more depth to it than some people might think at first glance.
The game is free and you can download it from the official site- http://asylumescapades.com/
Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated!
Here's a link to the trailer video-
Also, here are a few obligatory screen shots-
Check it out!-
Twisty's Asylum Escapades is a game that I created as part of a 2 man team (I'm the artist on the project, working with a programmer). This is our first game and it has been in development for over 5 years. The game was created using the Torque Game Engine Advanced.
Twisty's Asylum Escapades is a dark, 3D, single player, action adventure video game that is completely free. You play as Twisty; the floating brain with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth, as he makes his way through this bizarre mental facility, fighting enemies and solving puzzles in order to escape from the asylum.
It's a very unique and fun game with a lot of b-movie style references and atmosphere. The purpose was sort of to invert the whole monster and hero dynamic, having you play as the monster coming up out of a dark "dungeon-like" place, as opposed to being a hero going down into one. It's also designed to be just random, crazy fun and subtly spoofs certain other gaming conventions. I'll also mention that it has a bit more depth to it than some people might think at first glance.
The game is free and you can download it from the official site- http://asylumescapades.com/
Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated!
Here's a link to the trailer video-
Also, here are a few obligatory screen shots-
Check it out!-
I've gotten some wonderful feedback (both positive and negative, the negative being the most helpful) for my game. I've changed a good bit about the visuals. Each of the different bots have different color schemes now. Default Sentry stay the same blue, but Bombers are red for example/etc. Also added particles to the game to visualize the bots or bases being destroyed. Also added few new enemy visuals as well.
Our lighting is looking great! Unfortunately, the appearance of "nodes" in the first level doesn't make any sense, so I need to find some other way to get some cool shadows.
The floor isn't in there yet, but it's gonna be awesome when it's in!
This is looking sharp.
Mr_Appleby
Member
if i'm reading correctly you're using a set of buffers? Was about to have a go at a similar thing using OpenAL and a rotating set of small buffers. very interested to get something working as static sounds only makes me sad. especially coming off a project on the raspberry pi where i just talk to the hardware directly.
Yeah, in that example I'm using 4 small buffers. I fill up all four and queue them and then whenever one finishes I fill it back up and add it back into the FIFO queue.
Mr_Appleby
Member
excellent i'll give it a shot. cheers.
I'm going to be making a mystery/horror VN and I'd like some help deciding which style I should draw it in.
I've already got people voting elsewhere, but I'd like to see what GAF has to say.
I was making an entirely different game until recently, when problems with GMS caused me to sadly have to put it on hiatus. Now I'm learning Unity and hoping to get that game back on track, but it's going to take me awhile to learn how to use Unity effectively (I've only got my character moving around and jumping so far) so I wanted to have another game I can make good progress in while I'm learning that. Hence, the VN! Only a short one in comparison to the other one I have planned, but it will be good practice.
I've already got people voting elsewhere, but I'd like to see what GAF has to say.
I was making an entirely different game until recently, when problems with GMS caused me to sadly have to put it on hiatus. Now I'm learning Unity and hoping to get that game back on track, but it's going to take me awhile to learn how to use Unity effectively (I've only got my character moving around and jumping so far) so I wanted to have another game I can make good progress in while I'm learning that. Hence, the VN! Only a short one in comparison to the other one I have planned, but it will be good practice.
I've now grasp the main concepts about XAudio2, read about its history etc.
and have implemented a simple wavloader playing sounds on-demand. Sweet.
Today I'm going to consider the streaming stuff. I wrote a simple sine
oscillator that fills a buffer with a, well, sine wave featuring a smooth
change in pitch if any changes occur. I want to use this experimentally for
rising the pitch while nearing the end of a combat area flying an aircraft.
Arrrgh!
Or for indicating the "depth" of a stall. Anyhow. It seems likethe callback mechanism is XAudio2's way of signaling that the samples were
played, which is actually what I wanted to know initially. Am just curious how
short the buffers can be made, i.e. how fast the XAudio2 systems respond such
that an uninterrupted play can be assured, since this determines the latency
of the sounds being played. Sure I want to have the new sound being played the
millisecond it happens. Yet I've read somewhere that XAudio2's thread wakes up
every 10ms (XBox360 about ~5ms) processing and feeding data to the hardware.
So the buffers can be changed 100 times per second at best. Am going to
tinker around with it and will later build everything again with WASAPI after
having read more about it.
An interesting thing I discovered within XAudio2 is that it also allows for
32-bit floating-point sound data as input, i.e. WAVE_FORMAT_IEEE_FLOAT,
bypassing the PCM conversion penalty. That's way cool if one generates samples
from raw math filling the buffers. For example, a sine oscillator will already
produce 32-bit floating-point numbers (using sinf). Hence, no need for
conversion. However, the bandwidth doubles (16-bit PCM vs. 32-bit IEEE_FLOAT).
googleplex
Member
I'm going to be making a mystery/horror VN and I'd like some help deciding which style I should draw it in.
I've already got people voting elsewhere, but I'd like to see what GAF has to say.
I was making an entirely different game until recently, when problems with GMS caused me to sadly have to put it on hiatus. Now I'm learning Unity and hoping to get that game back on track, but it's going to take me awhile to learn how to use Unity effectively (I've only got my character moving around and jumping so far) so I wanted to have another game I can make good progress in while I'm learning that. Hence, the VN! Only a short one in comparison to the other one I have planned, but it will be good practice.
C looks good.
Thanks for all the votes, guys!
B and C pretty much tied, so I finished up both of them and included some alternate facial expressions so you can see how the character(s) will change in each style.
Tell me which you prefer! I hope it doesn't end up in a tie again, I don't want to have to choose...
I'm a little sad D only got a bare handful of votes, since that one was my favorite. But that always seems to be the case! No one likes my favorites.
B and C pretty much tied, so I finished up both of them and included some alternate facial expressions so you can see how the character(s) will change in each style.
Tell me which you prefer! I hope it doesn't end up in a tie again, I don't want to have to choose...
I'm a little sad D only got a bare handful of votes, since that one was my favorite. But that always seems to be the case! No one likes my favorites.
Dynamite Shikoku
Congratulations, you really deserve it!
I liked D
I'm going to be making a mystery/horror VN and I'd like some help deciding which style I should draw it in.
I've already got people voting elsewhere, but I'd like to see what GAF has to say.
I was making an entirely different game until recently, when problems with GMS caused me to sadly have to put it on hiatus. Now I'm learning Unity and hoping to get that game back on track, but it's going to take me awhile to learn how to use Unity effectively (I've only got my character moving around and jumping so far) so I wanted to have another game I can make good progress in while I'm learning that. Hence, the VN! Only a short one in comparison to the other one I have planned, but it will be good practice.
Personally i would choose A for a more realistic tone, D for more indie/original feel(it reminds me of some 2d horror indie games), B is the best looking suited for more canonic style(but maybe it needs darker outlines), i don't like C too much.
It all depends on your idea of the game.
Diablohead
Member
It's still 3 hours until Saturday for me, but I figured hey why not since I'm at a good stopping point and I'll be working on my char's AI partner all day tomorrow, so now's as good a chance as any.
Gifcam caused a little lag since my laptop isn't particularly up to snuff, but you get the idea:
For more reference, the game is rendering in 1080p natively:
I like what I see!
I tried a similar kind of animation with a side project, I find that it's one of those easy to do hard to master kind of things but you seem to have it under control.
Hello everyone,
Twisty's Asylum Escapades is a game that I created as part of a 2 man team (I'm the artist on the project, working with a programmer). This is our first game and it has been in development for over 5 years. The game was created using the Torque Game Engine Advanced.
Twisty's Asylum Escapades is a dark, 3D, single player, action adventure video game that is completely free. You play as Twisty; the floating brain with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth, as he makes his way through this bizarre mental facility, fighting enemies and solving puzzles in order to escape from the asylum.
It's a very unique and fun game with a lot of b-movie style references and atmosphere. The purpose was sort of to invert the whole monster and hero dynamic, having you play as the monster coming up out of a dark "dungeon-like" place, as opposed to being a hero going down into one. It's also designed to be just random, crazy fun and subtly spoofs certain other gaming conventions. I'll also mention that it has a bit more depth to it than some people might think at first glance.
The game is free and you can download it from the official site- http://asylumescapades.com/
Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated!
Here's a link to the trailer video-
Also, here are a few obligatory screen shots-
Check it out!-
This looks great and reminds me of the days when a video game was a video game and not a movie, full of wacky things instead of tears.
RobotNinjaHornets
Banned
Thanks for all the votes, guys!
B and C pretty much tied, so I finished up both of them and included some alternate facial expressions so you can see how the character(s) will change in each style.
Tell me which you prefer! I hope it doesn't end up in a tie again, I don't want to have to choose...
I'm a little sad D only got a bare handful of votes, since that one was my favorite. But that always seems to be the case! No one likes my favorites.
C reminds me of Phoenix Wright. Go C!
Sanic
Member
Just a heads up, the standard edition of Gamemaker (PC/Mac export, unlimited resources, no splash screen on startup) is free at the moment, and it's apparently intentional. More details here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1resnx/gamemaker_studio_standard_is_free/
Twisted Jenius
Neo Member
Thanks! That's basically what I was going for. Although it obviously doesn't resemble them exactly, I wanted the game to be in the same spirit as some of those wacky, classic "mascot games" (Super Mario, Sonic, Rayman, Pac-Man, etc.) with plenty of strange characters and environments that border on the surreal.
I don't like it when games take themselves too seriously and so I wanted Asylum Escapades to be mostly just weird and fun.
Thanks! I've experimented with similar methods on four or five other occasions, so this is a much more refined product than what I started out trying a couple years back. I agree that it's definitely something you need experience with to get right.
On another note, I made large headway on a custom level editor this weekend. Similar to Spelunky or the upcoming game Chasm, mine picks from a bunch of sub-map templates and stitches them together and fills them out to make a unique larger level. Even if it wasn't integral to my game's systems, it's a hell of a lot faster than using GameMaker's level editor would have been for me, so that's a plus.
Debating 60fps for the trailer or the game?
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