exmachina64
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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
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show me your skeleton
Member
gangnam style?
Dynamite Shikoku
Congratulations, you really deserve it!
mobile suit gangnam style?
In other news, switching from particles to a mesh based explosion effect has improved my games performance so much. Getting a solid 60fps at full-res (2560 x 1440) on my iMac now.
In other news, switching from particles to a mesh based explosion effect has improved my games performance so much. Getting a solid 60fps at full-res (2560 x 1440) on my iMac now.
My team did for our last game using XNA framework. It took a really long time, and I wouldn't recommend it.
Caveat to that if you have a very specific game design that mechanically differs from what most engines give you out of the box -- but even then, "figuring it out" in engine is usually easier than writing your own.
Psychic Norse mythology!
What kind of control are you looking for?
I think as soon as he could switch vehicles it felt natural to be without vehicle, as the constant is Mike.
I'll have to do the animation and code for that. But a character is actually a lot more manageable than a vehicle when it comes to trying to talk to NPCs.
I think you'll spend most of your time in a mix of vehicles, doing missions. Then spend a little time talking to people as Mike.
Toying with the idea of being able to switch vehicle at any time, as you can now. It's kinda fun
Thanks. Yeah different ships will have very different handling. It is subtle, but the ship in the video does recoil on firing that pushes the ship sidways for firing the side canons. Ships also have strafe that I didn't show in the video. I suspect we will make a ship or two that has massive recoil where using the engine in clever ways could do some fun things
What kind of control are you looking for? The only issues I have had with Unity so far is collision issues.
I do.
Me and my college wrote an engine using XNA framework for our game Snails and then we ported it to iOS using Xamarin.
Then, I rewrote and restructured the whole thing using c++. This is the engine I'm using to write my new game.
I want to write simple 2D games, and for that purpose this homemade engines do the trick.
A new low poly experiment, this was actually really tricky:
It is fully shader based, no animation and no particles, running in the UDK.
Everyone seems to be going for this look. Are you using textures or vertex colors?
A new low poly experiment, this was actually really tricky:
It is fully shader based, no animation and no particles, running in the UDK.
Looks great.
When you say it's fully shader based, what triangles are you drawing? Is it just a quad with all of that in it? Or are the smoke clouds a draw call each...?
He seems to be doing something similar to Kentucky Route Zero.
BlastProcessing
Member
Pan across the city.
Games pretty much done now. We actually have enough time to jam out a few easter eggs.
Games pretty much done now. We actually have enough time to jam out a few easter eggs.
I think as soon as he could switch vehicles it felt natural to be without vehicle, as the constant is Mike.
I'll have to do the animation and code for that. But a character is actually a lot more manageable than a vehicle when it comes to trying to talk to NPCs.
I think you'll spend most of your time in a mix of vehicles, doing missions. Then spend a little time talking to people as Mike.
Toying with the idea of being able to switch vehicle at any time, as you can now. It's kinda fun
What if all the NPC's were in vehicles too? So you could drive alongside somebody as you were being told the next mission, or flying your helicopter in (a simple) formation? If you wanted you could mix them, have Mike hover over a car in his helicopter as they head to the next waypoint for example?
I'm always super impressed by what you put out.A new low poly experiment, this was actually really tricky:
It is fully shader based, no animation and no particles, running in the UDK.
I like the little embers; did you have to hand-animate every piece of this?
Ramp textures are used there, mainly with normal/fresnel but also based on distance. Vertex colors are used to mark different intervals and some amounts.
Well, there is still also geometry that shader is applied to. Basic geometry that have their vertexes moved through world position offset in the shader. It is one shader but with 3 different variations of settings, for the fire part, the sparks part, and the clouds part. So the whole is then 3 draw calls.
Zero animation, all shader.
I had to paint some vertex colors though to define amounts and intervals, for the embers I just generated the vertex colors with noise.This is the first image I'm sharing for my new game. This is Snails art style, it's the type of art I can do...
I'm not disclosing any more information at this moment. I can only share that the game is almost done, and it will be released on iOS and Android.
That mouse drawing still needs some work. I just didn't figured out what's wrong exactly. I cannot change the size because it would affect gameplay.
I'm not disclosing any more information at this moment. I can only share that the game is almost done, and it will be released on iOS and Android.
That mouse drawing still needs some work. I just didn't figured out what's wrong exactly. I cannot change the size because it would affect gameplay.
Well it could work that way. But wandering a character up to a static NPC would be somewhat easier! And there's only one of me
Oh damn, I didn't notice the line under the gif.Zero animation, all shader.
That's even more impressive knowing that. I take it that the brightest center area continues to face the camera if it rotates around? Shader stuff like this is so damn cool; I love the experimental stuff you post.
A new low poly experiment, this was actually really tricky:
It is fully shader based, no animation and no particles, running in the UDK.
Well... hot damn.
I wish I had even an inkling on how to start on that.
I mean, I can do something similar in pure code, but shaders have no real data lookup and persistence except in textures, right?
You'd still have to have different monobehaviours for different things though, right? Which would then have to implement all the interfaces of the underlying structure, just to pass them on, and every time you add something, you have to remember to update your 'main' monobehaviour for that thing.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't really like the component design at first either, but .HasA is so much easier and cleaner than big huge hydra-classes that just grow and grow.
There is one GameObject which has a MonoBehavior script. Instead of a couple of interfaces, there now is one base object class. Every object adds itself to a list when instantiated.
I do like the component based design and behavior scripts, but I think that circumventing it offers some nice advantages if you don't need certain features, or if you want to do certain things by yourself. Right now I'm only using it for large numbers of flocking enemies and the player, which interacts with them. Optimizing, like caching data is a lot easier this way. And the fact that you can use constructors and more OO design comes in handy.
ohblahitsme
Member
Howdy all, I need a program to do some 2d animations in and I was hoping you guys could help me. I'm using Haxe+OpenFL+HaxeFlixel, so I need my animations in sprite sheets. So far I've just been piecing images together but that sucks a lot. I'm willing to spend some money, but not too much. Hopefully under $100. Any recommendations?
TL;DR - I need a drawing program that supports animations for under $100.
Mac preferred!
TL;DR - I need a drawing program that supports animations for under $100.
Mac preferred!
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
Spine is pretty nifty, and has served me well so far. It has a Mac distro and a Haxe runtime (which I think means you don't actually have to rely on spritesheets, since none of the runtimes I've used do). Unfortunately, although you can get the $60 essential version, I can't in good conscious recommend something less than the currently $250 professional version. Still, there's a demo of the software that you might like to try out.
---
I spent today doing some character art. I'm kinda iffy on the second design, Pupus, but the rest I'm pretty happy with:
ohblahitsme
Member
Spine looks great! But it looks like you need to have the images drawn beforehand? I could work with that. Thank you! Maybe I'll buy Sketchbook Pro with it for a total of $120.
Any cheap alternatives to Sketchbook?
Edit:
Hmm thanks! $250 is really expensive though. Arrrg. Is there a particular reason the Professional one is much better?
Also nice art! What did you use to draw it?
Did you also wrote the rendering backend? Stated otherwise, are you using
more then just "put/setpixel" for doing all of the rendering, or are you using a
third-party graphics API?
Beautiful! :+ Well done!A new low poly experiment, this was actually really tricky:
It is fully shader based, no animation and no particles, running in the UDK.
^ Nice feed!
Love Pupus the most! He looks so funny! xD :+
... I spent today doing some character art. I'm kinda iffy on the second design, Pupus, but the rest I'm pretty happy with:
Love Pupus the most! He looks so funny! xD :+
Thanks! I'm using Adobe Illustrator. I've heard great things about Inkscape, which was free last time I checked, but I've never had a reason to use it. Illustrator's the industry standard, and I was raised on it since my dad was in clothing design when I was younger. So Inkscape hasn't been something I've ever looked into.
Regarding Spine, the main reason I'd advocate for professional is the use of auto-keying animations. When you move stuff in a new frame, it automatically stays there instead of you having to manually confirm it each time. I pretty much always have auto-key on, and can accidentally lose a good amount of work if it accidentally gets toggled off. Most of the other pro-only features have been pretty handy as well, but not necessarily essential to my workflow. To be honest, it feels a lot like they cut out some features from the software so they could get away with charging more, but I like Spine enough and it's helped me enough that the price was worth it.
But maybe you find you don't need that. It's why I mentioned that Spine has a trial version. If you find yourself able to work well without the pro features, don't let my discouragement keep you down!
To further elaborate, my general process is this: draw the character in Illustrator, specifically drawn to be in segmented articulations. Export the art as a PNG at 2x2 size to get better interpolation. Import the art into Spine. Build the skeleton. Animate it there. Export the animation and load it in my runtime (GameMaker Studio).
This is what the player looks like drawn in AI, first to scale and then split up into her individual articulations. Spine builds the actual texture atlas for you, and does it much more efficiently than I have here.
Then it's pretty simple to build a skeleton in Spine and attach the images to it.
ohblahitsme
Member
That's great! Thank you! I'm gonna try the trial when I'm done with finals tomorrow. Hopefully I don't need auto-keying. By manually confirming do you mean what he's doing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Eg7M43MoPu8 ? Like pressing K or clicking the key icon for every frame? I know I've used onion skinning before and it's been very useful (but not necessary). Hopefully I can get by without it.
When you draw your characters, do you draw each segment in a new layer? I must admit I'm not the best artist so the thought of planning a drawing like that kind of scares me.
Are you making an OS there, Missile?
Correct. There's a key binding, default K, which sets the rotation/translation of the bone for that frame. That probably seems pretty simple. For me, since the trial lets you test out auto-keying, it became pretty evidently superior in only a short time. But that's just for me, so maybe it won't for you.
In Illustrator, I don't work with layers very often. It seems a bit redundant since all of the shapes are vector objects. But I do group the vectors together (cmd-G) that make up each articulation.
And it definitely takes thought regarding planning. Figuring out how things will need to overlap, what order they'll need to be in; those kinds of things take practice. But Spine helps out a lot with this. For one thing, nothing's stuck on its hinge, so you can pan images around in addition to rotating them if it sells the movement better, and you can change the draw order on any frame of the animation, and the pro version of Spine also has mesh warping so you're not limited to rigid movement.
Correct. There's a key binding, default K, which sets the rotation/translation of the bone for that frame. That probably seems pretty simple. For me, since the trial lets you test out auto-keying, it became pretty evidently superior in only a short time. But that's just for me, so maybe it won't for you.
In Illustrator, I don't work with layers very often. It seems a bit redundant since all of the shapes are vector objects. But I do group the vectors together (cmd-G) that make up each articulation.
And it definitely takes thought regarding planning. Figuring out how things will need to overlap, what order they'll need to be in; those kinds of things take practice. But Spine helps out a lot with this. For one thing, nothing's stuck on its hinge, so you can pan images around in addition to rotating them if it sells the movement better, and you can change the draw order on any frame of the animation, and the pro version of Spine also has mesh warping so you're not limited to rigid movement.
I was thinking the same thing. You want low-level control of everything, you want to render all pixels directly instead of using libraries, you're making a window manager, might as well finish making the OS!
Would you be running Mac? On my previous game I used Spine along with Sketch, which is a vector drawing program. I believe it's not too expensive. The export workflow was pretty nice too. It was quite easy to export the pieces separately to png or whatever format you need.
I think I figured out a low-impact way to synchronize different animations. This was for the specific goal of synchronizing palette-swapped animations, but it should work for any animations with the same number of frames.
I also made a super simple palette-swapping command-line utility. The sad part is that of course there are probably 50 other tools that already do this for free, better, AND probably 50 ways to implement it more efficiently and effectively than the couple of days I spent on it. But hey, it seems like it works well enough, and I just have to get all the palette colors figured out.
I also made a super simple palette-swapping command-line utility. The sad part is that of course there are probably 50 other tools that already do this for free, better, AND probably 50 ways to implement it more efficiently and effectively than the couple of days I spent on it. But hey, it seems like it works well enough, and I just have to get all the palette colors figured out.
I think I figured out a low-impact way to synchronize different animations. This was for the specific goal of synchronizing palette-swapped animations, but it should work for any animations with the same number of frames.
I also made a super simple palette-swapping command-line utility. The sad part is that of course there are probably 50 other tools that already do this for free, better, AND probably 50 ways to implement it more efficiently and effectively than the couple of days I spent on it. But hey, it seems like it works well enough, and I just have to get all the palette colors figured out.
Why were they falling out of sync? Floating point errors?
I'm using my own rendered, but it's pretty simple. It only draws sprites, and a sprite is nothing more then a quad with a texture on it.
I add features to the engine when I need them, at this moment the engine includes:
-Simple renderer - draws sprites, filled quads and lines (opengl/opengl es)
-Scene manager- scenes are loaded in groups, so it's possible to switch scenes without any loading time
-Objects in the scenes have parent->child->child->child(...)hierarchy . Childs follow the parents
-Box2D is integrated at this moment with minimal support
-Simple scripting language that I use to perform simple tasks (usually in menus)
-Asset manager - this asset manager controls the assets used in the game and it makes sure that the the same asset isn't loaded twice
-Audio manager - it's working, but needs to be reviewed
-Input manager
-Sprite animation editor
-Font editor
The engine is developed in c++ and uses SDL. It's multiplatform and is currently running on Windows, iOS and Android, but it will run in MAC and linux also, I just don't want to waste time with that. I'm only interested in targeting mobile devices . I'm looking into porting to Windows Phone too.
A new low poly experiment, this was actually really tricky:
It is fully shader based, no animation and no particles, running in the UDK.
Love it!
I started developing "Roll Playing Game" with Unity3D and had a prototype ready in March. Before I could start with the "real" development, UE4 was suddenly released. I decided to check it out by rebuilding the prototype in UE4. Turns out I'm liking UE4 better for this project because I feel like I can achieve much more on the graphics side as a single developer (still also love Unity though) and don't need to pay for Unity Pro.
A comparison between new (UE4, top) and old (Unity, bottom):
Also, a short video showing the prototype level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Z7-iVxftA
A comparison between new (UE4, top) and old (Unity, bottom):
Also, a short video showing the prototype level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Z7-iVxftA
Chaos
Member
If any beginners are interested, 3dbuzz have made a free 20 hour course on creating a 2d game in Unity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9iHR1JxcE&list=PLt_Y3Hw1v3QSFdh-evJbfkxCK_bjUD37n&feature=share
They have also made a free course on 2d art for programmers -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bp_DDlgCdY&feature=share&list=PLt_Y3Hw1v3QTsLeihLYhHLkDV0dFTWDSS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9iHR1JxcE&list=PLt_Y3Hw1v3QSFdh-evJbfkxCK_bjUD37n&feature=share
They have also made a free course on 2d art for programmers -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bp_DDlgCdY&feature=share&list=PLt_Y3Hw1v3QTsLeihLYhHLkDV0dFTWDSS
Does anyone need help with 3d modeling for their project? I'm gonna have to rethink/take a break from my own project, in the meanwhile I'd be happy to help out anyone who needs it.
these are my terms:
I'll do it for free
won't commit to entire projects, but rather just individual models(for the time being at least)
not doing any design work, you supply the concept/blueprints I just model
not interested in AAA-quality stuff or doing entire levels, it's too time consuming.
Doesn't matter if its prototype stuff or for the final game.
I can model pretty much anything, quality depends on supplied references/concept art.
pm me if interested.
these are my terms:
I'll do it for free
won't commit to entire projects, but rather just individual models(for the time being at least)
not doing any design work, you supply the concept/blueprints I just model
not interested in AAA-quality stuff or doing entire levels, it's too time consuming.
Doesn't matter if its prototype stuff or for the final game.
I can model pretty much anything, quality depends on supplied references/concept art.
pm me if interested.
Thx all!
Yea, it is fresnel combined with a ramp texture, so it defines it with a gradient from front facing faces to away facing faces.
It is made with the lovely Unreal Engine node based shader editor, you have a instant preview there. There went also quite a lot of try and error into it.
ohblahitsme
Member
Yep! Thanks, I'll check that out.
Correct. There's a key binding, default K, which sets the rotation/translation of the bone for that frame. That probably seems pretty simple. For me, since the trial lets you test out auto-keying, it became pretty evidently superior in only a short time. But that's just for me, so maybe it won't for you.
In Illustrator, I don't work with layers very often. It seems a bit redundant since all of the shapes are vector objects. But I do group the vectors together (cmd-G) that make up each articulation.
And it definitely takes thought regarding planning. Figuring out how things will need to overlap, what order they'll need to be in; those kinds of things take practice. But Spine helps out a lot with this. For one thing, nothing's stuck on its hinge, so you can pan images around in addition to rotating them if it sells the movement better, and you can change the draw order on any frame of the animation, and the pro version of Spine also has mesh warping so you're not limited to rigid movement.
Ah okay, cool. Thank you!
Nice! That's quite some work spent. That C/C++/SDL thing is a solid one,
indeed! :+ Is Box2D free of any license issues? One more question (if you
don't mind); are you using TTF fonts in-game? If yes, what's the font rendering
engine behind? Or are you using a font editor converting TTF fonts to bitmaps
and using those in-game?
You were rised by Windows, right?
I thought I could postpone the development of a user interface till dealing
with the main game of mine, but the spectral stuff I'm doing has quite a
parameter space too large as it seems. The algorithmic and esp. the discrete
nature of said stuff is very sensitive on the parameters. And since I don't
won't to build a fixed-parameter solution only, working for just one or two
cases, I need an input method to cover a larger parameter space quickly, i.e.
being able to input many different parameters with way different magnitudes
in no time. ...
I was thinking the same thing. You want low-level control of everything, you want to render all pixels directly instead of using libraries, you're making a window manager, might as well finish making the OS!
Yeah!
The rational behind the user interface lies in lowering the time needed to adapt all the parameters. The outcome of the Retro Engine will be
visual based, hence, it's sort of an art to adjust the parameters for the
problem at hand. With a user interface, and being able to continuously vary
the parameters, good settings can be found in no time. The primary purpose of
being in control of the rendering ensures me that the result is the one asked
for, up to my own errors of course. This is a very important aspect when
developing / programming image processing algorithms. This way you will have a
reference implementation before spitting everything over to the hardware.
Pixel control is very important in graphics programming. Ask Corrinne Yu,
she can talk about two hours about it.
And I didn't wanted to go the hassle using an existing GUI just because I need
one or two windows and a few buttons. Most existing GUIs will make you
dependent one way or another and are blooded with all sorts of stuff I don't
need. I need a very small one, one which can be integrated in any C/C++
projects, yet flexible and easy extendable, without making the project grow
in complexity by leaps and bounds. That's what this interface is all about,
i.e. simplicity -- which doesn't suck. xD
Speaking about an OS, yeah, would be quite interesting. I think I will come
back to this for another game of mine. A couple of years ago I did some
bootloader programming (master boot record and friends) on PC loading other
chunks from disk executing. Quite interesting. I always dreamed up of an OS
solely for games and game development with all the cool stuff. A bootloader
coming up with some pretty cool graphics upon booting the system was the first
requirement of such an OS! Anyone? ANYONE?!!!
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