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[Blizzard]

Oh boy I was trying to use a Pool Manager for my Projectiles in Unity and instead of Despawning they Destroyed themself in the Second Spawning Wave.... I spent about 16hours trying out everything with no Success... unitl I recreadet my Bullets and now they dont Destroy themself anymore. This makes no sense because they are exactly the same!
The saddest part is that i feel no relief but anger spending so much time on fixing something that makes only a small aspect of the overall game...

Are there others here who experienced similar things?

That sort of thing can certainly happen in software development. The tough part is figuring out what WAS the problem. If you can identify the root cause, at least you've learned something (and maybe you can write down notes in case you forget). In theory, next time you find a similar problem you won't have to spend so much time on it.

There may also be good general practices, like certain coding styles or design methodologies, that can help prevent certain problems from occurring. That's probably a huge topic on its own though.

 

[Ashodin]

Wii U issues I has them but coming up with solutions!

 

[Pehesse]

I'm not actually using a spritesheet (thanks, Construct!) but I still wanted to see how it'd look like with all the currently completed animations on a single frame!

(with a higher res here : http://pehesse.deviantart.com/art/Honey-Rose-UFE-Honey-spritesheet-454069219)

Thankfully I'm done with the animations for a while. There'll be a load more to come, but for now, back to the prototype!

 

[Heart of Black]

I'm not actually using a spritesheet (thanks, Construct!) but I still wanted to see how it'd look like with all the currently completed animations on a single frame!



(with a higher res here : http://pehesse.deviantart.com/art/Honey-Rose-UFE-Honey-spritesheet-454069219)

Thankfully I'm done with the animations for a while. There'll be a load more to come, but for now, back to the prototype!

You might want to try and hit up Studio Mercato as they built their game Cannonbrawl in Construct 2, if you need help with animations.

 

[Five]

Really nice, Pehesse. That's a lot of frames!

 

[gundalf]

Welcome to game development.

This will keep happening. Enjoy the ride.

I knew it would be hard, but not this kind of "spending days on little things" type of hard... but I should not be complaining since there are times where I make super complex stuff that (surprisingly)works out of the box.

Anyway, thanks to Pooling I get now constant 60FPS, hooray!

That sort of thing can certainly happen in software development. The tough part is figuring out what WAS the problem. If you can identify the root cause, at least you've learned something (and maybe you can write down notes in case you forget). In theory, next time you find a similar problem you won't have to spend so much time on it.

There may also be good general practices, like certain coding styles or design methodologies, that can help prevent certain problems from occurring. That's probably a huge topic on its own though.

I am using Playmaker/Visual Scripting but the design methodologies certainly may apply to a certain extend.
Sad part for me is, that there was nothing to learn, I recreated the exact GameObject and the new works... time to move on and be happy that it works as intended.

 

[Pehesse]

You might want to try and hit up Studio Mercato as they built their game Cannonbrawl in Construct 2, if you need help with animations.

Thanks! Construct itself isn't giving much trouble, animation wise, though - it's actually quite lovely (even compared to what I've seen of Unity)! it's with the rest that I'm struggling a bit more, but it's all part of the fun

Really nice, Pehesse. That's a lot of frames!

Thanks a lot :-D There's 264 frames in there (yeah, I counted... just had to know) - 187 for her opponent, and that's only the beginning! :-D

 

[gundalf]

Wii U issues I has them but coming up with solutions!

Feel free to PM me, as long it is not Coding related though

 

[Jobbs]

Ghost Song has been officially greenlit. I know a lot of you probably voted, so thanks again. See you on Steam!

 

[Skab]

Ghost Song has been officially greenlit. I know a lot of you probably voted, so thanks again. See you on Steam!

Great news!

 

[Ashodin]

Congrats Jobbs! Looking forward to not hearing from you for another 2 weeks

 

[Jobbs]

Congrats Jobbs! Looking forward to not hearing from you for another 2 weeks

thanks, and if you ever need me, just speak my name and I'll appear!

 

[Amirai]

I'm not actually using a spritesheet (thanks, Construct!) but I still wanted to see how it'd look like with all the currently completed animations on a single frame!

Impressive amount of animation! C2 should automatically make sprite sheets though at export (it doesn't on preview), is that not happening for you?

Ghost Song has been officially greenlit. I know a lot of you probably voted, so thanks again. See you on Steam!

Congrats, Jobbs!

Might as well post a little update for my game too, got a couple of the hero's battlestances done.

 

[Letterbomb]

Well, here goes nothing. We launched a Kickstarter for our project. We don't have a playable demo or anything (we're in a position where we'd need money even for a proper alpha), but hopefully the gameplay was depicted well enough in the screens we provided. We tried to preview each department of content (art, music, and logic) in a sufficient way, so we'll see how it goes, I guess.

Now that this has finally launched, my heart goes out to all the guys who launched their own projects before... This is some NERVE-WRECKING stuff... I might just throw up, I'm so anxious and nervous and excited all at the same time. Blegh.

 

[friken]

It has been a while since I've posted any progress. Progress has been slow, but fruitful. Our in-game UI is starting to take shape. We have made a number of revisions before sharing it here, and I wanted to say THANKS to the gaf guys in the indieGAF irc channel! Tons of great feedback there that has helped refine things.

Combat UI:

Alien Dialogue UI:

 

[Ashodin]

Wow friken can I hire you for UI?

UI indie artists are a rare thing.

Also, I finally got Apexicon working on the Wii U! HOORAY! Now comes fixing broken stuff and putting together the battle board (again). Fun fun fun

 

[Ran rp]

Just hopped into Stencyl for the first time. I'm primarily an artist and usually don't have to touch the engine when working with teams, so this seems like a decent way to start making some small prototypes of my own. I've just been going through the online tutorials and fooling around a bit all day.

 

[friken]

Wow friken can I hire you for UI?

UI indie artists are a rare thing.

Thanks for the kind words... but the 'we' when I said 'we made progress on ui' was more less me working with our artist on data the ui needed and tweaks and him actually doing the art work

I'll pass on the kind words to our artist though.

 

[Michael Armbrust]

Oh boy I was trying to use a Pool Manager for my Projectiles in Unity and instead of Despawning they Destroyed themself in the Second Spawning Wave.... I spent about 16hours trying out everything with no Success... unitl I recreadet my Bullets and now they dont Destroy themself anymore. This makes no sense because they are exactly the same!
The saddest part is that i feel no relief but anger spending so much time on fixing something that makes only a small aspect of the overall game...

Are there others here who experienced similar things?

These type of things are so frustrating.

Not too long ago I spent a few days fixing my equivalent of the Unity character controller. It was working perfectly fine in the test environment, but in a full level things fell apart. Frame rate was in the single digits, crashes were plentiful, and on occasion the character would shoot out of the level like a rocket. Introducing a second character into the scene just created even more problems. Went back to square one and re-built the controller from scratch with an altered concept.

Game development takes lots of time and you come to expect hurdles, but it was just so frustrating having to redo something I thought was finished. At least it feels pretty great when you overcome the hurdle.


Also I really recommend for everyone to regularly make backups. They're great when problems arise, but it's also great being able to see exactly how your game looked through development.

Also, I finally got Apexicon working on the Wii U! HOORAY! Now comes fixing broken stuff and putting together the battle board (again). Fun fun fun

Congrats!!! Doesn't it feel great getting your game running on the dev kit?

I've been following your work since the start, but I've missed a lot in the past few months. For some reason I was thinking you moved to Wii U a while ago.

Also your website just keeps giving me a redirect loop

 

[Mabef]

Oh boy I was trying to use a Pool Manager for my Projectiles in Unity and instead of Despawning they Destroyed themself in the Second Spawning Wave.... I spent about 16hours trying out everything with no Success... unitl I recreadet my Bullets and now they dont Destroy themself anymore. This makes no sense because they are exactly the same!
The saddest part is that i feel no relief but anger spending so much time on fixing something that makes only a small aspect of the overall game...

Are there others here who experienced similar things?

For a solid week I couldn't figure out why my random level generator was spitting out these weird ass patterns. I rewrote literally every step of the process, several times over, trying to fix it... Turns out, elsewhere in the game, a <= instead of a == was instantiating the level generator twice. Two levels smushed into one set of arrays. Felt real smart about that one.

(My level generator's readability is fucking aces, now!)

So, anyone submitting to indiecade this year? I have an abstract local multiplayer Action RTS with 3 minute rounds that I plan to submit. It was built with 3 other classmates over 3 months.

SSsssssolddddd. I have a soft spot for anything that tries to evoke RTS strategies (redundant?) within a smaller scope.

 

[electricpirate]

Also I really recommend for everyone to regularly make backups. They're great when problems arise, but it's also great being able to see exactly how your game looked through development.

Working without source control: Not even once.

*seriously though, git is free, and is easy for one person, just start using it *

So, anyone submitting to indiecade this year? I have an abstract local multiplayer Action RTS with 3 minute rounds that I plan to submit. It was built with 3 other classmates over 3 months.

It's pretty hard to tell what's going on here, but the game is about building networks. All the control is on one build button,and movement. You build one type of structure (a tower that shoots out your color) and use that structure to try and build networks, conquer territory and steal your opponents structures.

It's working pretty well, but the input is a little borked for 4 player, and we need a tutorial that isn't hot garbage, so we are going to submit for the more expensive deadline.

 

[senahorse]

Anyone have any advice on recording your own sound effects? For example I want to record some cat sounds and a few other basic sound effects, e.g. rustling of leaves etc. Is there some cheap equipment in order to achieve this at a decent quality level?

 

[Kitbash]

Our in-game UI is starting to take shape.

The combat UI looks great. Love the colours!

One thing to watch out for when mocking up something like your dialogue UI is the length of the placeholder text. Come up with the longest string you think you'll need for each section and ask the artist to use that in their design. The layout looks tidy with barely any text in it -- but what happens when those one word placeholders become 10-20 word sentences? Not something you want to stumble upon after the design's been implemented.

 

[electricpirate]

Anyone have any advice on recording your own sound effects? For example I want to record some cat sounds and a few other basic sound effects, e.g. rustling of leaves etc. Is there some cheap equipment in order to achieve this at a decent quality level?

I'm not an expert, but my quick process is to record with no flourescent lights/ac/background noise.

I take the sound into audacity and I trim it down, and I run a noise filter to strip any ambient noise.

I make sure the sound fades in and out, if it starts high it clicks.

Generally the sounds you record will be too quiet so run a compression filter till it's loud enough.

That's the super basic, if you don't have a mic, you can use a decent set of headphones in a pinch as a mic.

 

[electricpirate]

SSsssssolddddd. I have a soft spot for anything that tries to evoke RTS strategies (redundant?) within a smaller scope.

Thanks! We are currently working on how to find people interested in this kind of thing. We know it works on a basic level, but we want to find enough people who can get into it, and get good at it, and see if it holds together at high level play.

 

[bkw]

Thankfully I'm done with the animations for a while. There'll be a load more to come, but for now, back to the prototype!

Very cool. I'd like to see it in motion. Seems like the frames could use more smears, but I could be wrong. Are there going to be more than two characters? The two character animations are awesome, but man, it's going to be a ton of work to add more and more characters.

Ghost Song has been officially

Great news! Looking forward to seeing it on Steam.

Might as well post a little update for my game too, got a couple of the hero's battlestances done.

Whoa, don't recall seeing this before. I'm liking the art style. Sharp foreground characters on a painterly background is always looks great. The clear faces are going to make for some nice expressions.

Well, here goes nothing.

Good luck with this! I wish I could see the prototype. Loving the music so far!

It has been a while since I've posted any progress.

This is shaping up nicely! Ah! I recognize your name from the IRC channel. Now I can attach a game to that name. =)

Also, I finally got Apexicon working on the Wii U! HOORAY!

Congrats!

 

[Dark Octave]

Congrats to everyone in here. You guys are making fantastic progress. Being Greenlit, WiiU, crazy huge sprite sheets, Star Diver looking more detailed. That's what's up, right there. I couldn't be more excited.

 

[missile]

A few things. On graduation, I worked with skin cancer detection and classification. There I learnt a lot about color spaces. Then, on my masters degree, I started working with filtering algorithms, but switched projects, some time later, to work with machine learning based image segmentation.

Sounds cool. Yeah color spaces are quite interesting esp. learning all
of the oddities of them.

Filtering can be quite difficult not only because of all the mathematics
involved, but also because there is a common misconception in filtering
between errors due to aliasing (from sampling) and errors do due bad/weak
reconstruction filters. Anyhow, filtering is what I'm currently into, building
them from scratch because I need precise control of frequency attenuation and
stuff, yet I also want to control (put to good use) the weaknesses of some
filters for my Retro Engine. For example, the ringing/ripples produced by a
truncated (spatial domain) sinc filter are pretty interesting. :+

... On my work, I did a few projects that involved face recognition, image filtering, processing, pattern recognition and even some image effects. I also worked quite a bit with augmented reality. Can't say too much about those projects, unfortunately.

Haha, nothing like that (for now) It was a long time since I worked with 3D (since graduation), for now I'm using DirectX and OpenGL for 3D programming. I'm mostly relearning the basics.

Don't know if I'll get lower than that, or switch to an engine. My goal, at least for now, is to make a good, presentable, and complete game, so I'm trying to focus on that. But, knowing myself, I'll end up creating a lot of cool things and forget about making the game, hahahaha.

What should the game be about?

Thanks! ;D

They currently pop between each other on a key press. And you can switch to the boat wherever you are, which is less than useful. I'm thinking about how Mike switches between vehicles. Perhaps little buildings for each vehicle. And the ability to bail out of each one, that then disappears in a puff of smoke... Not decided yet!

What about to (rocket-) eject Mike out of a vehicle with him landing on a new
one? xD

 

[Pehesse]

Impressive amount of animation! C2 should automatically make sprite sheets though at export (it doesn't on preview), is that not happening for you?

Thanks!
I actually looked for those exported spritesheets in C2, since I distinctly remember it making them, but I couldn't find them this time... I must have looked in the wrong place It's not a problem, though - as I said, I did this one for fun, rest of the time I use single frames and don't need the sheets! I really like how C2 handles animation... can't say it enough!

Very cool. I'd like to see it in motion. Seems like the frames could use more smears, but I could be wrong. Are there going to be more than two characters? The two character animations are awesome, but man, it's going to be a ton of work to add more and more characters.

Thanks a lot!

I'm not sure what you mean by smears ?

There are already a couple videos of the prototype, but I aim to do another one soon with everything finally integrated, and the IA doing... something, and not just jumping/flailing around :-D If you're interested, though, the previous vids are here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rELnkPXAhdE (things changed quite a bit since that one though - most notably, there's IA, and the characters are a bit sped up, thanks to feedback from this here thread, and plenty of other things)

There are going to be more than two characters, indeed. At least four "main" (though you only ever play one, except for some special occasions), and a handful of extra smaller ones, plus possibly some more characters without a full moveset but for extra story sequences. It's going to take a long, long time, but if the mechanical basis of the matches is there, then it's "only" going to require more animation :-D

Congrats to everyone in here. You guys are making fantastic progress. Being Greenlit, WiiU, crazy huge sprite sheets, Star Diver looking more detailed. That's what's up, right there. I couldn't be more excited.

Thanks :-D And yeah, gotta say, looking at this thread is an inspiration in actually getting things done, all of the great images and news are excellent to see. Love the Star Diver UI! It actually reminds me of Ascendancy somewhat, and that's a very good thing in my book.

 

[Dark Octave]

Coming up with a new name sucks. So I have a name that's similar, only replaces one word so we can salvage most of the work done on the logo and in a way I kind of like it better but now my partner doesn't like it.

 

[razu]

v0.10 of my 11 year old son's Spacial Invadeners™ game is up on http://vamflax.com/. It's PC only for today, but will upload a Mac version too. It's super early, but it's a game!!

Oh boy I was trying to use a Pool Manager for my Projectiles in Unity and instead of Despawning they Destroyed themself in the Second Spawning Wave.... I spent about 16hours trying out everything with no Success... unitl I recreadet my Bullets and now they dont Destroy themself anymore. This makes no sense because they are exactly the same!
The saddest part is that i feel no relief but anger spending so much time on fixing something that makes only a small aspect of the overall game...

Are there others here who experienced similar things?

It gets better with experience.

What about to (rocket-) eject Mike out of a vehicle with him landing on a new
one? xD

It's more a gameplay question than a matter of snazziness. If you have to make your way to the truck garage, then you're doing a little work to get the truck. Super Something Squad™ is going to be all about work-earn-reward. Little jobs for rewards. But it's gonna be cool too!!

 

[friken]

The combat UI looks great. Love the colours!

One thing to watch out for when mocking up something like your dialogue UI is the length of the placeholder text. Come up with the longest string you think you'll need for each section and ask the artist to use that in their design. The layout looks tidy with barely any text in it -- but what happens when those one word placeholders become 10-20 word sentences? Not something you want to stumble upon after the design's been implemented.

Thanks for the feedback.

Scroll boxes both sections will use scrollers.

Next up is cutting ui both uis to get them functional ingame. Hopefully they don't pose too many challenges.

 

[OldRoutes]

v0.10 of my 11 year old son's Spacial Invadeners™ game is up on http://vamflax.com/. It's PC only for today, but will upload a Mac version too. It's super early, but it's a game!!

Wow that is EXTREMELY cool! What did he use? Unity?

 

[FormallyMegadrive]

At my company we did a test of our game in a build on my vita, using the current psm beta for Unity, it works better than I expected, and it's looking somehow sexy ^^

[url]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnepCQRIEAAtL6E.jpg:large[/url] [IMG][/QUOTE]

I thought this was a 16-bit version of Gish for vita and I got excited. then i got sad. :(

looks great!

 

[friken]

v0.10 of my 11 year old son's Spacial Invadeners™ game is up on http://vamflax.com/. It's PC only for today, but will upload a Mac version too. It's super early, but it's a game!!

Very cool to get your son into it early. Put him to work

 

[friken]

Ghost Song has been officially greenlit. I know a lot of you probably voted, so thanks again. See you on Steam!

Fantastic! Huge congrats. I loved the newest comment on Ghostsong greenlight page "greenlit! was there any doubt!?"

I think most of us here have been thinking that for a while. Good work and I look forward to playing it on steam. Remember your gaf friends when you are rich and famous

 

[razu]

Wow that is EXTREMELY cool! What did he use? Unity?

Very cool to get your son into it early. Put him to work

Thank you!

Yeah, it's Unity. I tell him what to do, and he does it. Stuff is already being absorbed. He has final say on the design. We've discussed scoring systems with multipliers, etc.. Very cool to get him thinking about the inner mechanics of games.

And here's a very long video of us in action, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SaSHXjoTqg&feature=share.

We streamed it. Not realising youtube records your streams!! We'll do another with the screen in view next time

 

[Makai]

Congrats, Jobbs

 

[cbox]

Congrats jobbs! Hope to join you in the greenlit community soon

 

[timetokill]

Ghost Song has been officially greenlit. I know a lot of you probably voted, so thanks again. See you on Steam!

Congrats!!
Definitely voted. Happy to see it get on Steam!

 

[Mabef]

Anyone have any advice on recording your own sound effects? For example I want to record some cat sounds and a few other basic sound effects, e.g. rustling of leaves etc. Is there some cheap equipment in order to achieve this at a decent quality level?

If you know your way around a microphone, I might recommend visiting a video equipment rental place and checking out a mic for the day. The H2n is good: a handy recorder that's used pretty widely. Simple & easy. Anything similar to that would probably work well for you, too.
But if you're new to recording, you'll want some time to tinker around with your mic. Don't rent. I bought a Blue Snowball for voice overs, and it's a decent value for what it does. But it's powered through USB, so you're tethered to your computer (hope you like dead leaves in your carpet). Alternatively, you can look for cheap field recorders like the Zoom H1 ($99 new) or cheaper. This Olympus mic has good reviews, but I don't know anything elseabout it. Be careful when you go cheap; sometimes the mics are designed so much around voice that they'll bork anything else. Hope that helps! Sound equipment can be a headache (there's always sound libraries!).

Thanks! We are currently working on how to find people interested in this kind of thing. We know it works on a basic level, but we want to find enough people who can get into it, and get good at it, and see if it holds together at high level play.

Right. I can imagine how that kind of testing would be tough to organize, since it's a local game. Do you play RTS's competitively yourself? StarCraft 2? Maybe it's to bone up on those skills yourself!..

Spoiler

I know I need to, never did get past gold league :C

Thanks for the feedback.
Next up is cutting ui both uis to get them functional ingame. Hopefully they don't pose too many challenges.

I enjoy hearing about your UI! I'm doing some UI stuff myself in a few months, and watching your stuff develop is super useful.

 

[Tiu Neo]

Sounds cool. Yeah color spaces are quite interesting esp. learning all
of the oddities of them.

Filtering can be quite difficult not only because of all the mathematics
involved, but also because there is a common misconception in filtering
between errors due to aliasing (from sampling) and errors do due bad/weak
reconstruction filters. Anyhow, filtering is what I'm currently into, building
them from scratch because I need precise control of frequency attenuation and
stuff, yet I also want to control (put to good use) the weaknesses of some
filters for my Retro Engine. For example, the ringing/ripples produced by a
truncated (spatial domain) sinc filter are pretty interesting. :+

I can see how filters could be important for a retro engine. Even some "bad" filters can give you some pretty cool visual effects. They may be a headache sometimes (specially if you're trying to create something generic), but a well used filter can be a powerful tool.
One project I worked on had some "artistic filters" that where, in truth, all failed experiments.

Good luck!

What should the game be about?

I think I'll have a better idea by the end of the year, probably! For now, I'm kinda busy with work, plus my postgrad course (in game development!). It's funny, buy I'm not working on the game I want, since I'm working on learning more about making games But in the end, I think it'll be worth it.

I really like one prototype I made a few months ago, of an Zelda-style exploration game with dual-stick controlled items and weapons. Me and a friend created some pretty fun, different weapons with that kind of gameplay.

 

[lashman]

hey guys ... I've been playing around with PBR stuff a little bit more ... here's what I managed to come up with ... let me know what you think - all feedback is welcome

 

[Five]

hey guys ... I've been playing around with PBR stuff a little bit more ... here's what I managed to come up with ... let me know what you think - all feedback is welcome

You've done a fine job but these are two of the most overused items in games.

 

[OnPoint]

Question for people who have games on Steam. Can you just make as many codes to hand out as you like once you're on?

 

[lashman]

You've done a fine job but these are two of the most overused items in games.

yeah, I know that's why I went with those 2 specific items
but I'm glad you like them anyway

 

[Feep]

Question for people who have games on Steam. Can you just make as many codes to hand out as you like once you're on?

I can confirm this to be true. = D

 

[Ashodin]

Some of the Wii U devs have come up with an interesting and even better solution for multiple views (GamePad + TV), so I'm going to rework Apexicon to fit that. That means, unfortunately, going back to square one and resizing all the assets AGAIN, but hey, it's a learning experience.

 

[oxrock]

Been working on my art a bit since it was so atrocious.

Old:

New:

It's for the knight class in the diablo'ish style game I'm working on.

 

[senahorse]

If you know your way around a microphone, I might recommend visiting a video equipment rental place and checking out a mic for the day. The H2n is good: a handy recorder that's used pretty widely. Simple & easy. Anything similar to that would probably work well for you, too.
But if you're new to recording, you'll want some time to tinker around with your mic. Don't rent. I bought a Blue Snowball for voice overs, and it's a decent value for what it does. But it's powered through USB, so you're tethered to your computer (hope you like dead leaves in your carpet). Alternatively, you can look for cheap field recorders like the Zoom H1 ($99 new) or cheaper. This Olympus mic has good reviews, but I don't know anything elseabout it. Be careful when you go cheap; sometimes the mics are designed so much around voice that they'll bork anything else. Hope that helps! Sound equipment

I'm not an expert, but my quick process is to record with no flourescent lights/ac/background noise.

I take the sound into audacity and I trim it down, and I run a noise filter to strip any ambient noise.

I make sure the sound fades in and out, if it starts high it clicks.

Generally the sounds you record will be too quiet so run a compression filter till it's loud enough.

That's the super basic, if you don't have a mic, you can use a decent set of headphones in a pinch as a mic.

Thanks a lot guys, some great advice, much appreciated.