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[missile]

It has been a while since I shared some new alien races. We are about 1/2 done now with our target of 30 races to populate the universe and storyline with.

Dimnar:

Ornyon:

Ooope:

Veelow:

And every scifi game MUST have a race of sentient Shrooms:

Looks better each time!

 

[Faerith]

Where can I find a good pixelart community site?

I don't pixel that much anymore, but Pixelation was/is a nice forum with people who know their pixels.
http://wayofthepixel.net/

 

[V_Arnold]

If you want quality pixelart, pixeljoint.com
Good tutorials, a constant flow of new material.....

 

[missile]

Retro Spectral Analyzer / NG

Pretty interesting to see how the replicated frequency spectrum (peaks left
and right, initially) of the digital signal travels towards the lower
frequency range (center) while the frequency of the 'continuous' signal (blue)
is increasing, aliasing themselves as lower frequencies and as such as a lower
frequency signal upon reconstruction -- see the lower frequency red sine wave
while the blue one is at very high frequencies. Basically, the higher
frequency continuous signal gets masked as a lower frequency one. That means,
there are different continuous signals having the same digital representation.
This is aliasing.

 

[V_Arnold]

Missile, I do not know what that gif is, but it is magic.

 

[razu]

Retro Spectral Analyzer / NG

Pretty interesting to see how the replicated frequency spectrum (peaks left
and right, initially) of the digital signal travels towards the lower
frequency range (center) while the frequency of the 'continuous' signal (blue)
is increasing, aliasing themselves as lower frequencies and as such as a lower
frequency signal upon reconstruction -- see the lower frequency red sine wave
while the blue one is at very high frequencies. Basically, the higher
frequency continuous signal gets masked as a lower frequency one. That means,
there are different continuous signals having the same digital representation.
This is aliasing.

Make that game!

 

[Jobbs]

Retro Spectral Analyzer / NG

Pretty interesting to see how the replicated frequency spectrum (peaks left
and right, initially) of the digital signal travels towards the lower
frequency range (center) while the frequency of the 'continuous' signal (blue)
is increasing, aliasing themselves as lower frequencies and as such as a lower
frequency signal upon reconstruction -- see the lower frequency red sine wave
while the blue one is at very high frequencies. Basically, the higher
frequency continuous signal gets masked as a lower frequency one. That means,
there are different continuous signals having the same digital representation.
This is aliasing.

 

[DocSeuss]

"I need an artist, but can't afford one."
"Kickstarter it!"
"I need art for a good Kickstarter."
"...oh yeah..."

My problem.

 

[klaus]

Retro Spectral Analyzer / NG

Pretty interesting to see how the replicated frequency spectrum (peaks left
and right, initially) of the digital signal travels towards the lower
frequency range (center) while the frequency of the 'continuous' signal (blue)
is increasing, aliasing themselves as lower frequencies and as such as a lower
frequency signal upon reconstruction -- see the lower frequency red sine wave
while the blue one is at very high frequencies. Basically, the higher
frequency continuous signal gets masked as a lower frequency one. That means,
there are different continuous signals having the same digital representation.
This is aliasing.

I'm on no account an expert on the matter, but are we seeing the effect of crossing the Nyquist rate? Anyways, it's fascinating to look at (and it totally reminds me of the old Cisco logo, probably no accident)

Edit:

Perfect reaction image, that's from A Beatiful Mind, isn't it?

 

[cbox]

Fricken, your art is insane, and missile, magic.

 

[ZehDon]

/dead

My problem.

What type of art are you looking at for your Kickstarter? Any example images of what you're after? Depending on this, I may have some spare time in the next couple of days, depending on how my testers get on. I can't make any promises.

 

[Ranger X]

Retro Spectral Analyzer / NG

Pretty interesting to see how the replicated frequency spectrum (peaks left
and right, initially) of the digital signal travels towards the lower
frequency range (center) while the frequency of the 'continuous' signal (blue)
is increasing, aliasing themselves as lower frequencies and as such as a lower
frequency signal upon reconstruction -- see the lower frequency red sine wave
while the blue one is at very high frequencies. Basically, the higher
frequency continuous signal gets masked as a lower frequency one. That means,
there are different continuous signals having the same digital representation.
This is aliasing.

That's fascinating how....






.... I don't understand A SINGLE thing of what I see and read there. I swear that the only thing I get is that it a gif and some english language under it. Damn. lol

 

[Feep]

That's fascinating how....






.... I don't understand A SINGLE thing of what I see and read there. I swear that the only thing I get is that it a gif and some english language under it. Damn. lol

It's basic electrical engineering. Periodic waveforms can be translated to the "frequency domain" via a mathematical process known as a Fourier transform. Basically, the signal is reconstructed as a sum of a bunch of sine waves with varying frequencies.

He's getting a phenomenon known as "aliasing" due to the Shannon-Nyquist theorum, which says you need to sample at at least twice your signal period or shit gets fucked up.

Anyone read the Unity blogpost about scripting changes in 5.0? Weird stuff. Though having full .NET support would be lovely....

 

[cbox]

Sorry it's a big gif (20mb) , haven't shown off anything in a while. Testing out new backgrounds, added a slight grid to show some distance markers though I'm debating at whether I should keep it or not.

 

[Noogy]

He's getting a phenomenon known as "aliasing" due to the Shannon-Nyquist theorum, which says you need to sample at at least twice your signal period or shit gets fucked up.

I lost you at Shannon's Nyquil.

 

[Blizzard]

I lost you at Shannon's Nyquil.

For people who want to dig into the math, you can dig into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem etc. DSP was one of the classes I probably disliked most and it's been ages since I took it, so I only vaguely remember terms.

Leaving aside the more advanced math, one of the basic concepts people are mentioning involves waves and sample rates. Sine waves are easy, right? They're just wavy lines. Like this:

Now imagine you take a "sample" (the black dots) of one of those wavy lines, every so often. Like, once a second. Then when you're done, you look at the samples and say "What wavy line matched these samples?"

The problem, as shown in the picture, is that MORE THAN ONE wavy line will fit the dots! That's because the sampling rate, how often you make a dot, is too low. If you had twice as many dots, you would know whether it is the red line or the blue line.

 

[SmoothCB]

Cross posting from the IOS gaming thread.

We are looking at developing a puzzle based ios game and are looking for some advice.

1. Are there good examples of popular multiplayer (co op and competitive) puzzle based games?

2. What are some good examples of reasonable freemium models for both single and multiplayer games?

Any info is much appreciated. I'd love to give background on what we are developing but can't yet at this point.

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

Anybody entering Intel Level Up? I'd love to get a demo finished before then, but don't know if it will be possible.

 

[James Coote]

Anyone read the Unity blogpost about scripting changes in 5.0? Weird stuff. Though having full .NET support would be lovely....

My reading of it was that they want to make it easier to add new platforms in the future. I suspect they've expended a lot of time/effort trying to get the damn thing working on PS4/X1/WiiU all whilst having the platform holders breathing down their necks

Anybody entering Intel Level Up? I'd love to get a demo finished before then, but don't know if it will be possible.

I've actually started adding competition deadlines to my calendar, with email reminders when one is coming up soon. There's so many out there, that even if you miss one, there'll probably be another a couple of weeks later when maybe you'll have something even better looking/playing to enter.

 

[missile]

Missile, I do not know what that gif is, but it is magic.

Yeah, it's magic!

That's fascinating how....

.... I don't understand A SINGLE thing of what I see and read there. I swear that the only thing I get is that it a gif and some english language under it. Damn. lol

I may try a brief explanation:

Well, the gif shows in one run the core issue of all of digital signal
processing, i.e. of the problem of representing a continuous signal (blue)
with a discrete one (red). Within this example the sampling rate of the blue
signal is held constant. The samples are represented by the red dots. The
white bars are the magnitude spectrum of the discrete/red signal. Basically,
those magnitude tell us how much intensity of a given frequency is in the
digital signal (red). The problem with digital signals is that they have
replicated spectra (see the peaks left and right, initially) induced by the
finite sampling process making the sampled continuous function discrete and
periodic. If one samples a continuous signal with too few samples, said
spectra will get closer together. Upon a certain frequency or a certain low
sample rate, these spectra will start to overlap and as such will influence
each other, i.e. aliasing occurs. This means that the continuous signal can
not be exactly reconstructed from the discrete samples any longer, because,
due to the overlap, the magnitude at each frequency gets mangled up. But when
the replicated spectra don't overlap, the signal can be reconstructed exactly.
But when do they not overlap? That's what Nyquist and Shannon found out a
couple of decades ago. A sufficient condition is when the sample rate with
which we sample the continuous signal (blue) is at least > 2x the highest
frequency of the continuous signal.

The gif above shows how this condition gets violated. Initially, the
replicated spectra are well separated, that means, there are enough sample
points (red dots) with respect to the current frequency of the continuous
signal (blue). But as the frequency of the continuous signal increases, with
the sample rate held fixed, there won't be sufficient samples to keep the
spectra separated from a given point onwards. That's the case when the
frequency of the continuous signal is larger than half the sample rate (the
so-called Nyquist frequency). In this case the spectra start to overlap. In
the animation above the frequency of the continuous signal is increased to an
extend that the replicated spectra go full circle as one can see in the
animation. Hence, while the continuous signal (blue) is at a high frequency,
the sampled version of it (red) is at a lower frequency as the spectrum
clearly shows (center).

One can say that the samples of the high frequency continuous signal include a
copy of the sampled continuous signal at a low frequency. Funny, heh? In the
case shown above you can see a low frequency sine wave (red) while the
continuous signal is at high frequency, hence, aliasing.

This is essentially the reason why one can see low frequency images in high
frequency parts of an image if the images isn't sampled properly or filtered
sufficiently. Now you know from where the artificial circles in a recent
picture of mine come from;

Only the circles with center at the image's midpoint are for real. All the
other ones are due to aliasing of the video signal. One of the tasks of the
Retro Spectral Analyzer is to fine-tune said aliasing. The goal is not to
eliminate it entirely (would defeat the point of being retro to being with),
yet an over-paced version is also not needed.

I can write much more, esp. about the spectrum and how one can see it as a
coordinate vector (functional) of a function in an infinite dimensional vector
space with a basis of periodic functions. But I think I should stop here since
it goes way beyond the thread's subject.

Make that game!

You gave me a good idea making use of it in a game. :+

I'm on no account an expert on the matter, but are we seeing the effect of crossing the Nyquist rate? Anyways, it's fascinating to look at ...

Thanks. Indeed, it's what you said.

Thanks for the flowers, but I didn't do that much. The one to owe is Jean
Baptiste Joseph Fourier (21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830):

Mr. Fourier, I owe ya!

 

[Turfster]

PSA: don't open e-mails from Unity with spammy-sounding subjects

 

[missile]

... (and it totally reminds me of the old Cisco logo, probably no accident) ...

Yet I think their logo represents the two struts of a bridge wired by some
cords. But I don't know for sure. Anyone?

 

[missile]

Bridge? How can I be so naive...?

 

[klaus]

Yet I think their logo represents the two struts of a bridge wired by some
cords. But I don't know for sure. Anyone?

You're right ofc, from Wikipedia:

The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name, San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on using the lower case "cisco" in its early years. The logo is intended to depict the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Somehow my mind linked the similar appearance to your gif with their routers encoding signals, perhaps using some Fourier transformations in the process ^^

Bridge? How can I be so naive...?

Ha, OK that's gotta be the real truth about it

 

[missile]

You're right ofc, from Wikipedia:


Somehow my mind linked the similar appearance to your gif with their routers encoding signals, perhaps using some Fourier transformations in the process ^^ ...

Thanx for clearing it up. :+

... Ha, OK that's gotta be the real truth about it

Must be a running gag at the company. xD

 

[missile]

Sorry it's a big gif (20mb) , haven't shown off anything in a while. Testing out new backgrounds, added a slight grid to show some distance markers though I'm debating at whether I should keep it or not.

I think the grid is cool. It might be quite helpful judging distances with
respect to some enemies while timing certain actions against them at the same
time.

 

[domino99]

http://beyondhumanproject.com/

Hey guys here's screenshot of my first indie game it's a Sci-Fi platformer inspired by Metroid and Devil May Cry

 

[DocSeuss]

What type of art are you looking at for your Kickstarter? Any example images of what you're after? Depending on this, I may have some spare time in the next couple of days, depending on how my testers get on. I can't make any promises.

It won't be ready to Kickstart for a few months, I don't think. I've been dealing with this stuff lately, so a project that was supposed to start this spring is only just getting moving now, and I don't feel comfortable with crowdfunding until I have a playable demo.

I'd prefer to pay up front, which I can't do for the reasons linked above, so the next best thing is negotiating a cut of the Kickstarter. As a result, I'm not sure I want to go "hey, you wanna make art, and, at some point in the future I haven't nailed down yet, I'll pay you from a Kickstarter?"

At the same time, concept art's always good to have.

Bah. This is a crappy, confusing situation. Thanks for the offer.

 

[Pasta_Soup]

Long time, no posts.

I've spent the past 4 days creating townspeople for Olympia Rising. One of our backer tiers was "be a townsperson in-game!" so I had 38 characters to sprite. It was a lot of fun, but I'm glad I'm moving on to new stuff now.

Here are some of my favs from the set.

I'm looking forward to seeing all 38 of them hanging out in town once our programmers get them in-game.

We're also way ahead of schedule on development. We originally said December 2014 for the release date, but we figured we'd prolong the ETA just in case. We'll probably be finished by the end of June!

 

[ZehDon]

It won't be ready to Kickstart for a few months, I don't think. I've been dealing with this stuff lately, so a project that was supposed to start this spring is only just getting moving now, and I don't feel comfortable with crowdfunding until I have a playable demo.

That's such a terrible situation to be in, I'm sorry. I read those posts a couple of weeks back (I think?), but I didn't connect you in this thread to you in that thread. I'm sorry things haven't improved a whole lot, either.

In terms of our games, it sounds like we're in close to the same position development wise. I'm in the process of getting my playable demo ready and out to testers, just squishing the last few show-stopping bugs that cropped up yesterday. Once its tested and polished up, I'll start piecing together my own Kickstarter, and see if I can make this development thing work.

I was let go from my job in February, though luckily my wife is still working. We decided to make a run at this 'Game Development' thing, and though its been hard, its nothing like what you're going through. My heart goes out to man.

At the same time, concept art's always good to have. Bah. This is a crappy, confusing situation. Thanks for the offer.

I completely understand. I can't replace a full time dedicated paid artist, but I'm no slouch when it comes to whipping up concept art either. If you'd like, shoot me a PM when you get a chance, and we'll discuss exactly what you need and the art style/quality level/quantity you need - even if its just what you need to get your kickstarter going. I'll show you some of the work I do, and you're happy with my stuff, I'll gladly donate my time and get your art done. Let me know.

 

[AusRoachman]

Decided to take a break from my usual turn based prototype to go a little more fast paced with an arcade flyer

Made a quick vid cycling through all the cameras

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NP94WhdcOU&feature=youtu.be

 

[cbox]

I think the grid is cool. It might be quite helpful judging distances with
respect to some enemies while timing certain actions against them at the same
time.

Thanks! Certainly helps place the ship on the play field too,

 

[friken]

Sooooo happy... sorry in advance for a bit of a long winded post.

So, today I asked our artist to help make some ship concepts as we are struggling with modeling cool ships. To date our game has always used a mix of 2d/3d, but 3d for ships/planets/surfaces and 2d for fx, aliens, ui, etc.

He color sketched the following for the lipoc race:

Looked pretty good and made me rethink using 3d ships. If we could make 2d look good enough, it really would save a ton of modeling time, so I asked him to make a ship overhead view for the Veelow race. About bit later he sent this:

hmmm... cool concept, so I put it in the game as a 2d sprite. As I feared I couldn't get any form of lighting on a 2d quad to look anything but terrible. The lighting for the 3d models was great... can't backtrack to have virtually no lighting for 2d sprites, and for SURE don't want to go back to the stone ages of making a ton of sprites w manually painted lighting at various angles.

I remembered an awesome kickstart a while back for lamplight. For those unfamiliar, this is REALLY worth a look:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/finnmorgan/sprite-lamp-dynamic-lighting-for-2d-art

So I looked into doing something similar in Unity. The Unity community being huge and awesome, low and behold someone already beat me to it (Huge kudos to Kencho):
http://kencho-dev-blog.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/cel-shaded-sprites-in-unity3d-43-and.html

So I started implementing a custom shader based on Kencho's work. I struggled a bit at first but I'm thrilled with the end result... 2d realtime lighting that really looks great/3dish. Note the image below is 3 screenshots merged w the same ship at multiple angles so you can see 1:1 pixel of the lighting:

The basics is a custom shader to use a normal map, which is generated from a horiz lighting and vert lighting. Here are my two lighting images:

And of course I need a gif to really show the effect:

I still need to balance out the left/top lighting images and tweak the base image to not have lighting from the front baked in, but I'm pretty happy with the results.

 

[Raonak]

Working on Super Pokemon Eevee Edition trying to get a new release out (0.74).

In addition to that, gamemaker modules are 50% off, so I bought the android exporter.
I've gotta say, it's fantastic.

I didn't even change anything. Just hooked up my phone to my laptop, selected android on the build target, clicked play, and boom. (after 30 seconds of loading...) my game was playing on my phone. blew my mind. Had to add some virtual buttons to get past the title screen.

controls are the hardest part imo, my game, Nax of the Universe, is a 2D character-action RPG, very reaction orientated, so it's quite hard to make it feel right. But i thought up a pretty good control scheme. espeacially since my game tends to require multiple button inputs to execute special attacks.

virtual joystick to move. on left side of screen. Block button above that. The right side doesn't have any virtual buttons. Instead, im doing something more interesting.
Tap the right side to attack.
Swipe forward for special attack, swipe backwards for launcher. swipe up to jump, swipe down to dodge/taunt(dodges in direction joystick is at, or if joystick is not pressed, will taunt?). Hold to do super attack.
The control scheme is working suprisingly nicely and the game suits smartphones far better than i would've expected. the swipe action controls feels responsive enough.
there's a few more controls that I've gotta sort out. and movement doesn't feel right.

I think block will be a virtual button on the left side, since you can't move and block, so it makes sense. weapon switch button on that side makes sense too.

 

[friken]

Sorry it's a big gif (20mb) , haven't shown off anything in a while. Testing out new backgrounds, added a slight grid to show some distance markers though I'm debating at whether I should keep it or not.

very very nice. Game looks more fun every time I see a gif When can I play it?

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

Long time, no posts.

I've spent the past 4 days creating townspeople for Olympia Rising. One of our backer tiers was "be a townsperson in-game!" so I had 38 characters to sprite. It was a lot of fun, but I'm glad I'm moving on to new stuff now.

Here are some of my favs from the set.

I'm looking forward to seeing all 38 of them hanging out in town once our programmers get them in-game.

We're also way ahead of schedule on development. We originally said December 2014 for the release date, but we figured we'd prolong the ETA just in case. We'll probably be finished by the end of June!

Great sprite work. I'm always surprised that people can make such good detail with so few pixels

 

[Jobbs]

Sooooo happy... sorry in advance for a bit of a long winded post.
And of course I need a gif to really show the effect:

This looks fantastic. Long before Ghost Song I used to sit around drawing top view ships for a game idea I had (which I still believe in strongly, but it'd be tricky to make).

At the time I felt like they looked pretty good static, but moving around a screen in gameplay they felt flat. Using methods such as yours it looks like it's all solved and really provides the depth and detail they need. Makes me want to make a game like that once again.

 

[missile]

Sooooo happy... sorry in advance for a bit of a long winded post.

So, today I asked our artist to help make some ship concepts as we are struggling with modeling cool ships. To date our game has always used a mix of 2d/3d, but 3d for ships/planets/surfaces and 2d for fx, aliens, ui, etc.

He color sketched the following for the lipoc race:

Looked pretty good and made me rethink using 3d ships. If we could make 2d look good enough, it really would save a ton of modeling time, so I asked him to make a ship overhead view for the Veelow race. About bit later he sent this:

hmmm... cool concept, so I put it in the game as a 2d sprite. As I feared I couldn't get any form of lighting on a 2d quad to look anything but terrible. The lighting for the 3d models was great... can't backtrack to have virtually no lighting for 2d sprites, and for SURE don't want to go back to the stone ages of making a ton of sprites w manually painted lighting at various angles.

I remembered an awesome kickstart a while back for lamplight. For those unfamiliar, this is REALLY worth a look:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/finnmorgan/sprite-lamp-dynamic-lighting-for-2d-art

So I looked into doing something similar in Unity. The Unity community being huge and awesome, low and behold someone already beat me to it (Huge kudos to Kencho):
http://kencho-dev-blog.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/cel-shaded-sprites-in-unity3d-43-and.html

So I started implementing a custom shader based on Kencho's work. I struggled a bit at first but I'm thrilled with the end result... 2d realtime lighting that really looks great/3dish. Note the image below is 3 screenshots merged w the same ship at multiple angles so you can see 1:1 pixel of the lighting:

The basics is a custom shader to use a normal map, which is generated from a horiz lighting and vert lighting. Here are my two lighting images:

And of course I need a gif to really show the effect:

I still need to balance out the left/top lighting images and tweak the base image to not have lighting from the front baked in, but I'm pretty happy with the results.

Pretty good post -- serving the thread's title quite well! :+ For, I somehow
miss the development part in many of the posts in here. Different story. Cool
to see this kind of lighting in the game of yours. It really adds to the
feeling! Keep the 3d stuff for the next game.

Decided to take a break from my usual turn based prototype to go a little more fast paced with an arcade flyer

Made a quick vid cycling through all the cameras

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NP94WhdcOU&feature=youtu.be

Yeah tinkering around with ones very own crap is perhaps the best thing out
there! :+ I do have similar breaks, programming something for hours just to
get the 'picture' while deleting the code afterwards. xD

...

...

Very nice! Am very curious about the game!

...

... Makes me want to make a game like that once again.

Oh, please!

 

[genbatzu]

my wife and me finished our first game, currently iOS only (maybe later for steam, if I figure out how to add those achievements)
it took quite longer than expected, ranging from february up until now (it got approved by apple yesterday) but now we have a game! a selfmade game
I never thought It's so exciting to have a game made by oneself

but there is still something that worries me.. the ability to actually find it in the AppStore ._.
any ideas for good tags I can use?
the app is called PENG!uin, but since it ignores the ! while searching I get thousands of results

I introduced our game here, if you wanna have a look: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=112952098&postcount=334

and that's the title screen of it:

 

[missile]

http://beyondhumanproject.com/

Hey guys here's screenshot of my first indie game it's a Sci-Fi platformer inspired by Metroid and Devil May Cry

Can we see that in motion, please?

 

[Nibel]

Long time, no posts.

I've spent the past 4 days creating townspeople for Olympia Rising. One of our backer tiers was "be a townsperson in-game!" so I had 38 characters to sprite. It was a lot of fun, but I'm glad I'm moving on to new stuff now.

Here are some of my favs from the set.

I'm looking forward to seeing all 38 of them hanging out in town once our programmers get them in-game.

We're also way ahead of schedule on development. We originally said December 2014 for the release date, but we figured we'd prolong the ETA just in case. We'll probably be finished by the end of June!

Gorgeous. Real talent right here folks!

 

[domino99]

Can we see that in motion, please?

Here is a very old devlog there will be new devlog soon.
http://youtu.be/4AQ2axSuY7o

 

[Interfectum]

Long time, no posts.

I've spent the past 4 days creating townspeople for Olympia Rising. One of our backer tiers was "be a townsperson in-game!" so I had 38 characters to sprite. It was a lot of fun, but I'm glad I'm moving on to new stuff now.

Here are some of my favs from the set.

I'm looking forward to seeing all 38 of them hanging out in town once our programmers get them in-game.

We're also way ahead of schedule on development. We originally said December 2014 for the release date, but we figured we'd prolong the ETA just in case. We'll probably be finished by the end of June!

That looks great man. I love the color usage.

 

[friken]

This looks fantastic. Long before Ghost Song I used to sit around drawing top view ships for a game idea I had (which I still believe in strongly, but it'd be tricky to make). At the time I felt like they looked pretty good static, but moving around a screen in gameplay they felt flat. Using methods such as yours it looks like it's all solved and really provides the depth and detail they need. Makes me want to make a game like that once again.

Thanks for the kind words. Your ships need to be in a game. Finish ghost song so we can all play it and get after your ship game

The lighting didn't address all the 'flat' feel issues unfortunately. With our 3d ships, we had then lean into / tilt turns about 20 degrees. I tried tilting or scaling width of the 2d sprites thinking it would also help but it actually just makes the 2d ship instantly look paper thin -- paper mario style. In fact having the lighting shift actually amplifies the paper thin feel if you tilt the quad. The human eye is amazing at picking up the fact the lighting and perspective of the ship isn't changing on a tilt -- had to take a vid of it it looked so bad:

Also lost, moving to 2d ships, is having any parts rotating in the depth axis like we had the engine section rotating of our krex ship.

All in all I think moving to 2d ships is more practical for our small indie team and budget (lack thereof). I think with lighting and maybe a couple other tricks/tweaks it will be plenty 'good enough'. There are of course drawbacks on the 3d side as well. Zooming out to very small ships for long range battle for example, 3d models tend to alias and go jaggy even with moderate aa levels. All tradeoffs 3d vs 2d.

On another positive side for our game, I do think 2d ships are more artistically consistent with our aliens, intro, and story scenes.

Pretty good post -- serving the thread's title quite well! :+ For, I somehow
miss the development part in many of the posts in here. Different story. Cool
to see this kind of lighting in the game of yours. It really adds to the
feeling! Keep the 3d stuff for the next game.

Thanks missle. I like lower level topics too. Though, I'm guilty of posting shallow end-result screenshots looking for kudos or feedback. I guess the mix of both is what makes this thread what it is. I have to admit most of what I'm working on day to day isn't very worthy of a deep look from the dev perspective as it is just hooking up routine stuff and tweaking visual things.

I enjoy your posts a lot.... many have me really scratching my head trying to technically understand what you've done and how you did it

 

[friken]

Long time, no posts.

I'm very impressed with these! Quality pixel art really grabs my imagination. What isn't there in pixel density my mind fills in 100x. Moving away from pixel art, is what killed point and click adventure games for me. When adv game art rez/detail increased as technology allowed, they also lost soul.

I really find it fascinating what my memory thinks I played vs what I really played. My mind's memory of kings quest 1 is 1000x more detailed than the reality of the pixels. I loaded it up recently and was a bit shocked about how low rez, low color, low detail it was compared to my fond memories of it.

 

[Pasta_Soup]

Thanks for all the compliments, guys! I sent each of the backers their respective pixel character - they all seem to really like them.

I'm very impressed with these! Quality pixel art really grabs my imagination. What isn't there in pixel density my mind fills in 100x. Moving away from pixel art, is what killed point and click adventure games for me. When adv game art rez/detail increased as technology allowed, they also lost soul.

I really find it fascinating what my memory thinks I played vs what I really played. My mind's memory of kings quest 1 is 1000x more detailed than the reality of the pixels. I loaded it up recently and was a bit shocked about how low rez, low color, low detail it was compared to my fond memories of it.

Coincidentally, I grew up on Lucas Arts point and click adventure games - they're definitely a major influence on my pixel art and how I animate. The imagination factor played a strong role in my experience with those games as well.

 

[Water]

Hi indie-GAF, I'm posting from Nordic Game conference. Excellent event. Anyone else currently here too?

 

[Jocchan]

Long time, no posts.

I've spent the past 4 days creating townspeople for Olympia Rising. One of our backer tiers was "be a townsperson in-game!" so I had 38 characters to sprite. It was a lot of fun, but I'm glad I'm moving on to new stuff now.

Here are some of my favs from the set.

I'm looking forward to seeing all 38 of them hanging out in town once our programmers get them in-game.

We're also way ahead of schedule on development. We originally said December 2014 for the release date, but we figured we'd prolong the ETA just in case. We'll probably be finished by the end of June!

Great pixel art and great animation here. They all have a lot of personality.

 

[hypernima]

I guess I can say I am new to this thread, I read the OP and I'm familiar with some of the engines but I could go more in depth about some of my goals. Currently I am a student working on thesis for my BFA. However I am starting it early because I know for sure that I want to make a game for my Senior thesis.

However, I don't know how to code. But I know how to make my own art, sounds, and music. I guess I can say that I'm looking for a bit more then tutorials and more of a mentor to help me out from time to time? I'd be greatly appreciative if I could get that, but for the most part I want to make a Mega Man styled platformer for my thesis.

 

[kyotokid]

Hi guys,

Just a quick hello from another poor indie! I left the games industry (Sony, Bizarre Creations and um...Gameloft) to go and make games that we wanted to make and that we think people might like to play too. Weird, humour filled adventures with solid gameplay and weird sensibilities. I'm working with a bunch of guys from our respective bedrooms and kitchens. We call ourselves Team Aozora. We'll have stuff to share with you before too long but its very early days. I'm off learning how to be a start-up so I can go after a bit of funding to help us make the game!

Also sorting out the design with my good friend and designer/scripter guy Jim.

I first got introduced to NeoGAF donkey's years ago when I was working on MotorStorm. I'm very open and will try to help anyone in any way I can. I wrote up a few things about the afore mentioned MotorStorm and got a nice reaction on the old reddits . This isn't about getting clicks to our site I just want to foster openness and indie love. The work displayed in this thread is amazing and we've a lot to learn! So, we're using Unity and looking to round out the team so that is one of my many, many duties at the moment. Alas I'm the only full time person on the project but Jim will go full-time in a few months too

I pray I didn't break any rules in this post, hollar at me if I did

smooches!
-Ivan