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[Jupiter_Shrooms]

Is anyone here using Unity to make a 2D-tile based game?

I'm trying to figure out how to do large 2D tile maps, but most tutorials I've been able to find encourage using a separate game object per tile, and that seems like it could get inefficient really fast. Ideally, I'd like to just use one canvas and draw tiles to it during run-time.

2D toolkit catches my eye, but I'd like to know what their solution is to 2D tilemaps before I pay the price. So yeah, anybody?

 

[Blizzard]

It's interesting to me that experiment 3 seems to be the most popular here and elsewhere. A few like the original, and a few like 4, but I suppose the rivet corner look in 4 actually produces an annoying "feels like an optical illusion" effect.

 

[Whitebison]

Posted the Screenshot Saturday thread a bit early

Subbed!!

 

[Jobbs]

Subbed!!

Yeah, subbed. It's a good idea. I'll use it. Maybe or maybe not today. Haven't decided.

 

[Michael Armbrust]

How strict are they one the dev program requirements? My company isn't yet incorporated.

I wouldn't really be much help, since I was incorporated and had the static ip and company email ready to go.

At least for me though incorporation was a breeze. I filled out the forms online and contacted Sony the same day.


_________________________________________________________________________

Kinda strange to only notice now, but I just realized that all of the VizionEck screenshots I revealed today are really old.

Like really really old.

This screenshot for example was taken 8/21/13, the same day I incorporated VizionEck LLC and first contacted Sony.


The images aren't outdated or anything, but I'm just kinda amazed how I didn't think about it till now. As of late most of my work has been in polishing and adding new features so the time just flew by I guess. Never felt the need to take new screenshots.

Has something like this ever happened to you guys?

 

[Noogy]

Is anyone here using Unity to make a 2D-tile based game?

I'm trying to figure out how to do large 2D tile maps, but most tutorials I've been able to find encourage using a separate game object per tile, and that seems like it could get inefficient really fast. Ideally, I'd like to just use one canvas and draw tiles to it during run-time.

2D toolkit catches my eye, but I'd like to know what their solution is to 2D tilemaps before I pay the price. So yeah, anybody?

I'm using 2D Toolkit specifically for tilemaps at the moment. It's pretty solid, and being able to work directly in Unity is pretty nice. It's the main reason I haven't tired other tilemap tools, tbh.

I still haven't figured out an elegant way to do tiles that expand beyond the border, so I'm using several layers to keep my tiles from looking like tiles. But I think it's a nice way to work. Collider integration is fantastic.

 

[ijed]

Kinda strange to only notice now, but I just realized that all of the VizionEck screenshots I revealed today are really old.

I like the style. Is that a shader for all the outlines? I'm trying to do something similar but need to learn a bit more about it. I'm just using textures at the moment.

 

[Blizzard]

I think it's time for me to stop poking at background squares for now and make progress on other things, but here is one last comparison. A or B? You will probably have to click to expand in order to compare.

Option A:

Option B:

I tried to make it very subtle, but I thought having SOME sort of pattern could make the floor feel more textured and less repetitive. I tried some other experiments with vents or sections instead of filling the whole thing, but didn't like it as much as just making it entirely textured.

 

[Phil S.]

Hi all. I'm doing various game design classes in college after a decade of not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. I joined the local independent game developer association chapter here in my city to make new friends and learn new things. I hope I can make some friends in here too.

This is my first real project that I want to consider releasing in a commercial form.

It's called Super Push Adventure, and it's a puzzle game where the goal is to simply get to the bird at the end of each stage. Of course, it's not as easy as it sounds. You have to push objects out of the way, some can only be pushed once, some are used to fill up holes so you can cross over them safely, some levels have locked doors that need to be opened by keys, and some levels have enemies that must be avoided or used to assist, and so forth.

These are a combination of screens and just levels from my game. I'll just post two, as I don't want to take up a lot of room. I'm doing this in Game Maker 8.1, learning some things here and there. I'm not good with programming or Game Maker Language at all, so I've been getting a lot of help from the folks on the GM forums.

I am actually near the end of development. I just need to fix some story-related elements and finish some compositions. Then it's polish, polish, polish, and playtesting.

 

[Limanima]

My engine/game is finally running on Android (in the emulator)!!
After a few more hours fighting with a memory corruption, everything seems to be ok now.

Next, implement features that are already working on iOS: advertising and leaderboards.

 

[anonymous_abc]

I think it's time for me to stop poking at background squares for now and make progress on other things, but here is one last comparison. A or B? You will probably have to click to expand in order to compare.



I tried to make it very subtle, but I thought having SOME sort of pattern could make the floor feel more textured and less repetitive. I tried some other experiments with vents or sections instead of filling the whole thing, but didn't like it as much as just making it entirely textured.

B, like the subtle grate texture.

 

[Sàmban]

Screenshot Saturday!!

A gif of something I've been working on. I plan to release it in an episodic manner, with relatively short levels as I go. I'd like to get GAF involved in developing the story for each episode (game will be freeware), but I can't make threads yet so that'll have to wait.

I'm pretty proud of the AI and the chromatic aberration filter I managed to pull off. The game is being made in GameMaker Studio Pro.

 

[Vark]

Actual Ballistics! Though that jerk on the far right keeps returning values about 20 pixels further on the X axis than I'm expecting. I think it has something to do with his scale or his center axis is off somehow.

It's low priority for now either way.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Just tidy'd up some physics today for the wall stick/jump mechanic. I am taking the wall bounding slow in this GIF. I made sure to tweak every little damn thing so it's spot-on perfect feeling in every way. You can ascend walls a lot faster than shown here. Took a while to tweak the perfect hold times vs button presses and get the feel of timing just right so that it is predictable, persistent and precise. Quality of control is a huge priority for me.

EDIT: Just noticed a bug
EDIT2: Fixed said bug

 

[Adam Scott Aukerman]

Just tidy'd up some physics today for the wall stick/jump mechanic. I am taking the wall bounding slow in this GIF. I made sure to tweak every little damn thing so it's spot-on perfect feeling in every way. You can ascend walls a lot faster than shown here. Took a while to tweak the perfect hold times vs button presses and get the feel of timing just right so that it is predictable, persistent and precise. Quality of control is a huge priority for me.

EDIT: Just noticed a bug

Love how economical those graphics are. You've got a hell of a lot of motion out of a handful of pixels.

 

[mabec]

Screenshot Saturday!!

I want to play that gif... i mean game.

 

[Michael Armbrust]

I like the style. Is that a shader for all the outlines? I'm trying to do something similar but need to learn a bit more about it. I'm just using textures at the moment.

The outlines are actually a mesh that's generated in advance. Then their shader pushes them towards the camera by the smallest amount in order to avoid z-buffer issues with the black background objects.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Love how economical those graphics are. You've got a hell of a lot of motion out of a handful of pixels.

Thanks! It's more difficult than I expected, TBH. Forced my hand to come up with creative ways to hide imperfections in animations. It also forced my hand to change a few boss designs due to sprite limitations but all in all it worked out well, we think.

 

[razu]

Screenshot Saturday!!

A gif of something I've been working on. I plan to release it in an episodic manner, with relatively short levels as I go. I'd like to get GAF involved in developing the story for each episode (game will be freeware), but I can't make threads yet so that'll have to wait.

I'm pretty proud of the AI and the chromatic aberration filter I managed to pull off. The game is being made in GameMaker Studio Pro.

Looks cool! But... we all know what happened last time someone mentioned chromatic aberration.... 8(

 

[Sàmban]

Looks cool! But... we all know what happened last time someone mentioned chromatic aberration.... 8(

Uh oh...what happened? I haven't really been following the thread.

 

[Five]

Uh oh...what happened? I haven't really been following the thread.

A different posted added significant CA to his/her game, most of us thought it was distracting from an otherwise gorgeous game, and coarse language was used, and one of the mods had to intervene.

 

[Jobbs]

Screenshot Saturday!!
I'm pretty proud of the AI and the chromatic aberration filter I managed to pull off. The game is being made in GameMaker Studio Pro.

I love it!

 

[Shiver]

I have a few of game concepts, but I really don't think I have it in me to learn programming.

I suppose the best bet is for me to get a team together, but I really don't know where I'd start.

Perhaps I should animate a few of my concepts to try and entice people to help out on it?

You can use visual scripting. It's fairly easy and a lot quicker than learning programming from scratch.

Look up playmaker for unity. Or just use stencyl.

 

[Rubikant]

Just tidy'd up some physics today for the wall stick/jump mechanic. I am taking the wall bounding slow in this GIF. I made sure to tweak every little damn thing so it's spot-on perfect feeling in every way. You can ascend walls a lot faster than shown here. Took a while to tweak the perfect hold times vs button presses and get the feel of timing just right so that it is predictable, persistent and precise. Quality of control is a huge priority for me.

EDIT: Just noticed a bug
EDIT2: Fixed said bug

Ah, a man after my own heart! In my previous job I was often the primary game controls programmer, and have implemented wall jumping on at least 7 different side-scrolling platformers, each one being unique due to the character and style of game it was being used in. Few can appreciate how much time, effort, and lots and lots of tweaking is necessary to make mechanics like this feel just right. Good controls are so very vital, IMHO.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Ah, a man after my own heart! In my previous job I was often the primary game controls programmer, and have implemented wall jumping on at least 7 different side-scrolling platformers, each one being unique due to the character and style of game it was being used in. Few can appreciate how much time, effort, and lots and lots of tweaking is necessary to make mechanics like this feel just right. Good controls are so very vital, IMHO.

Thank you. It's one of the most important aspects for us to make sure we nail 100%. I feel you really need to dig in to make sure that what you will be doing 90% of the game needs to feel effortless, to a point. Skill should be involved where it needs to be involved but the controls shouldn't get in the way of the game, IMO.

The wall jump, itself, wasn't the most difficult to implement, but like you said, it takes a lot of time and effort to nail the mechanics. Any small inconsistency can be noticed in a big way to the end user. It is crazy fun tho

 

[NinjaBoyLao]

Actual Ballistics! Though that jerk on the far right keeps returning values about 20 pixels further on the X axis than I'm expecting. I think it has something to do with his scale or his center axis is off somehow.

It's low priority for now either way.

I like this art. any vid or animated gif?

 

[Jupiter_Shrooms]

I'm using 2D Toolkit specifically for tilemaps at the moment. It's pretty solid, and being able to work directly in Unity is pretty nice. It's the main reason I haven't tired other tilemap tools, tbh.

I still haven't figured out an elegant way to do tiles that expand beyond the border, so I'm using several layers to keep my tiles from looking like tiles. But I think it's a nice way to work. Collider integration is fantastic.

Thanks Noogy! I'm still trying to narrow down whether which technology to use. Something else that caught my eye was SpriteTile which allows you to rotate and flip tiles. Do you know if 2D Toolkit allows you to do the same?

 

[Vark]

I like this art. any vid or animated gif?

Not enough animation yet to really warrant it, but hopefully soon!

 

[superNESjoe]

Just tidy'd up some physics today for the wall stick/jump mechanic. I am taking the wall bounding slow in this GIF. I made sure to tweak every little damn thing so it's spot-on perfect feeling in every way. You can ascend walls a lot faster than shown here. Took a while to tweak the perfect hold times vs button presses and get the feel of timing just right so that it is predictable, persistent and precise. Quality of control is a huge priority for me.

EDIT: Just noticed a bug
EDIT2: Fixed said bug

This is legit. I love the animation in here. There is still an art in minimalism, and you are showcasing that.

 

[Jacksinthe]

This is legit. I love the animation in here. There is still an art in minimalism, and you are showcasing that.

I appreciate it, joe, thanks! I was afraid to start showing things from the game but the response from people has made the journey thus far worth it. Thank you!

 

[V_Arnold]

AbsintheGames, your stuff looks amazing in motion! Keep it up!

 

[Limanima]

I managed to integrate ads for Android in my c++ engine!Yeah!!
It was a fight with JNI and Java, but it 's working.
I love when a plan comes together!

 

[Lord_Balkan]

I just got some view tilting when the character is strafing.

http://youtu.be/1UhAxvBCNSs

Not sure if that is finalized because I want to play around with different interpolation methods.

 

[Vark]

This is the first pass at the transition into "battle mode".

 

[Anustart]

Messing around with 2D Toolkit. Loving it. This is going to save me so much damn time. Now if I only had an artist :/ I keep trying and I keep failing, I don't have it in me.

 

[Blizzard]

Obvious borders:

Obvious borders with shadow:

Less-obvious borders plus blob shadow:

Even less borders plus blob shadow:

Borders or no borders? GHETTO DROP SHADOW?! I understand the more organic appeal of no borders, but for a spaceship/high-tech setting I almost feel like panels are still fitting.

 

[legacyzero]

Screenshot Saturday?

 

[Lord_Balkan]

Screenshot Saturday?

Sure, though I don't really have anything unique.

 

[Ashodin]

Terraforming in Construct 2

 

[Mystic River]

Still working on shaders but it is getting better every day, just another ship designed a few days ago.

 

[Noogy]

Thanks Noogy! I'm still trying to narrow down whether which technology to use. Something else that caught my eye was SpriteTile which allows you to rotate and flip tiles. Do you know if 2D Toolkit allows you to do the same?

2D Toolkit doesn't allow you to do this, and I was looking at SpriteTile for the same reason. However, since you can manually place objects natively into Unity, I figured I could use a mix for my current title.

I couldn't do something like my last game with 2D Toolkit's tile editor, but it works well for simple tiling, and seems pretty efficient. And I believe you get the source code anyway, so if you want to get down and dirty you can edit the code.

Edit: I should clarify, you can flip tiles, and rotate them at 90` angles. You can't say, scale and add a slight rotation to a single tile. Another nice thing about the tile editor is that you can easily 'paint' over a region to add tint or shading.

 

[TheHollowNight]

Late screenshotsaturday post from me, because the timezones were all janked for me when the guys originally tweeted it (I was sleeping at the time).

Anyhoo

 

[vivin]

Late screenshotsaturday post from me, because the timezones were all janked for me when the guys originally tweeted it (I was sleeping at the time).

Anyhoo

Im digging every screenshot I see from Beacon, lovely work

 

[Kritz]

sometimes I feel like a monkey banging a stick, trying to work out why the flow of my game sucks. A buddy got me to draw a flow diagram of my mechanics, to try and work out where the game is getting too boring / stressful, or where there are mechanics that don't lead anywhere or offer stuff to the gameplay loop.

It's... supposed to be... a map of the nouns and verbs within the game, overlayed on an overhead view of the physical world layout. I'm not sure if it's actually helped, but perhaps that's because it's incomprehensible. But I think that the internal crisis I'm having with my game isn't stemming from the mechanics or lack thereof, but perhaps the flow of them. When I test my game, I get super stressed out because it's impossible to serve every customer, and even if you try to, every table you clear out gets immediately filled by a new one. Which is like, the opposite of rewarding. So, that's one area I should look at - scaling the customer intake based on various factors.

And I think already it's made the game more fun when testing, because instead of having a constant 10 orders to prepare at a time, it's more like 1 - 4. But, again, monkey banging a stick. I've never really had to consider a game's flow before, because this is the first time I've made a game with a scope larger than "player jumps" or "player shoots".

It's just weird to shift gears from implementation and programming, to thinking about... balance, flow and design. In my mind I'm like, "I can just make more features!", but I realise I should be trying to make my existing feature set better.

 

[V_Arnold]

Kritz, your post is very interesting to me, who also happens to be a designer and a programmer. Thank god I have my girflriend draw (and an other talented friend of mine as well), because I surely could not handle THAT much multitasking. Also I suck at drawing.

Anyway..you talked about serving customers. I gotta admit, I have no idea what your game truly is, so I can only go with the stuff you just wrote, but if it is based on serving customers, and you want reward for the player, how about....

a. Speeding up serving time as a buff for every N-th finished customer?
b. Grouping them together, and more rewards if you serve them all?
c. Give a cooldown time after you served someone. You can have a global parameter that ramps up and which regulates your cusomter in/out flow, based on how many there currently is, or whether your game enters a "crowded moment" session, or its opposite ("the lets us give the player some room to breath" part).

 

[Chaos]

If anyone's a beginner to programming I came across these C# tutorial videos that look pretty good.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C-Fundamentals-for-Absolute-Beginners

 

[Pierate]

So, while putting McStabby on hold cause I wasn't sure where to go with it, I decided to start working on something simpler that I should be able to finish.

This is the result so far:

So it's a Shmup with minimalistic graphics and simple gameplay; kill enemies while avoiding bullets, no extra lives.

You can play the current versions here: Link

It's just a few waves looping infinitely right now, but eventually the plan is to have 5 or so levels with it's own boss. After beating the final boss the game would loop, allowing one to eventually reach the maximum score.The game would also increase in difficulty with each loop.

 

[anonymous_abc]

Borders or no borders? GHETTO DROP SHADOW?! I understand the more organic appeal of no borders, but for a spaceship/high-tech setting I almost feel like panels are still fitting.

from both a visual and a gamely perspective I would definitely prefer high contrast borders.
And the first set of drop shadows look far superior to the blob shadows.

 

[Michael Armbrust]

This is creative, but feels kind of headache-inducing on my eyes...maybe because of the 0% to 100% contrast. It brings back nightmares of NaissanceE and it's seizure inducing pure white/black areas. At least yours isn't flashing!

I don't know if some less extreme form of white, or some soft form of glow could help or not. Or it could be mine is just a fringe opinion.

No one while playing it has felt that way, but yeah there are a good amount of responses from pictures and video that think that.

Gameplay is the most important part for me so if there's something I can do to make it more accessible, I'll definitely try it out.

Image filters like glow and lens distortion would be nice since they wouldn't skew a player's competitiveness. Full on retexturing with say solid colors is also something I'd be for, but then I'd need to sort out how to handle it with online matches.

 

[Xun]

You can use visual scripting. It's fairly easy and a lot quicker than learning programming from scratch.

Look up playmaker for unity. Or just use stencyl.

Oh really? I'll have to look into it.

The only problem is my ideas are probably a bit too ambitious, but we'll see.