Support NeoGAF

[Five]

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.

Welcome! Care to share which engine you're planning to use, or are you looking for advice on that regard?

Because some people, like Roanak and me, use GameMaker, so we wouldn't be able to help out much with Construct or Unity projects. And then vice versa for people using Construct or Unity.

Really though, what's probably going to help you the most is coming in to the thread with a specific problem like "hey, I'm using Unity, here's what I'm trying to do, why isn't it working?" You have the greatest chance in that case of being seen quickly by someone who knows how to help and answer you.

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

Welcome! Always nice to see new faces.

 

[Pehesse]

Love Friken's post about 2D lighting in Unity! That's something I'd love to try at some point! I think it looks pretty nice, even when the ships tumble sideways, but then again I'm pretty forgiving with anything 2D.

Also love those sprites, so quote to repost and add visibility! I definitely agree with your considerations about the power of imagination, and I believe this is why most JRPG nowadays seem (and probably are) weaker than their older counterpart : their graphical and storytelling "limitations" allowed us to fill the blanks using our own imagination a lot more. Case in point : Mystic Quest vs. Sword of Mana... granted, Sword of Mana isn't the most technically advanced game either, but something was definitely lost in translation when updating those sprites, and especially the script (the Amanda scene, or the falling tower, etc...) Or at least, it feels that way to me...

As for Honey Rose : there's been leaps of progress these past few days : all of the animation has been implemented, and I've been adding and playing with the prototype ever since. Latest thing to work is the special move, here :

http://gfycat.com/WarpedUnderstatedCanary

There's also a menu now :

http://gfycat.com/IncomparableDistantArmedcrab

..and all kinds of other things! Still a lot to do, but it's such a great feeling when things begin to mix together.

 

[charsace]

The more I play around with the unity character controller, the more I hate it. which also leads me to believe people aren't using it in most games.

 

[electroflame]

The more I play around with the unity character controller, the more I hate it. which also leads me to believe people aren't using it in most games.

I've never really seen the point of it, since a Rigidbody will do most of the same stuff, with much more flexibility.

The only thing I liked about the Character Controller was how it handled slopes and steps, but that can be emulated on a Rigidbody without all the heartache that comes from Character Controllers.

In my (admittedly not super-vast) experience, a Character Controller works alright for drag-and-drop, quick prototyping. But if you actually try to do anything past that, they're more trouble than their worth (the performance horrors if you try to do multiplayer with those!).

 

[missile]

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

MotorStorm was dope! I hope you stick around. *Good luck!* /liquidsvoice

 

[Turfster]

The more I play around with the unity character controller, the more I hate it. which also leads me to believe people aren't using it in most games.

Both the character controller and their own car controller are rather useless and crap. Car controller example can't drive straight and doesn't even come to a rolling stop if you don't mod it.

 

[kyotokid]

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

Congrats, I've been watching the progress for a while

 

[Jobbs]

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.)

I don't think it has to be a trade off at all. I have numerous ideas about how to use traditional animation to add detail and movement to the ships. I could do transformations, subtly tilting, etc, all with traditional frames of animation. This could look better than any generic polygon ships type game which would be 99% of games these days (especially when combined with a shading technique similar to spritelamp or what you did). It could look amazing, and indeed, I think what you're doing looks better than the typical polygon style game without question. It's not impossible to make good art with polygons, of course, but the type of polygon models I see in most games just look dull and generic. Good 2D art tends to have more personality and flare.

My idea is pretty crazy, too, inspired heavily by the old Dos game Solar Winds, but with a few other layers of game mechanics on top of that I think could be big. So it's a shooter game but also an RPG with exploration and so on. A ship in the universe. Also a roguelike. (not kidding)

I don't think I have the programming knowledge to do it myself as currently, implementing the features I envision, maybe once I have time for it I'll go looking for collabs.

Congrats, I've been watching the progress for a while

Thanks

 

[hypernima]

Welcome! Care to share which engine you're planning to use, or are you looking for advice on that regard?

Because some people, like Roanak and me, use GameMaker, so we wouldn't be able to help out much with Construct or Unity projects. And then vice versa for people using Construct or Unity.

Really though, what's probably going to help you the most is coming in to the thread with a specific problem like "hey, I'm using Unity, here's what I'm trying to do, why isn't it working?" You have the greatest chance in that case of being seen quickly by someone who knows how to help and answer you.



Welcome! Always nice to see new faces.

I haven't decided yet, after playing more MM styled games like IWTBTG and IWBTB either GM or MMF2 seem applicable for this style of game.

 

[razu]

I'm off on holiday for a week tomorrow. I expect good things on my return! Keep it cool people!

I am definitely starting screencasting some development when I get back too. Can't wait!

 

[Five]

I haven't decided yet, after playing more MM styled games like IWTBTG and IWBTB either GM or MMF2 seem applicable for this style of game.

Well, in my extremely biased opinion (having used GM nearly ten years and never tried MMF2), I recommend you go with GM.

 

[klaus]

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:

Perhaps the transparent parallax diffuse shader (assuming you are using Unity) helps to alleviate the issue. All you need to do is to bake a height / displacement map from the 3d model, which also gives you the normal map "for free" (just duplicate the file & set import options to generate a normalmap from heightmap). It will probably not work well if the ship has very steep structures, but it might improve the 3d effect..

PS: I really like the look of your game, looks much better than a few weeks ago ^^

 

[Makai]

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

This is the Wild West. No rules here. Thanks for joining!

 

[Amirai]

I haven't decided yet, after playing more MM styled games like IWTBTG and IWBTB either GM or MMF2 seem applicable for this style of game.

I'd highly reccommend checking out construct 2 instead of MMF. C2 is like everything MMF should have been.

 

[charsace]

I've never really seen the point of it, since a Rigidbody will do most of the same stuff, with much more flexibility.

The only thing I liked about the Character Controller was how it handled slopes and steps, but that can be emulated on a Rigidbody without all the heartache that comes from Character Controllers.

In my (admittedly not super-vast) experience, a Character Controller works alright for drag-and-drop, quick prototyping. But if you actually try to do anything past that, they're more trouble than their worth (the performance horrors if you try to do multiplayer with those!).

Was trying to do player collisions against enemies and didn't realize character controller runs outside the physics engine.

Both the character controller and their own car controller are rather useless and crap. Car controller example can't drive straight and doesn't even come to a rolling stop if you don't mod it.

I tried it and could see within an hour that their CC was not good.

 

[hypernima]

Well, in my extremely biased opinion (having used GM nearly ten years and never tried MMF2), I recommend you go with GM.

I'd highly reccommend checking out construct 2 instead of MMF. C2 is like everything MMF should have been.

I can check the C2 demo since I don't have 400 bucks to spend atm. But it looks a lot more coding intensive, which is something I still have this summer to learn.

GM has a free trial iirc, so I'm going to look into getting 8.1

 

[Amirai]

I can check the C2 demo since I don't have 400 bucks to spend atm. But it looks a lot more coding intensive, which is something I still have this summer to learn.

GM has a free trial iirc, so I'm going to look into getting 8.1

You can start with the personal edition, which is currently $119 (though it should be going up to $129 somewhere in the next 24 hours). You can use that until you've earned $5,000 from using C2, at which point you can upgrade to a business license.

Having used both MMF and C2, I wouldn't agree that C2 is more coding intensive than MMF. I certainly find C2 much easier to use. From what I've heard, GM is actually the much more coding instensive choice, as GML (a scripting language) is required to make anything more complex than the simplest of games (I don't have extensive experience with GM though, that's simply what I've heard from a lot of people who use it at places like tigsource).

 

[Dead Prince]

I can check the C2 demo since I don't have 400 bucks to spend atm. But it looks a lot more coding intensive, which is something I still have this summer to learn.

GM has a free trial iirc, so I'm going to look into getting 8.1

PM ashodin about C2 since that's what he's using for his game apexicon.

 

[Shadow64]

From what I've heard, GM is actually the much more coding instensive choice, as GML (a scripting language) is required to make anything more complex than the simplest of games (I don't have extensive experience with GM though, that's simply what I've heard from a lot of people who use it at places like tigsource).

I'm just starting to go through learning GM and I don't think it's so bad, programming-wise. I feel like I could make a lot of games with it before having to dive into GML. If you're looking to START making games, it's probably the right place for you and as you learn to use it you'll be at a place to start making more complex stuff.

I'm basically paraphrasing a lot of what the creator of Gunpoint (a GM game) had to say about it, but since I taught myself AS3 and now I'm using this, I'm finding myself pretty happy with not having to worry SO much about all of the rendering/framerate issues I was having with Flash.

Also I just got approved today and this is my first GAF post. Hi!

Ps. If you are thinking of grabbing GM it's having a pretty solid deal right now. You can get up to professional edition for pretty cheap and then the HTML export is only another $50. I think total I've paid about $150 to be where I am with it and I can export to Win, Mac, Linux, and HTML. Pretty solid.

 

[Ashodin]

C2 is awesome when you get the hang of it. It's really designer focused.

 

[karaokelove]

First off, amazing job on this thread! Thank you for supplying indie devs with such an awesome platform with which to promote our games!

Rather than get too in depth with my game description, I'll just post the quick pitch and some GUI mockups. If you're interested in the nuts and bolts, you can check out our dev blog at www.thunderpunchstudios.com for an inside look at the development of Puzzle Hunters.

Quick Pitch: Puzzle Quest meets Avengers Alliance

Battle Screen

Team Management Screen

Character Management Screen (Attack Panel Only)

Of course we will be using our own characters, since we don't have the rights to any Marvel or DC IP's. I'm also about to be removing the 4 attributes directly under each character portrait, which should make the UI a lot less intimidating.

We should have a playable demo out sometime within the next 3 months.

Finally, we just recently got accepted by Nintendo to develop for Wii U and 3ds. While we're probably still going to aim for an initial release on PC and possibly Tablet, there are some definite advantages to releasing on Wii U that make it an enticing option.

Thanks for reading!

-Brian Woody, Thunderpunch Studios

 

[AusRoachman]

Made a quick dogfighting video with some more ships and a base

next thing to add is some ground turrets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xMuvy1B0C8&feature=youtu.be

 

[RedHotChimiChanga]

Thanks for reading!

-Brian Woody, Thunderpunch Studios

Do you like Doctor Doom? =D

 

[superNESjoe]

Long time lurker of this thread, let me first just say how awesome I think it is the way you all come together and support each other's developments and aspirations.

I'm a newer developer myself, I've released two small games using Game Maker. I've teamed up with a friend who graduated recently to work on my third and final Game Maker game before moving on to Unity.

As I'm sure any developer in here will remember from their first projects, the quality of my first titles may not be high but I still hold a lot of pride in seeing them through and finishing them. I've enjoyed reading the posts in this thread up until this point and am excited to be able to engage with you all from this point on.

 

[Alchemy]

Maybe this is the wrong place to post this, but I'm pretty excited and want to share what me and a few friends have been building in Unity. This was also posted in the Steam Greenlight page as we just launched our Greenlight campaign! We're still working on it, but we have a little over half of the game's content built and we're cruising along trying to get it finished.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252729659

The hook for Tinertia is that you use the right analog stick to fire rockets in any direction (on a 2D plane) and if you want to jump you need to fire at the ground to rocket jump, there is no jump button. Everything is physics based, so the angle you shoot at determines how you jump in the air, off walls or off the ceiling!

We're going for very tight, difficult, and short levels that really force the player to learn the rocket mechanics. Hopefully a few of you guys are big into difficult platformers!

 

[Shadow64]

I'm a newer developer myself, I've released two small games using Game Maker.

Would love a link to these to see what you've created.

 

[superNESjoe]

Would love a link to these to see what you've created.

Sure! These first two titles were largely learning experiences. My third game is the first one where I'm going into it really feeling confident about the design.

The games are Jesh and Super Zombie Poop 2K, and both are on Steam Greenlight. You can see brief information and trailers for each at http://m07games.com/

 

[TunaUppercut]

As for Honey Rose : there's been leaps of progress these past few days : all of the animation has been implemented, and I've been adding and playing with the prototype ever since. Latest thing to work is the special move, here :

http://gfycat.com/WarpedUnderstatedCanary

There's also a menu now :

http://gfycat.com/IncomparableDistantArmedcrab

..and all kinds of other things! Still a lot to do, but it's such a great feeling when things begin to mix together.

Wow. This is awesome. This is really impressive. How many people are working on this project?

 

[friken]

I don't think it has to be a trade off at all. I have numerous ideas about how to use traditional animation to add detail and movement to the ships. I could do transformations, subtly tilting, etc, all with traditional frames of animation. This could look better than any generic polygon ships type game which would be 99% of games these days (especially when combined with a shading technique similar to spritelamp or what you did). It could look amazing, and indeed, I think what you're doing looks better than the typical polygon style game without question. It's not impossible to make good art with polygons, of course, but the type of polygon models I see in most games just look dull and generic. Good 2D art tends to have more personality and flare.

My idea is pretty crazy, too, inspired heavily by the old Dos game Solar Winds, but with a few other layers of game mechanics on top of that I think could be big. So it's a shooter game but also an RPG with exploration and so on. A ship in the universe. Also a roguelike. (not kidding)

I don't think I have the programming knowledge to do it myself as currently, implementing the features I envision, maybe once I have time for it I'll go looking for collabs.

I agree 2d can definitely be amazing and in my opinion far less generic. When I say trade off I mainly mean losing the freebies like rotation of geometry vs making sprite frame animations. For sure lots of 2d tricks, techniques, etc to even surpass what you get 'free' w 3d models.

I loved solar winds, great game. Let's finish our current projects and maybe a collab is in our future

 

[friken]

Perhaps the transparent parallax diffuse shader (assuming you are using Unity) helps to alleviate the issue. All you need to do is to bake a height / displacement map from the 3d model, which also gives you the normal map "for free" (just duplicate the file & set import options to generate a normalmap from heightmap). It will probably not work well if the ship has very steep structures, but it might improve the 3d effect..

PS: I really like the look of your game, looks much better than a few weeks ago ^^

Thanks for the input. I've refined the new 2d sprite lighting shader/normal mapping and very pleased with it.

No go on the height map from 3d models because there are no models for these new ships We are in the process of moving away from modeling the ships as modeling is taking us too long w limited skillset and our 2d artist can make much better looking stuff in 2d than our modeling skill.

 

[Ranger X]

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.

Ok thanks, now at least I get what this is about.
Looks like I won't become an effect or shader programmer anytime soon. lol

 

[Five]

Anyone know how dependable most online colorblind filters are? I'm making a memory matching game which is basically a straight rip of this puzzle (http://youtu.be/AWoUtuE_f3A?t=10m51s) and it occurred to me that people might not be playing with audio, so a visual cue would help. Coloring the text on the headstones is the easiest, but then it occurred to me that maybe some color deficient vision people might not be able to solve the puzzle.

These are the colors I'm using right now, and some of the colorblind filters make it super hard to tell the difference between the colors and some of the filters don't affect it too much. So I guess I'm wondering if anyone else has experience solving this problem.

 

[friken]

I spent the day refining the custom sprite shader, rgb ramp, and learning how to work with our artist to make the lighting images for normals in a balanced way. I also made a utility for our artist so he can test base/left/top image first for ships in-game without having to have me import and make a test build. Here is his newest ship w/ tweaked lighting. This is from the util so the ship is way bigger than normal and I purposefully made the gif slowmotion so you you can see the lighting better since rotation speed was pretty quick:

gif compression makes lighting look like it errors, video of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Loyq_vaXx-0&feature=youtu.be

here is the base and top lighting images:

this ship is for the ornyon race for context:

--

As for Honey Rose : there's been leaps of progress these past few days : all of the animation has been implemented, and I've been adding and playing with the prototype ever since. Latest thing to work is the special move, here :

http://gfycat.com/WarpedUnderstatedCanary

I agree with others... this is looking really, really good. I'm also curious how many people on your team. Those animations are looking like a TON of time went into them.

I'm pretty excited and want to share what me and a few friends have been building in Unity. This was also posted in the Steam Greenlight page as we just launched our Greenlight campaign!

Fun looking game and good work on the greenlight video and page. I added my yes vote. Best of luck getting the coveted green light. I suspect it will do very well.

 

[MABManZ]

Here to plug my current Greenlight campaign and upcoming Kickstarter next week!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/stats/259565917

Combat Core is a 3D arena fighting game that borrows elements from games like Power Stone, Custom Robo, and Super Smash Bros. Hyper-powered multiplayer combat with custom fighters, weapon pickups, powerups, and environmental hazards!

I've got an alpha demo ready and will release it alongside my Kickstarter launch. There's pretty much nothing for 3D arena fighters on PC, or even on consoles (outside of Smash) so I hope I can fill the niche!



Youtube Trailer Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GghJVaLkRx0

 

[missile]

Ok thanks, now at least I get what this is about.
Looks like I won't become an effect or shader programmer anytime soon. lol

No shaders applied. It's pure C, structs, and bytes.


Reducing frequency bleeding.
Basically, if you truncate any continuous signal, which you have too when you
want to make a spectral analysis, and which you implicitly do while you are
sampling a continuous signal on a finite interval, then you will introduce a
jump discontinuity if the signal doesn't happen to line up perfectly on both
ends of the sample interval (including derivatives). This discontinuity
introduces higher frequencies into the sampled digital signal, as one can see
by watching the last animation of mine. For example, if the signal lines up
perfectly, no artificial frequencies are introduces, i.e.

blue: part of a sine wave signal defined on whole real axis, red: samples of
said sine wave on a bounded interval

Now if we just increase the frequency of the above sine wave by just 1/10 Hz,
then the end points won't match any longer on the sample interval with the
result that the spectrum ramps up indicating higher frequencies in the digital
signal which aren't there in the continuous signal, leading to oscillation
upon reconstruction, i.e.

To alleviate this problem, one can either cut off the higher frequencies of
the spectrum in some way, or try to smooth the discontinuity in question. Both
techniques are equivalent.

One technique to do so is known as windowing. Basically, you just multiply the
continuous signal on the sampling interval with another function such that the
result possesses the properties needed. One of those function is the so-called
Hann window, i.e. 0.5-0.5*cos(x). If we multiply this function against the
original signal on the sample interval, the resulting signal makes a smooth
transition across the endpoints of the sample interval, i.e.

(Hann window) * (sine wave at 1.1Hz)

The original sine wave gets a little bit distorted towards the end points and
damped across the interval, but we get something in return. Look at the
spectrum! The higher frequencies are damped to a great extent. Virtually no
oscillation. But rest assured there is a trade-off to be made, but it's worth
the effort in most cases.

This technique is quite important for proper filter construction and will be
used within the Retro 3D Engine.

Retro Spectral Analyzer / NG

 

[missile]

...

...

Looks pretty cool on its own! You guys have some real momentum going. :+

 

[Jobbs]

I spent the day refining the custom sprite shader, rgb ramp, and learning how to work with our artist to make the lighting images for normals in a balanced way. I also made a utility for our artist so he can test base/left/top image first for ships in-game without having to have me import and make a test build. Here is his newest ship w/ tweaked lighting. This is from the util so the ship is way bigger than normal and I purposefully made the gif slowmotion so you you can see the lighting better since rotation speed was pretty quick:

We've gotten to the point where I'm trying to insert money into the screen and it's not taking it.

 

[Pehesse]

Wow. This is awesome. This is really impressive. How many people are working on this project?

I agree with others... this is looking really, really good. I'm also curious how many people on your team. Those animations are looking like a TON of time went into them.

Thanks a million to you both! I'm actually working alone on this project. There should be soon things coming from a music composer (a great one at that, but I'll wait until it's formally confirmed to get all excited and tell names), but as far as everything else goes (even sound effects... shudder), it's just me. There HAS been a ton of time put into those animations (4 to 5 months now, and many many more to go) - the game itself must have been worked on like a month or so only for now :-D

Friken : I love how the top down ship view look, it's way more interesting that the earlier 3D to me. Probably less "good" from a technical standpoint, but has a lot more personality! Also, that GUI is looking damn nice! Though maybe it's the GIF compression, but the glow effect at the bottom sometimes makes the "crew" part a bit hard to read? Nevetheless, I love it.

To join the discussion about what engines are interesting : I've tried my hand at game maker, RPG Maker, Construct 2 and a bit of Unity right now, and I'd recommend one or the other based on a combination of your developer approach, your skill background and the requirements of the game you want to make.

For instance, of those, I really like RPG Maker the best, but it's clearly unsuitable for many types of games. For anything related to text management and image displacement, though, I found it to be the easiest to use, so anything text heavy should try that, in my opinion! For "graphical type" designers, I really found it to be the easiest to use, with many possibilities when you start playing around. You can even script in Ruby to change things at a deeper level, and you can do stuff that doesn't look anything like a RPG, or a classic RPG Maker game for that matter, if you put that kind of effort it.

As for Construct (C2) I'd say it's the second one on my list, first one when you consider games that are clearly outside the range of RPGMaker stuff (like, say, a fighting game). Not to say a fighting game is a perfect fit for C2 either, it probably would have been best with Unity actually, but as far as development goes, if you don't like writing code, then I find C2 to be the best : all the logic behind writing code, but none of the syntax. It takes a while to learn the ins and outs of everything it has (I certainly don't) but the range of possibilities is already great, either using the built in "behaviors" or by designing your own stuff. So I'd say it's the kind of thing to use if you know a bit of programming logic, but none of the syntax, or are a very graphical person instead of technical, or want to design a game primarily 2D, either side scrolling or top down. One of the limitations I'm struggling against right now is its text management, but there are apparently some plugins that help with that by allowing use of xml files and the likes?

I'd be interested in Ashodin's experiences in exporting the game in anything other than a browser game/a reskinned browser game, on PC, using C2?

As for Game Maker, I definitely respect it because of the games it allowed to do, but I found it to be the hardest to use actually. As in, it seems to have the most possibilities out of the box, but the commands are a bit more obscure in what they do, so you have to learn the engine a lot more than, say, Construct, to get anything complex to work. I'll admit I haven't used it in years though and I disliked the experience, so I probably just didn't give it the time it needed.

I'd love to try out Stencyl at some point, because of how Jobbs talks about it, so that's probably the next thing I'll do after Honey. Maybe it's another program to consider?

 

[missile]

My girlfriend loves it too. It's awesome, really.

 

[Noogy]

I'm finally learning Unity. Heck, might even make a game with it.

 

[Jarekx]

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!

Those sprites are awesome. Great work. Can't wait to play the game!

 

[kyotokid]

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

oooh I like the atmosphere here. Look forward to seeing more

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

Anyone know how dependable most online colorblind filters are? I'm making a memory matching game which is basically a straight rip of this puzzle (http://youtu.be/AWoUtuE_f3A?t=10m51s) and it occurred to me that people might not be playing with audio, so a visual cue would help. Coloring the text on the headstones is the easiest, but then it occurred to me that maybe some color deficient vision people might not be able to solve the puzzle.

These are the colors I'm using right now, and some of the colorblind filters make it super hard to tell the difference between the colors and some of the filters don't affect it too much. So I guess I'm wondering if anyone else has experience solving this problem.

There's actually multiple different types of colour blindness and it is really hard to be able to cover all of them - Red/Green colour blindness is the most common, but it actually ranges to full on 'can only see in greyscale'.

What you see most pattern matching games use (match 3 puzzle games for example) is to have optional symbol recognition in addition to just colours.

Depending on how much you want to cater for player ease of usability (which is sounds like you already are to some extent by adding colour pattern recognition as an alternative to an audio based puzzle) would be to add some symbolic recognition as well, or to offer an alternative means of progression for people who literally cannot solve that puzzle (some sort of resource cost to bypass, or some sort of time gating that lets someone brute force it if they've been there too long or whatever).

Without knowing the specifics of your puzzle, I can't be more specific with alternative solutions, but most puzzles introduced to non-puzzle genre games designed to be time gates (road bumps) for content, rather than gateways (road blocks).

From what I've seen of your game, it seems to be a metroidvania style platformer, so perhaps you could offer an alternative method of bypass that relies on a different player skill; so let people who want to use congitive skill solve a puzzle, but have an optional miniboss who drops the player solution to allow for a reflexive skill solution as well?

 

[Pehesse]

My girlfriend loves it too. It's awesome, really.

Many thanks to you both :-D

 

[Diablohead]

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

How many metroid style games are in this thread now?

Looks really nice, are you animating the sprite with drawn frames or using pieces to make up the character?

 

[klaus]

Thanks for the input. I've refined the new 2d sprite lighting shader/normal mapping and very pleased with it.

No go on the height map from 3d models because there are no models for these new ships We are in the process of moving away from modeling the ships as modeling is taking us too long w limited skillset and our 2d artist can make much better looking stuff in 2d than our modeling skill.

here is the base and top lighting images:

Now you have me confused - how did you do the lighting images (from which you derived the normal maps iirc) if you have no 3d model? They look quite detailed to me. Oh and it's still possible to get a heightmap, CrazyBump (and possibly other tools) can generate heightmaps form normalmaps

No shaders applied. It's pure C, structs, and bytes.


Reducing frequency bleeding.
Basically, if you truncate any continuous signal, which you have too when you
want to make a spectral analysis, and which you implicitly do while you are
sampling a continuous signal on a finite interval, then you will introduce a
jump discontinuity if the signal doesn't happen to line up perfectly on both
ends of the sample interval (including derivatives). This discontinuity
introduces higher frequencies into the sampled digital signal, as one can see
by watching the last animation of mine. For example, if the signal lines up
perfectly, no artificial frequencies are introduces, i.e.

blue: part of a sine wave signal defined on whole real axis, red: samples of
said sine wave on a bounded interval

Now if we just increase the frequency of the above sine wave by just 1/10 Hz,
then the end points won't match any longer on the sample interval with the
result that the spectrum ramps up indicating higher frequencies in the digital
signal which aren't there in the continuous signal, leading to oscillation
upon reconstruction, i.e.

To alleviate this problem, one can either cut off the higher frequencies of
the spectrum in some way, or try to smooth the discontinuity in question. Both
techniques are equivalent.

One technique to do so is known as windowing. Basically, you just multiply the
continuous signal on the sampling interval with another function such that the
result possesses the properties needed. One of those function is the so-called
Hann window, i.e. 0.5-0.5*cos(x). If we multiply this function against the
original signal on the sample interval, the resulting signal makes a smooth
transition across the endpoints of the sample interval, i.e.

(Hann window) * (sine wave at 1.1Hz)

The original sine wave gets a little bit distorted towards the end points and
damped across the interval, but we get something in return. Look at the
spectrum! The higher frequencies are damped to a great extent. Virtually no
oscillation. But rest assured there is a trade-off to be made, but it's worth
the effort in most cases.

This technique is quite important for proper filter construction and will be
used within the Retro 3D Engine.

Retro Spectral Analyzer / NG

Keep those posts coming, that's really interesting & informative! Will you do the signal processing in the retro engine via shaders / GPGPU? I assume CPU won't be fast enough for large resolutions..

 

[karaokelove]

Do you like Doctor Doom? =D

Ha, you could say that!

 

[karaokelove]

This actually isn't my project, but I figure this would be the perfect place to talk about it. Any fans of 2.5d fighting games (like SFIV, UMvC3, MK9, and Injustice) should absolutely check out the Universal Fighting Engine. It's a Unity tool set designed to allow users to create amazingly in-depth custom fighting games with as little work and experience as possible.

You can check out their youtube channel here for a ton of videos showcasing the power and versatility of UFE. There's even already a Kickstarter project for a game being developed with UFE (though it's not the best run project I've ever seen...).

 

[F-Pina]

Maybe this is the wrong place to post this, but I'm pretty excited and want to share what me and a few friends have been building in Unity. This was also posted in the Steam Greenlight page as we just launched our Greenlight campaign! We're still working on it, but we have a little over half of the game's content built and we're cruising along trying to get it finished.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252729659

The hook for Tinertia is that you use the right analog stick to fire rockets in any direction (on a 2D plane) and if you want to jump you need to fire at the ground to rocket jump, there is no jump button. Everything is physics based, so the angle you shoot at determines how you jump in the air, off walls or off the ceiling!

We're going for very tight, difficult, and short levels that really force the player to learn the rocket mechanics. Hopefully a few of you guys are big into difficult platformers!

Looks awesome dude. Voted!

 

[friken]

Now you have me confused - how did you do the lighting images (from which you derived the normal maps iirc) if you have no 3d model? They look quite detailed to me. Oh and it's still possible to get a heightmap, CrazyBump (and possibly other tools) can generate heightmaps form normalmaps

The sprites and lighting from top and lighting from left are hand drawn and the normalmap created pragmatically from the two directional light images similar to SpriteLamp's system:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/finnmorgan/sprite-lamp-dynamic-lighting-for-2d-art

I'll definitely look into crazybump. I also want to look into an easiest method to make a 3d model from the sprite/normal for 3d printing and promo art material.