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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
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Holy feedback batman!
Thanks for all the kind words everyone, and the feedback is spot on..
Thanks!, you are quite right. We want our hero to feel like he has past injures which linger and help inform the way he moves, although right now he has a bit of a constant lean happening, need to break that with more cycles.
The whole anim is still WIP, we wanted to keep the movements quite small and economical on this run. Right now his equipment is bouncing around just a tad too much, so I think its a case of bringing some more movement into his body, and less bounce to his equip to balance it all out. All his equipment is physics/simmed, just the core body movement is hand animated
Thanks. His shield is currently on top of his pelt, so when he has his shield equipped, you should see some nice flowing pelt action on his back
Cheers man, Im rather happy with how the hair turned out so far.
Thanks, We are keeping the weapons rather low fantasy/down to earth, Most of the equipment found in Ashen is objects scrapped together, so could be very easy to break
Thanks man, its great to see people are seeing into the art style and what we are trying to do with it. The textures are currently placeholder as such, but I wouldnt expect them to change drastically. We are going with a very muted color palette, it will be mostly making sure the surfaces read correctly (His axe hilt will read like metal for example) The world is actually a bigger character than the hero in our story, if that makes sense..so I hope it wont disappoint.
And yes, im a very big fan of giants, Its been one of our design pillars from day1, not just in the giant world, but actual giants roaming said giant world
We are spending the majority of our time building out the world first, before populating it with creatures to inhabit it, so sadly pictures of the giants will have to wait until another day
Thanks for all the kind words everyone, and the feedback is spot on..
Thanks!, you are quite right. We want our hero to feel like he has past injures which linger and help inform the way he moves, although right now he has a bit of a constant lean happening, need to break that with more cycles.
The whole anim is still WIP, we wanted to keep the movements quite small and economical on this run. Right now his equipment is bouncing around just a tad too much, so I think its a case of bringing some more movement into his body, and less bounce to his equip to balance it all out. All his equipment is physics/simmed, just the core body movement is hand animated
Thanks. His shield is currently on top of his pelt, so when he has his shield equipped, you should see some nice flowing pelt action on his back
Cheers man, Im rather happy with how the hair turned out so far.
Thanks, We are keeping the weapons rather low fantasy/down to earth, Most of the equipment found in Ashen is objects scrapped together, so could be very easy to break
Thanks man, its great to see people are seeing into the art style and what we are trying to do with it. The textures are currently placeholder as such, but I wouldnt expect them to change drastically. We are going with a very muted color palette, it will be mostly making sure the surfaces read correctly (His axe hilt will read like metal for example) The world is actually a bigger character than the hero in our story, if that makes sense..so I hope it wont disappoint.
And yes, im a very big fan of giants, Its been one of our design pillars from day1, not just in the giant world, but actual giants roaming said giant world
We are spending the majority of our time building out the world first, before populating it with creatures to inhabit it, so sadly pictures of the giants will have to wait until another day
Looks really good man! loving the feel of it already. Wanna see more! Are you guys in the industry?
I checked out your site, sweet stuff. Here's a bunch of wierd stuff;
My name is also Andy P. Spooky. (his nick is Android? Spookyier; mine is sometimes Phandroid.)
Derek on your team has basically exactly the same favourite games as me.
Your inspirations for you game are almost exactly the same as my project! (your subsequent game even sounds similar!)
You looked into doing isometric (but we are still sticking with it!)(hope this isnt a mistake now!)
Are you sure your not working with me or I'm working on your game? Am I one of you?
Congratulations!! Let's hope you can get it out on Steam as well.
Pasta_Soup
Member
Thanks so much, man! Glad you liked it. Means a lot coming from you - Dust is a fantastic game that I very much enjoyed!
And congrats on the "over 1 million units" milestone, that's incredible!
Haven't posted progress in a bit, but here's a render of what our enemy spawn points will look like. Really digging it and i hope it translate well into the final game. Once the particles stop flowing, the enemies will kinda spurt out of the darkness and head on towards trying to kill you.
Is the coroutine being run five times less frequently than update...?
legacyzero
Banned
Haven't posted progress in a bit, but here's a render of what our enemy spawn points will look like. Really digging it and i hope it translate well into the final game. Once the particles stop flowing, the enemies will kinda spurt out of the darkness and head on towards trying to kill you.
That looks great! Is there some kind of explosion of light once that happens?
You need to get this on PC!
It's the precursor for a set amoun of enemies to spawn. I was thinking that the enemies would kind of appear and scale up, ten fly out of the hole. Looking to do a test tonight and see how it all looks.
Just_myles
Member
Question indiedevGAF, I pretty much have the basic mechanics(fly, bang, shoot, die, spawn etc..) in my game but, want to put a more personal touch on the art. What do you think about the Drawing pads like the wacom?
Any art software recommendations that go along well with these? Suggestions?
Visually right now, I am in the atari phase.
Any art software recommendations that go along well with these? Suggestions?
Visually right now, I am in the atari phase.
I have a Wacom and love it. The game I'm currently working on doesn't explicitly make use of it, in that none of the final art was produced with a drawing pad, but I love doing concept stuff in PhotoShop with one.
For example, this is a concept piece I did:
Which I'm currently working on turning into game assets:
Mr_Appleby
Member
wow all the great art in this thread continues to blow me away. i have ... cubes the basic hooks to the physics engine got done last night and today i've just been writing a few test scripts. low framerate is from capturing at 10fps.. oops. still getting to grips with gifcam, had some problems with it rendering the transparencies (non-updating areas of the image) in green but previewing first seems to get rid of that.
as mentioned earlier i'm using the Bullet collision/physics API. Despite the rest of the engine being written in C and Bullet being a C++ library, it's been very easy to plug in and saved me a lot of time and headaches.
For shits and giggles, this is what the Lua code looks like that sets up the scene. Lines beginning "loon" are calls to my engine.
the only other code is the function to generate a bunch of materials, the run loop which unpauses the physics when space is pressed and adds the text, and the physcube constructor which simply adds a cube primitive to the scene and attaches a rigidbody. the whole point of the engine is for me to be able to rapidly prototype ideas in a way i'm comfortable working.. and i'm pretty happy with how it's going so far tbh.
the basic hooks to the physics engine got done last night and today i've just been writing a few test scripts. low framerate is from capturing at 10fps.. oops. still getting to grips with gifcam, had some problems with it rendering the transparencies (non-updating areas of the image) in green but previewing first seems to get rid of that.
as mentioned earlier i'm using the Bullet collision/physics API. Despite the rest of the engine being written in C and Bullet being a C++ library, it's been very easy to plug in and saved me a lot of time and headaches.
For shits and giggles, this is what the Lua code looks like that sets up the scene. Lines beginning "loon" are calls to my engine.
Code:
function startup()
-- generate all the materials for shading
genMaterials()
-- basic scene settings
loon.display.setClearColor(0.1, 0.1, 0.5, 1.0)
loon.physics.setGravity(0, -10, 0)
-- start with physics simulation paused
loon.physics.pause()
-- make a ground cube
ground = loon.scene.addCube({x = flx, y = floorlevel, z = -20}, materials.ground, {x = 10, y = 2, z = 10})
loon.physics.addBoxColliderDynamic(ground, 0);
-- position camera above and looking slightly down
campos = {x = 0, y = 5, z = 0}
camrot = {x = 25, y = 0, z = 0}
loon.scene.updateCamera(campos, camrot)
--load fonts
fOxy16 = loon.fonts.loadTTF("fonts/OxygenMono-Regular.ttf", 16)
--create the stack of physics cubes
spawnBuilding(4, 4, 8)
end
function spawnBuilding(xnum, znum, ynum)
local x = 0 - (xnum / 2)
local y = floorlevel + 2.5
local z = -20
for n = 0, ynum do
for i = 1, xnum do
for j = 1, znum do
p_id = Physcube:new(x + (i * 1), y + (n * 1), z + (j * 1), materials.building)
cubes[p_id.id] = p_id;
end
end
end
endthe only other code is the function to generate a bunch of materials, the run loop which unpauses the physics when space is pressed and adds the text, and the physcube constructor which simply adds a cube primitive to the scene and attaches a rigidbody. the whole point of the engine is for me to be able to rapidly prototype ideas in a way i'm comfortable working.. and i'm pretty happy with how it's going so far tbh.
Haven't posted progress in a bit, but here's a render of what our enemy spawn points will look like. Really digging it and i hope it translate well into the final game. Once the particles stop flowing, the enemies will kinda spurt out of the darkness and head on towards trying to kill you.
Curious if you used gifcam as well. All of my attempts to create gifs (even smaller than that) run like crap. Help?
Hit the arrow to the right of "Rec" and change the recording framerate to 16 or 33 FPS.
I don't think so. I'm simplifying here, but the change amounted to:
BEFORE:
Code:
void Update()
{
if (Phase == Phase.Command)
{
// Game logic
}
}AFTER:
Code:
void Start()
{
StartCoroutine(GameLogic());
}
void GameLogic()
{
while (Phase == Phase.Command)
{
// Game logic
yield return null;
}
}
ZehDon
Member
Voted
Good luck mate, I look forward to it!man... i'm going to have to watch dragonball one of these days just to get the references on this board
Haha, I was joking a bit about our most likely symmetrical situation in project development.
Speaking of which, I thought to share with you guys a couple of gifs, since I'm still messing around with parallax scrolling, trying to find the right speed for each layer in order to come up with a decent sense of depth.
Please forgive the choppiness... I took them from 30fps clips.
I did ya, make sure you choose 33fps from the "new" button dropdown.
Well, that looks like it'd do the same thing. If anything it should be, (not noticeably), slower as there must be some state saving/reloading for coroutines to work.
Maybe something was lost in the simplification?
I'd add a counter to each, and see how many times each "Game logic" update is run per minute.. You've not left the game logic update in the Update function have you...?
This feels like kind of a noob question, but I've been thinking about it lately...
Right now my 3-D characters just do an animation blend from their walk/run animation to their idle animation, which looks a little janky...their feet slide. So I wanted to make a quick "stopping" animation where they just plant their feet and transition nicely into an idle...
...but of course, this animation can be triggered at any frame in the run cycle. If the character happens to have their left foot up when the transition happens, it looks fine. If the character has their right foot up, though, the blending makes it look silly.
Does anyone know best practices on this? Should I check what frame the run cycle is on, and try to jump to that frame in the slow-down animation? I dunno.
Right now my 3-D characters just do an animation blend from their walk/run animation to their idle animation, which looks a little janky...their feet slide. So I wanted to make a quick "stopping" animation where they just plant their feet and transition nicely into an idle...
...but of course, this animation can be triggered at any frame in the run cycle. If the character happens to have their left foot up when the transition happens, it looks fine. If the character has their right foot up, though, the blending makes it look silly.
Does anyone know best practices on this? Should I check what frame the run cycle is on, and try to jump to that frame in the slow-down animation? I dunno.
If you want to do it properly you probably need two animations, one for each foot, and select the appropriate one depending on the current frame. But if you want correct transitions between every animation things can escalate quickly and result in a ridiculous amount of animations. So yea, try to fudge it with blends and frame jumps as much as you can. Also if it's not a player controller character you can usually allow for some delays to let the animations play out, or do some planning ahead to make sure it lines up correctly.
For animation problems, I usually gather reference from other games, watching how their motion looks and what it looks like it's doing.
For the specific problem of run-end anims, different people solve it different ways. Some have lots of different specific anims based on speed and footing, potentially even feeding into different idle anims. Some let the run anim play out until it's at its most central point or closest to the idle anim, and then blend or snap to idle. The solution I'm using is a single, snappy run-end anim that has the character instantly plant her feet in the same place they'll be during the idle anim and then have some minor follow-through with the knees and other joints, bouncing just a little bit forward from the abrupt stop.
It's partly a matter of what you think looks best and partly a matter of what best serves your gameplay. My game has lots of twitchy platforming and quick fighting, so the animations need to feel a little bit snappy and responsive. A slower, more deliberate game has different needs.
The mountains are moving too quickly. They look like tiny hills right now. You almost don't want them to move at all. In fact, at this point, it would look better if they didn't move.
Suppose the tents and arches and other stuff in the primary plane is ten meters away, but the mountain is a kilometer away. The mountain should be moving at 10m/1km (0.01) the speed of the primary plane.
For the specific problem of run-end anims, different people solve it different ways. Some have lots of different specific anims based on speed and footing, potentially even feeding into different idle anims. Some let the run anim play out until it's at its most central point or closest to the idle anim, and then blend or snap to idle. The solution I'm using is a single, snappy run-end anim that has the character instantly plant her feet in the same place they'll be during the idle anim and then have some minor follow-through with the knees and other joints, bouncing just a little bit forward from the abrupt stop.
It's partly a matter of what you think looks best and partly a matter of what best serves your gameplay. My game has lots of twitchy platforming and quick fighting, so the animations need to feel a little bit snappy and responsive. A slower, more deliberate game has different needs.
The mountains are moving too quickly. They look like tiny hills right now. You almost don't want them to move at all. In fact, at this point, it would look better if they didn't move.
Suppose the tents and arches and other stuff in the primary plane is ten meters away, but the mountain is a kilometer away. The mountain should be moving at 10m/1km (0.01) the speed of the primary plane.
I've done some deeper investigating and it seems the big difference is due to me turning off VSync without realizing it. Still, the Coroutines are a lot cleaner and help to alleviate God-object syndrome, so I'm keeping them. I did bork my netcode in the process, but there's just one hickup to correct.Well, that looks like it'd do the same thing. If anything it should be, (not noticeably), slower as there must be some state saving/reloading for coroutines to work.
Maybe something was lost in the simplification?
I'd add a counter to each, and see how many times elach "Game logic" update is run per minute.. You've not left the game logic update in the Update function have you...?
Haha, the coincidences do stack up, maybe we are working on the same game and dont realize it yet
We are Ex industry devs yeah. Spent time in both games and film, threw it all in to work on our own idea and see how things turn out!
Do you have any links to the game you are working on? I'm always interested in seeing other indie titles.
Ah man, this is exactly the sort of area we are just getting into ourselves. Are you using unity/mecanim? So far for us the blending between idle/walk/run is working rather smoothly. Good work practice is to make sure these anims work regardless of the blend, like old school animating
Sorry, dont have much of an answer for you, but let us know how your situations work out, as Im sure it will help us all in our quest for sweet sweet animations.
If anyone's around, I'm trying out a live stream for Shwip!
http://www.twitch.tv/jamhammer/
Just a test for now. Edit : down because my upload = junk.
http://www.twitch.tv/jamhammer/
Just a test for now. Edit : down because my upload = junk.
Popped in for a quick look. The game itself looks very smooth (tons of particle effects!) but the stream kept pausing every couple of seconds, which made it a bit hard to follow. Still, very nice job from what I saw
Popped in for a quick look. The game itself looks very smooth (tons of particle effects!) but the stream kept pausing every couple of seconds, which made it a bit hard to follow. Still, very nice job from what I saw
Eek yeah, my upload is terrible apparently - need to upgrade STAT. thanks for the nice comments!
Hey guys, gonna do a bit of fishing here.
There's a character who wasn't originally intended to be shown in the upcoming video, but I decided I'd like to show him. He has a few lines. There is no one cast for him yet.
He really has a miniscule amount of dialogue in the video. Just a few lines. I was curious if anyone here who knows how to do VO would be interested in doing me a solid -- There's be no presumption other than that you'd appear in the video. If it worked out, you could potentially have the role in the final game and be properly credited at that time. His dialogue in the video is so small that it shouldn't take you long to record.
Criteria:
- Adult male
- UK or aussie accent preferred
- It's a bonus if you're familiar with how NPCs are handled in Dark Souls, the NPC interactions in my game are modeled after the ones in that game
If you have experience or otherwise are confident in your abiilty to do something like this, hit me up and I'll tell you more about the character. PM me here or email me.
There's a character who wasn't originally intended to be shown in the upcoming video, but I decided I'd like to show him. He has a few lines. There is no one cast for him yet.
He really has a miniscule amount of dialogue in the video. Just a few lines. I was curious if anyone here who knows how to do VO would be interested in doing me a solid -- There's be no presumption other than that you'd appear in the video. If it worked out, you could potentially have the role in the final game and be properly credited at that time. His dialogue in the video is so small that it shouldn't take you long to record.
Criteria:
- Adult male
- UK or aussie accent preferred
- It's a bonus if you're familiar with how NPCs are handled in Dark Souls, the NPC interactions in my game are modeled after the ones in that game
If you have experience or otherwise are confident in your abiilty to do something like this, hit me up and I'll tell you more about the character. PM me here or email me.
Resolution not 1080p, preorder cancelled!Look
It's mission 2 guys
That background image is literally 24960 x 15360
Hmm, possible bullshot. Shady business, Feep.
I also cancelled it
PM'ed.
Wyndstryker
Member
We can see the pixels.
RelentlessRolento
Member
Been working hardcore late night all week and last weekend just getting the entirety of my game running... feels good
got done that was missing: boss stage/ai/endgame, 4 levels finished with all different looks and functions, full game loop working (game runs from beginning room to end room and back again properly with bonus game in between), cutscene/character intro/character endings sections built (all they need is story images and text), third character made and fully working (hamburger)... and alot more I forget.
All that's really left to really program is the fourth character, and the arcade attract mode. From there it's all down to doing the rest of the artwork and story and polishing as I go during public playtests
got done that was missing: boss stage/ai/endgame, 4 levels finished with all different looks and functions, full game loop working (game runs from beginning room to end room and back again properly with bonus game in between), cutscene/character intro/character endings sections built (all they need is story images and text), third character made and fully working (hamburger)... and alot more I forget.
All that's really left to really program is the fourth character, and the arcade attract mode. From there it's all down to doing the rest of the artwork and story and polishing as I go during public playtests
Always good to dig into the system to see what's going on!
In other news, I've been hand painting AO onto my landscape, and my son placed those trees!
Why can't I define a method with optional parameters inside a MonoBehaviour?
I get a warning that the names of the file it is in doesn't match, but my game doesn't crash, it just halts all ingame objects that use that class?
I have to move that method into its own class(nested also doesn't work) and away from any file where a class derived from MonoBehaviour is in.
I can then instantiate it inside a MonoBehaviour Object and use it just fine
Really weird but it works now.
I get a warning that the names of the file it is in doesn't match, but my game doesn't crash, it just halts all ingame objects that use that class?
I have to move that method into its own class(nested also doesn't work) and away from any file where a class derived from MonoBehaviour is in.
I can then instantiate it inside a MonoBehaviour Object and use it just fine
Really weird but it works now.
Good call sir, I see what you mean and you're right, that layer definitely needs to slow down a fair bit. Thank you!
I've been working on cyberpunk jam this week. I've been getting way too into this one and probably won't finish it completely by the deadline, but at least I've gotten something interesting to work on out of it!
It's a metroidvania set in a futuristic Heian era Kyoto... which hangs upside down from the sky. You play an onmyouji hacker/magician. I swear all of this makes sense in context.
Early screen of one of the first areas (it's a bit more complex now).
The hacking mechanic requires you to find symbols in nature to use in hacking/spells. These are water and fire respectively.
An upside down forest with a ribbon pathway beneath it.
The big thing I just finished working on today, the techno shrine where you start the game and find your first symbol/other tutorial nonsense. I could have just screencapped it but it had to be gif'ed for its full magnificence.
It's a metroidvania set in a futuristic Heian era Kyoto... which hangs upside down from the sky. You play an onmyouji hacker/magician. I swear all of this makes sense in context.
Early screen of one of the first areas (it's a bit more complex now).
The hacking mechanic requires you to find symbols in nature to use in hacking/spells. These are water and fire respectively.
An upside down forest with a ribbon pathway beneath it.
The big thing I just finished working on today, the techno shrine where you start the game and find your first symbol/other tutorial nonsense. I could have just screencapped it but it had to be gif'ed for its full magnificence.
Haha, the coincidences do stack up, maybe we are working on the same game and dont realize it yet
We are Ex industry devs yeah. Spent time in both games and film, threw it all in to work on our own idea and see how things turn out!
Do you have any links to the game you are working on? I'm always interested in seeing other indie titles.
Soon! We've just been discussing setting up a tumblr and having more regular little drops of pics and info. So maybe we should do that. Currently we're in the industry, squeezing it out in our spare time, it sounds fun to do this shit full time though. Best of luck to you! I'll post up a link when we set something up.
Mr_Appleby
Member
love the way you draw people, that looks great.
bumpkin
Member
You know, I wish that seeing others excel and make more progress on their projects motivated me, but sometimes it makes me kind of depressed.
I know that the difference between myself and a lot of the folks here is that they're simply more dedicated to their projects. Hell, Noogy made Dust's development his full-time job! I'm lucky if I can set aside an hour or two every other day to work on my stuff. Short sporadic coding sessions make it very difficult to get "in the zone" and make marked progress with stuff.
The fact he went from being an artist who never coded in his life to making something that's incredibly impressive is a whole other story.
I didn't really think about this frustration until this morning when I overheard/saw a bunch of my co-workers showing some people the game they're making in Unity. These are guys who aren't really programmer-programmers by trade; they're both test engineers for my company's proprietary software product. I know it shouldn't get to me because they're using an already-built engine as where I'm developing my own from scratch (by choice), but dammit, it bums me out.
Sorry to get all LiveJournal on you guys, I just had to vent.
I know that the difference between myself and a lot of the folks here is that they're simply more dedicated to their projects. Hell, Noogy made Dust's development his full-time job! I'm lucky if I can set aside an hour or two every other day to work on my stuff. Short sporadic coding sessions make it very difficult to get "in the zone" and make marked progress with stuff.
The fact he went from being an artist who never coded in his life to making something that's incredibly impressive is a whole other story.
I didn't really think about this frustration until this morning when I overheard/saw a bunch of my co-workers showing some people the game they're making in Unity. These are guys who aren't really programmer-programmers by trade; they're both test engineers for my company's proprietary software product. I know it shouldn't get to me because they're using an already-built engine as where I'm developing my own from scratch (by choice), but dammit, it bums me out.
Sorry to get all LiveJournal on you guys, I just had to vent.
As you point out, this is an excellent reason to use an already-built engine depending on your goals. If your goal is learning engine mechanics, building an engine is educational. If your goal is to be someone who actually finishes at least one game, and not someone (like me) who has a graveyard of over a decade of abandoned, incomplete projects and pretty much nothing to show for it, using an existing engine or tool is a good idea.
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