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[Moosichu]

Been slowly working on my first game while lurking on this thread to keep me energised and motivated.

I have made some good progress, however I do have a couple of questions about gamemaker if anyone is willing to answer them. Firstly I am going to explain the setup I decided in terms of making levels.

Below is a screenshot from the room editor of a test-room.

The way I decided to do things was have all interacting objects have a depth of '0' by default. That way, the the floor of the tileset can be at a depth of 2, things like treestumps and the bottom of houses can have a depth of 1 and treetops which render above the player can have a depth of -1 (like treetops). This works quite well. Furthermore, I place invisible objects above 'solid' tiles. With this setup if I need to later I could also implement functional bridges by having the collisions depend on the depth of the invisible objects.

This means everything renders in the correct order apart from NPCs.

The first image looks great how you expect, but the second one doesn't. So the question is, is there anyway to control the draw order of objects which have the same depth?

If not do I have to go to the drawing board and what would you recommend.


My second question is related to collision masks of attacks.
http://i.imgur.com/4Sj3sd0.gif

Above is a give of a simple attacking animation followed by a blocking animation in all 4 directions. (Incomplete at the moment as the arms haven't been animated in all 4 directions for the attack yet.)

For the collision mask, is the best thing to do to create a new object which spawns on top of the character which has the collision mask for the attack animation (and blocking etc.)? However, you don't seem to be able to create an individual mask for different sub-images of a sprite animation, so do I have to create a separate sprite for each frame of animation for an attack which has a different mask?

TLDR: I have highlighted the questions themselves.

I love this thread so much and all the stuff here is blowing me away

Another little snippet of the combat!

http://www.gfycat.com/SpeedyWiltedFlea

I love the art style of this.


EDIT: What do I do about sounds? I have music covered, but things like sword-swipes. Hazards, fire etc.? Sorry if it seems so basic.

 

[Granadier]

Tell me about it. I seem to be in this permanent cycle:

10 Read this forum.
20 Feel energised.
30 Do a bit more.
40 Real world pressures stop me from doing stuff for a bit.
50 Get down because I haven't done anything for a bit.
60 Feel a bit like a failure.
70 GOTO 10

It probably doesn't help that I can't even decide which fucking engine to use. Unity gets things done quicker, but I can't justify the cost of Pro, leaving a lot of nice things out of my reach. Unreal is C++ (fun) and lets me access everything, but takes a lot longer to do anything. And runs like shit on my Mac, meaning I have to go to my gaming PC to code.

GAH.

What features are you needing from Pro?

Might be worthwhile to get a prototype going in Unity Free just to get something done. Then you can gauge whether it's worthwhile to buy Pro or switch to UE4.

 

[JulianImp]

The first image looks great how you expect, but the second one doesn't. So the question is, is there anyway to control the draw order of objects which have the same depth?

Basically, you could do it the old-fashioned way of having all sprites larger than one tile render their tiles separately at the correct depth (i.e: heads always render above torsos).

The alternative would be sorting larger sprites by Y position with a script that probably updates every time a large sprite moves, and calculates depth based on how close to the top of the screen an object is (so the depth value would be inversely proportional to the object's Y position). This concept can be optimised to work okay and would probably be more versatile than forcing split sprites like with my first suggestion as well, so I guess it could work.

I don't know how easy it would be to code an optimised algorithm for that in GM, but I think the cheapest alternative for you would be something like...

//Initializing variables
baseDepth = 5;
maxDepth = 55;
deltaDepth = maxDepth - baseDepth;

//Sorting algorithm (should execute for each object every time it moves)
depth = round((y / room_height) * deltaDepth);

You're basically turning the y coordinate into a number that falls between 5 and 55, and could add or remove granularity by setting a wider depth range. The ideal range would always be equal to your room height, but the issue is that then you'd be unable to tell where the character's depths would end, making it hard to add stuff below or above them depending on how you implement the algorithm.

 

[Moosichu]

Basically, you could do it the old-fashioned way of having all sprites larger than one tile render their tiles separately at the correct depth (i.e: heads always render above torsos).

The alternative would be sorting larger sprites by Y position with a script that probably updates every time a large sprite moves, and calculates depth based on how close to the top of the screen an object is (so the depth value would be inversely proportional to the object's Y position). This concept can be optimised to work okay and would probably be more versatile than forcing split sprites like with my first suggestion as well, so I guess it could work.

I don't know how easy it would be to code an optimised algorithm for that in GM, but I think the cheapest alternative for you would be something like...

//Initializing variables
baseDepth = 5;
maxDepth = 55;
deltaDepth = maxDepth - baseDepth;

//Sorting algorithm (should execute for each object every time it moves)
depth = round((y / room_height) * deltaDepth);

You're basically turning the y coordinate into a number that falls between 5 and 55, and could add or remove granularity by setting a wider depth range. The ideal range would always be equal to your room height, but the issue is that then you'd be unable to tell where the character's depths would end, making it hard to add stuff below or above them depending on how you implement the algorithm.

Thanks! You gave me an idea. It doesn't even have to depend on the room height but the resolution (as offscreen depth doesn't matter) Which is a constant in this game as it is 16bit-ish. Should be able to cook something up now! Thank you

 

[gundalf]

Wow that's quite a jump! The new version looks really cool.

Thanks!

There is nothing left of the old version it seems, looks great though! Any bigger screenshots you can share?

Sure

 

[Moosichu]

Basically, you could do it the old-fashioned way of having all sprites larger than one tile render their tiles separately at the correct depth (i.e: heads always render above torsos).

The alternative would be sorting larger sprites by Y position with a script that probably updates every time a large sprite moves, and calculates depth based on how close to the top of the screen an object is (so the depth value would be inversely proportional to the object's Y position). This concept can be optimised to work okay and would probably be more versatile than forcing split sprites like with my first suggestion as well, so I guess it could work.

I don't know how easy it would be to code an optimised algorithm for that in GM, but I think the cheapest alternative for you would be something like...

//Initializing variables
baseDepth = 5;
maxDepth = 55;
deltaDepth = maxDepth - baseDepth;

//Sorting algorithm (should execute for each object every time it moves)
depth = round((y / room_height) * deltaDepth);

You're basically turning the y coordinate into a number that falls between 5 and 55, and could add or remove granularity by setting a wider depth range. The ideal range would always be equal to your room height, but the issue is that then you'd be unable to tell where the character's depths would end, making it hard to add stuff below or above them depending on how you implement the algorithm.

Solution is finished! I wrote a function called dynamicDepth which is called like this:

///Dynamic Depth Calculations
if(dynamic_depth_enabled) {
   depth = dynamicDepth(y, view_yview, pseudo_depth);
}

Each object has a pseudo_depth of 0 by default, but that can be changed in the room creation code.

Below is the code with explenation. My setup now has 'depth-zones of 300 game maker depth values' With the all objects being given a depth in that zone between 5-294.

So I will have the ground tiles at depth 0.
Tree stumps at depth -1.
Object anywhere between -5 and -294.
Tree tops at depth -295.

I hope I explained it well enough!

_y = argument0;
_view_yview = argument1;
pseudo_depth = argument2;

//declare local variables
var _depth, _y_in_view;

//The final depth will be based on the pseudo depth * a factor of 300
//As first 5 depths in a depth zone are used by tiles, ignore them
_depth = (pseudo_depth * 300) - 5;
_y_in_view = _y - _view_yview; //calculate object y-coordinate in view
if(_y_in_view < 0) { //If object is offscreen at top, render it at bottom depth
    _depth = _depth;
} else if (_y_in_view > (285)) { //If object is offscreen at bottom, render it at top depth
    _depth -= 285;
} else {
    //lower objects are rendered on top of higher ones for the same pseudo_depth
    _depth -= _y_in_view;
}

return _depth;

 

[friken]

We were using smoothmoves in unity for animation of our 2D aliens. It worked but the workflow was very slow. example of an idle animation using it:

The results were workable but it took a lot of art tweaking to cut up the characters just right to not notice the seams when animating. Also because of only being able to scale or rotate each body part, we were very limited w amount of movement before seams were obvious. I picked up puppet2D for unity and it supports bones/IK and mesh deformation. Great I thought... well after two days of messing with it I just couldn't get it to do what I really wanted, which was to speed up my workflow. I spent forever with a single rig trying to get the IK system to work right w more than two bones and then when I got that sorted I spent forever manually setting per vertex bone weights. The end result... a bit more funky than what I already had but just in different ways. I was about ready to go back to smoothmoves but saw uni2D... so tried it and within 10 minutes or so of rigging I had something I liked a lot. It will also speed up the workflow a lot since we won't need to cutup anything that doesn't overlap another sprite. It has a great system to make a mesh sprite and auto grid the mesh w #vert/horiz points. then you can simply click some bones on top and it morphs the mesh very well.

This is an exaggerated example of a quick animation so you can see how it warps the mesh feeling very organic. We couldn't have moved the neck/arms/face nearly as much with the old system without seams showing.

 

[Auctopus]

I'm just commenting here for the first time really right above your post so I don't think I deserve much of a say, but will toss my opinion into the ring.

One of the hardest parts for any indie developer is exposure, and most so these games out of passion, so I imagine many have their own thoughts on games and many would love to talk about it. Setting it up with people would be up to the individual if they were interested, so there's nothing wrong with it.

However, I also would maybe suggest for yourself to do it as you're interested in the premise rather than the one trick to make it different. I know you're interested, but what I mean is that it runs as a nice feature that hopefully audiences would be interested to read, but many here have smaller projects most people outside don't know about, and probably won't have any immediate rewards in readership as it'd be a small site interviewing small projects. If things go well, it could develop into something interesting, but I think if your biggest desire is to do some things different, this is more like a feature than a main attraction. But it doesn't sound like a bad idea to me, and if the projects you interview for are successful I can see some then finding the articles and reading more of them.

That sounds cool!

Regardless of how much exposure your articles get, I think a lot of us would be more than happy to talk with you about our games.

Well, after saying all of the above, it wouldn't be right for me to chase you out of town - I'll confirm instead that I think it's a lovely idea :-D

That's encouraging Thanks. Well, I guess I should go away and figure out some sort of format then if anyone would like to message me if they have a project they'd like to talk about, I'll reply ASAP. If not, well I'll try and pick some I like the look of!

 

[Jobbs]

have you considered using a color reduction shader in the game to actually cause some of that beautiful presumably gif-caused color banding to actually occur in real time? that's what I'm doing.

 

[Five]

This is an exaggerated example of a quick animation so you can see how it warps the mesh feeling very organic. We couldn't have moved the neck/arms/face nearly as much with the old system without seams showing.

I won't lie: a big part of the reason for my own chosen art style is to hide seams in the puppets.

What you're doing looks amazing. I'm very happy for you!

 

[Blizzard]

I won't lie: a big part of the reason for my own chosen art style is to hide seams in the puppets.

What you're doing looks amazing. I'm very happy for you!

I would be interested in seeing something like a youtube version of the same scene if you have one, to look at whether the banding is still there.

 

[Bomber Bob]

Thanks!



Sure

that's beautiful man!

 

[kiguel182]

Thanks!



Sure

That looks gorgeous. Really like that art style.

 

[Ranger X]

Been slowly working on my first game while lurking on this thread to keep me energised and motivated.

I have made some good progress, however I do have a couple of questions about gamemaker if anyone is willing to answer them. Firstly I am going to explain the setup I decided in terms of making levels.

Below is a screenshot from the room editor of a test-room.

The way I decided to do things was have all interacting objects have a depth of '0' by default. That way, the the floor of the tileset can be at a depth of 2, things like treestumps and the bottom of houses can have a depth of 1 and treetops which render above the player can have a depth of -1 (like treetops). This works quite well. Furthermore, I place invisible objects above 'solid' tiles. With this setup if I need to later I could also implement functional bridges by having the collisions depend on the depth of the invisible objects.

This means everything renders in the correct order apart from NPCs.

The first image looks great how you expect, but the second one doesn't. So the question is, is there anyway to control the draw order of objects which have the same depth?

Easy solution.
In the creation event for your NPCs objects, define your depth:

depth=y;


And in the step event, make your depth up to date:

depth=y;


I don't know if you got me but your depth will always be according where the character is in the screen, vertically speaking. Problem solved. You might need to reorganise other objects' depth but that shouldn't be a pain. Go logically.

My second question is related to collision masks of attacks.

Above is a give of a simple attacking animation followed by a blocking animation in all 4 directions. (Incomplete at the moment as the arms haven't been animated in all 4 directions for the attack yet.)

For the collision mask, is the best thing to do to create a new object which spawns on top of the character which has the collision mask for the attack animation (and blocking etc.)? However, you don't seem to be able to create an individual mask for different sub-images of a sprite animation, so do I have to create a separate sprite for each frame of animation for an attack which has a different mask?

There are different approaches to collision masks really. I would say, go as simple as possible and fix later if really needed. Your character should be a blunt rectangle, just like old RPGs like that. And for your attack animations, why not simply make them "precise"? You will be able to create collision events after that where other objects will collide with it down to the pixel.

 

[Feep]

I'm starting to see why almost literally zero video games use ensemble voice recording sessions.

 

[TouchTiltGames]

We were using smoothmoves in unity for animation of our 2D aliens. It worked but the workflow was very slow. example of an idle animation using it:

The results were workable but it took a lot of art tweaking to cut up the characters just right to not notice the seams when animating. Also because of only being able to scale or rotate each body part, we were very limited w amount of movement before seams were obvious. I picked up puppet2D for unity and it supports bones/IK and mesh deformation. Great I thought... well after two days of messing with it I just couldn't get it to do what I really wanted, which was to speed up my workflow. I spent forever with a single rig trying to get the IK system to work right w more than two bones and then when I got that sorted I spent forever manually setting per vertex bone weights. The end result... a bit more funky than what I already had but just in different ways. I was about ready to go back to smoothmoves but saw uni2D... so tried it and within 10 minutes or so of rigging I had something I liked a lot. It will also speed up the workflow a lot since we won't need to cutup anything that doesn't overlap another sprite. It has a great system to make a mesh sprite and auto grid the mesh w #vert/horiz points. then you can simply click some bones on top and it morphs the mesh very well.

This is an exaggerated example of a quick animation so you can see how it warps the mesh feeling very organic. We couldn't have moved the neck/arms/face nearly as much with the old system without seams showing.

Looks awesome! Yeah I was using SmoothMoves about a year ago, not sure if it has improved but I found it cumbersome myself. Try Spine! It's awesome, it's a 2D rig animator. So it has all the features of a 3D package to rig/weight a 2D character, then animate it, then send it to Unity.

cheers.

 

[friken]

Looks awesome! Yeah I was using SmoothMoves about a year ago, not sure if it has improved but I found it cumbersome myself. Try Spine! It's awesome, it's a 2D rig animator. So it has all the features of a 3D package to rig/weight a 2D character, then animate it, then send it to Unity.

cheers.

Thanks for the input. I did try the Spine demo. Maybe I didn't give it enough time but I was finding it difficult to use. I think a lot of the issue is how our art was made. Puppet2D for example, would work well if we had more simplified character designs that were all biped/human. I had a lot of trouble getting puppet and spine to do IK/bones for snake-like spines. For example, the one I've been animating tonight:

 

[friken]

have you considered using a color reduction shader in the game to actually cause some of that beautiful presumably gif-caused color banding to actually occur in real time? that's what I'm doing.

yep, we are using a few diff shaders for the alien communication / dialogue screens. While I haven't finalized anything yet, I've toyed w a lot I love the look of including some grain and dithers. I'll have to post some of the ones we've toyed with and get some feedback -- maybe I'll screencap some when I'm done w this animation.

I would be interested in seeing something like a youtube version of the same scene if you have one, to look at whether the banding is still there.

Here is the one rig/animation on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0inmnOv1s44

other misc dev videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUVeniVhllcd8NAxMHT4EHA

I don't have the full scene dither or grain shaders on in that video though. imo the gif banding is a bit much... if I use a dither shader I doubt I'd crank it up that high.

 

[Ashodin]

Oh man this music is so gud.

https://soundcloud.com/ashodin/psyscrolr-summer-v1

Enjoy guys!

 

[Blizzard]

Here is the one rig/animation on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0inmnOv1s44

Yeah that looks fine to me. I'd say it would be annoying if it flickered with banding like the GIFs.

 

[friken]

I won't lie: a big part of the reason for my own chosen art style is to hide seams in the puppets.

What you're doing looks amazing. I'm very happy for you!

lol... I undrestand! I've tried reworking my art a half dozen times before getting it to work well enough in smoothmoves.. but limited movement without showing seams. I love this new method for example that worm like alien I posted is only two cuts.. body w all background tentacles and one forground one that is on top. w smoothmoves I would have had to cut body in 2-3 parts and each tentacle 3-5 parts to have it even close the way it is rigged now.

Yeah that looks fine to me. I'd say it would be annoying if it flickered with banding like the GIFs.

thx for the feedback. I'm not a big fan of strong dither in our art style/game, but I love it in others. I am wanting a viewscreen-like effect that I've toyed w grain/dither/scanlines/etc. I may use some/combo but I'm undecided. I can crank up the presentation flare when I get the game done.... you know in a decade or few.

 

[Granadier]

Have any of you dealt with making "gibs" in a game? I've gotten the itch to finish the animations for my players, and I want them to explode into gibs when they die.

My thoughts were to use a particle system?, or to destroy the player object and instantiate a set of "gibs" objects that animate outwards from the player death, or something else completely that I'm not thinking of.

Any input from you more experienced folks would be greatly appreciated!

Half Life style gibs are what I'm aiming for.

 

[Jobbs]

Have any of you dealt with making "gibs" in a game?

I'm doing a 2D game, but yes. I always liked the way gibs seemed to work in fallout 3, so I emulated that model for my 2d game.

basically when the enemy dies, I hide the main sprite and spawn a series of separate objects for body parts all in roughly the right place to form the figure. These gibs are somewhat generic body parts not always specific to the enemy type, but they are made to look a bit generic and since they move fast in practice they work fine.

in this example you can see how the gibs look when they spawn but have no forces applied to them: http://gfycat.com/CapitalArcticCrownofthornsstarfish

and now to finish off I apply some forces to the body parts when they spawn: http://gfycat.com/JointGlitteringGroundbeetle

it's a little goofy, sure, but I find it satisfying.

 

[Dead Prince]

Oh man this music is so gud.

https://soundcloud.com/ashodin/psyscrolr-summer-v1

Enjoy guys!

👍

 

[electroflame]

Thanks for the input. I did try the Spine demo. Maybe I didn't give it enough time but I was finding it difficult to use. I think a lot of the issue is how our art was made. Puppet2D for example, would work well if we had more simplified character designs that were all biped/human. I had a lot of trouble getting puppet and spine to do IK/bones for snake-like spines.

I haven't tried it myself, but Sprites and Bones may be worth a shot. It's open-source, too, so the only thing you might waste in trying it is time (no monetary commitment is a plus!).

 

[Michael Armbrust]

I've been working on menus.


Got the basics of the in game one up and running.

(Gifcam screwed up the green outlines, the text is just placeholder)

 

[OccamsBlender]

I hear a lot about people using Graphics Gale, but haven't ever used it myself. Generally just go with GIMP. Does GG have a lot of benefits over it?

When it comes to pixel art? Absolutely!!!

-Pallet management with GG(or any pixel art program really) is way easier than generic image editing software.
-GG lets you leave up a number of preview windows such as 100% and super duper close up simultaneously.
-Animating with GG's preview windows is a godsend. Block out individual frames to see if the animation is smooth enough is VERY important.

The level of control and feedback for pixel art in GG is what makes it so darn convenient. It's worth the $19 it costs.

 

[TheHollowNight]

Yesss. A fellow low-poly connoisseur! Your game is looking rad!

 

[razu]

I've been working on menus.


Got the basics of the in game one up and running.

(Gifcam screwed up the green outlines, the text is just placeholder)

Way cool! I'm going to have to do something similar for any VR demos I make. Not made 3D UI before, should be fun!

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

Way cool! I'm going to have to do something similar for any VR demos I make. Not made 3D UI before, should be fun!

Unitys new UI stuff looks like you can literally just place an invisible quad anywhere in the world and draw UI elements onto it, in addition to being able to draw a UI attached to your camera

 

[_machine]

We've had a problem where a part of our game, the deckbuilder, works just fine in the editor, but doesn't work in the compiled build at all and apparently our only hope is to redo it almost completely or update the engine (which breaks quite a few things), but it'd be nice to get some feedback on what you guys think about our current deckbuilder.

So at the top right you have your current built deck and the cost of each card. You can hover over the deck to check each card or remove them by clicking. Below that you can see the size of your deck and the maximum size of it and the amount of cards you have for all the different mana costs aka the cost balance of your deck. Left to it you can choose which type of cards you're browsing; minions or spells and on the far left you get to browse those cards and pick which ones you want. We also currently support 3 save slots for different deck builds.

Tomorrow we'll be demoing the game in Finland at an event called Northern Game Summit and we'll be announcing how we're taking the game forward in the future. We definitely still need to a lot more testing as the 2 months we've spent developing the first playable we haven't gotten enough feedback, but having the game at Assembly Summer was pretty good and we got at least a bit of feedback.

 

[amanset]

I've been working on menus.


Got the basics of the in game one up and running.

(Gifcam screwed up the green outlines, the text is just placeholder)

Phew, because you misspelt "Gallery"

 

[amanset]

What features are you needing from Pro?

Might be worthwhile to get a prototype going in Unity Free just to get something done. Then you can gauge whether it's worthwhile to buy Pro or switch to UE4.

The usual suspects of lighting options, shadow options and post-processing. Nothing essential, but all niceties to have access to.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

The usual suspects of lighting options, shadow options and post-processing. Nothing essential, but all niceties to have access to.

Is this any help?

 

[Davision]

Thanks!



Sure

Nice, you might want to try to make the polygons density more consistent though. Like the terrain ground a bit less and that brown rock a bit more.

 

[Nibel]

Impressive stuff Looking good!

 

[Noogy]

We were using smoothmoves in unity for animation of our 2D aliens. It worked but the workflow was very slow. example of an idle animation using it:

The results were workable but it took a lot of art tweaking to cut up the characters just right to not notice the seams when animating. Also because of only being able to scale or rotate each body part, we were very limited w amount of movement before seams were obvious. I picked up puppet2D for unity and it supports bones/IK and mesh deformation. Great I thought... well after two days of messing with it I just couldn't get it to do what I really wanted, which was to speed up my workflow. I spent forever with a single rig trying to get the IK system to work right w more than two bones and then when I got that sorted I spent forever manually setting per vertex bone weights. The end result... a bit more funky than what I already had but just in different ways. I was about ready to go back to smoothmoves but saw uni2D... so tried it and within 10 minutes or so of rigging I had something I liked a lot. It will also speed up the workflow a lot since we won't need to cutup anything that doesn't overlap another sprite. It has a great system to make a mesh sprite and auto grid the mesh w #vert/horiz points. then you can simply click some bones on top and it morphs the mesh very well.

This is an exaggerated example of a quick animation so you can see how it warps the mesh feeling very organic. We couldn't have moved the neck/arms/face nearly as much with the old system without seams showing.

Thanks, this is informative. I've been using Unity's native 2D animation (and will probably stick with it throughout my current project since it's relatively simple), but I can already tell I'm severely limited by what it can do. I had to custom build my animation system/tools in my last game, so having to use Unity's setup feels like a step backwards in many ways.

 

[Michael Armbrust]

Phew, because you misspelt "Gallery"

It's an in game menu, it's not even going to have a gallery hahaha.

 

[superNESjoe]

GunWorld hit one of its biggest milestones today as we push out of Alpha and into our first Beta build. We're working on cutting a new trailer to show off some of the new features and bosses and then we'll begin our marketing attempts in preparation of our upcoming launch. In the meantime, here's Dwayne on a speeding train.

Any marketing advice would be massively appreciated, this is the first real game we've put together with an audience in mind and we're kind of flying by the seat of our pants. Any vets with some exposure tips would be awesome.

 

[Arkhanor]

Looking at the awesome work of you guys, I realized that I really need to study more hahah!

My last game (personal project) was released two years ago and it was a simple ActionScript 3 (with flixel) game.

Coin Shooter (It's my first released game. The art is weird because I'm just a programmer)

and here's a project that has been on hold for a year. It's a project I started with some friends (other programmer and two artists). It's not really a game yet, since it has no gameplay besides the movement.

I'm thinking of learning some HTML 5 and make any game using it or return to some java experiments.

 

[Burt]

Been putting together some angled tilesets today so everything won't look quite so RPG Maker:

Roof needs a ton of work, but it's coming along alright. Tiling at that 22.5 degree angle without making everything jaggy enough to take out an eyeball and keeping it as close as possible to the perpendicular roof tile is a massive pain in the ass though.

and here's a project that has been on hold for a year. It's a project I started with some friends (other programmer and two artists). It's not really a game yet, since it has no gameplay besides the movement.

What's this about, exactly?

When it comes to pixel art? Absolutely!!!

-Pallet management with GG(or any pixel art program really) is way easier than generic image editing software.
-GG lets you leave up a number of preview windows such as 100% and super duper close up simultaneously.
-Animating with GG's preview windows is a godsend. Block out individual frames to see if the animation is smooth enough is VERY important.

The level of control and feedback for pixel art in GG is what makes it so darn convenient. It's worth the $19 it costs.

Thanks, I'll give it a run in a bit. The help on the animation end does sound good.

 

[Five]

It looks good, Burt.

Popstar, I think there's a fatal flaw in your extension (Chrome, at least). Every time I go to a specific part of the page, a la the last-unread link from my subscriptions page or actually posting in the thread, it unloads the GIFs and puts me at the place on the page where I would be if the images were not there. Then the WebMs load in a second or two later and push the rest of the page down, but my place on the page stays, so I have to scroll back down.

I know, first world problems, but I might switch back to just letting the huge GIFs load in.

 

[friken]

I've mostly finished an idle animation for the wormlike race, Khaodra. I tried capturing a gif but because of a fog/cloud layers it dithered terribly and I'm too lazy to try and cap a better one... so a link to the video for those that want to see the end result:

http://gravityride.com/?p=533

still cap:

 

[gundalf]

Oh man this music is so gud.

https://soundcloud.com/ashodin/psyscrolr-summer-v1

Enjoy guys!

I LOOOOVE this! It reminds me kinda about Protodome's music.

Nice, you might want to try to make the polygons density more consistent though. Like the terrain ground a bit less and that brown rock a bit more.

Yep, you are totally right, though, I will use the polygon density for some Gameplay Elements.

Yesss. A fellow low-poly connoisseur! Your game is looking rad!

 

[Arkhanor]

What's this about, exactly?

The screenshot is awful, sorry about that. The "ball" is a spaceship with an alien and the player must collect these blue crystals to earn points. As I said, there is not much in the game and we really need to work on the game design and the level design so it can be a "real" game. The weird part: the player controls the "base" rock and by tilting it, guide the ship to the crystals. It's not final and we have a long way ahead to finish it.

This 3D model is an early work of my friends Luiz Alexandre (3D and concept) and Helton Azevêdo (2D - Concept). (The 2D concepts are lost in another dimension by this time :/)

 

[Burt]

The screenshot is awful, sorry about that. The "ball" is a spaceship with an alien and the player must collect these blue crystals to earn points. As I said, there is not much in the game and we really need to work on the game design and the level design so it can be a "real" game. The weird part: the player controls the "base" rock and by tilting it, guide the ship to the crystals. It's not final and we have a long way ahead to finish it.

This 3D model is an early work of my friends Luiz Alexandre (3D and concept) and Helton Azevêdo (2D - Concept). (The 2D concepts are lost in another dimension by this time :/)

Ah haha, nice. Yeah, that first shot had me a little confounded as to what I was looking at.

 

[Popstar]

It looks good, Burt.

Popstar, I think there's a fatal flaw in your extension (Chrome, at least). Every time I go to a specific part of the page, a la the last-unread link from my subscriptions page or actually posting in the thread, it unloads the GIFs and puts me at the place on the page where I would be if the images were not there. Then the WebMs load in a second or two later and push the rest of the page down, but my place on the page stays, so I have to scroll back down.

I know, first world problems, but I might switch back to just letting the huge GIFs load in.

Hmm, I can probably fix that by replacing the original GIF with the preview GIF gfycat auto generates instead of just blocking it completely.

EDIT: New version for Chrome. Loads preview images so your page doesn't jump around.

PS: YouTube Me Again! turns links to gfycat videos into small thumbnails that you can expand into video embeds. Also works with SoundCloud.

 

[Five]

I put a sort of album cover together today for my game using the new name. Composition like this is fascinating to me, and usually I don't think I'm very good at it, but I think this turned out okay.

Hmm, I can probably fix that by replacing the original GIF with the preview GIF gfycat auto generates instead of just blocking it completely.

EDIT: New version for Chrome. Loads preview images so your page doesn't jump around.

PS: YouTube Me Again! turns links to gfycat videos into small thumbnails that you can expand into video embeds. Also works with SoundCloud.

I don't know why, but it's still the same for me. It says it's build 0.2, but the behavior is identical. If it helps, I'm running Mac 10.9.4 and Chrome 37.0.2062.94. Not that I expect you to endlessly debug this, as I'm thankful for you trying already, but I figured I'd offer what I could in case you're interested.

 

[Popstar]

I don't know why, but it's still the same for me. It says it's build 0.2, but the behavior is identical. If it helps, I'm running Mac 10.9.4 and Chrome 37.0.2062.94. Not that I expect you to endlessly debug this, as I'm thankful for you trying already, but I figured I'd offer what I could in case you're interested.

I'm on 10.9.5 and 37.0.2062.122 so we're pretty close.

Can you try going this link and see what happens? http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=130963100#post130963100

If should take you to post 16332 by -Winnie- in this thread. Which has a gfycat of the dude driving the truck into the tree. Tell me if it jumps around and by how much if it does. For me it jumps a tiny bit. About a single line. I think a little jumpiness might be coming from the fact that Gaf does a little shrink-to-fit thing with large images while the video versions are full-size. If its still jumpy try making your browser wider and see if that affects it.

And don't worry about asking me to debug it. I've been wanting to learn how to write extensions for awhile so I'm doing this as a learning exercise.

 

[Five]

I'm on 10.9.5 and 37.0.2062.122 so we're pretty close.

Can you try going this link and see what happens? http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=130963100#post130963100

If should take you to post 16332 by -Winnie- in this thread. Which has a gfycat of the dude driving the truck into the tree. Tell me if it jumps around and by how much if it does. For me it jumps a tiny bit. About a single line. I think a little jumpiness might be coming from the fact that Gaf does a little shrink-to-fit thing with large images while the video versions are full-size. If its still jumpy try making your browser wider and see if that affects it.

And don't worry about asking me to debug it. I've been wanting to learn how to write extensions for awhile so I'm doing this as a learning exercise.

That link works fine for me. About as you describe. But the previous page (50ppp) is still messing up. For example, if I click on the backtrace to your quote of me, it starts on my post and then jumps to this part of the page and stays there:

edit: Also, this might be affecting it, but I have WebM for NeoGAF installed and Stylish with the style NeoGAF. Fixed. installed.
edit 2: well, turning both of those off didn't change anything. Hmm.