Left stick/dpad move, L to jump, touch screen to interact and shoot fireballs.
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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
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I checked out the trailer, nice work! How long did it take to put it together?
Cross posting from the screenshot saturday thread, just because!
love it.... very nice animations. I love the retro 2d fighter feel but with modern high rez art.
Nice idea... that cave-ish looking backdrop does look like some dripping moisture would fit.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about voiceover and dialogue and wanted to run an idea by everyone here. First some background... We have planned to have voiceovers for all the aliens, similar to modern games like mass effect or classics like starcontrol (3do version). One thing I've always been on the fence about is aliens speaking english w misc world accents. You see it in mass effect, starcontrol, other scifi games and movies. I've always gotten over it and do enjoy voiceovers as opposed to just reading text. I'm thinking of doing something a bit different...
How about having all the aliens make odd sounds like pops/clicks, growls, tones, telepathy, or whatever audio would fit the alien that is very non human and have a single digital-ish voice translate. So you hear there alien strange sounds followed shortly by the translator translating whatever they say? It seems like this could work very well and also from a dev standpoint may be a good bit less work.
How about having all the aliens make odd sounds like pops/clicks, growls, tones, telepathy, or whatever audio would fit the alien that is very non human and have a single digital-ish voice translate. So you hear there alien strange sounds followed shortly by the translator translating whatever they say? It seems like this could work very well and also from a dev standpoint may be a good bit less work.
Eight hours, first hour spent storyboarding
Thanks. I guess I shorthand it as "Ogre Battle meets FFVI", although that's a bit grandiose. But yeah, the easiest way to describe it is essentially as a class-based SRPG along the lines of Ogre Battle:MOTBQ/POLC with a turn-based JRPG battle system instead of auto-combat, along with more in-depth/interactive/explorable environments. So, instead of maps being a collection of capture points posing as towns, there are actual towns, fortifications, and landmarks to explore and interact with in the way your might in a JRPG, which is what you're seeing in that shot.
I feel like that would necessarily feel somewhat artificial, and thus rob much of the emotion from the dialogue. Is that what you're going for?
I guess I'm having a hard time imagining what it would be like, but the only emotive robots I've liked who still sound digitized are the ones who are supposed to feel rather emotionless, such as GlaDOS from Portal. I don't think having a few dozen aliens all sound like GlaDOS would be appreciable.
But if it's less digitized, more real sounding, that begs the question to me of why it can't also affect accents and inflections. You can pick different voices for Siri on your iPhone, different voices for your GPS, and even different voice packs for Call of Duty with today's technology, so I don't buy that voice tech in the future will be stuck to one artificial sounding voice.
not bad! did you do the voice work?
Good point about losing some of the emotion. I wasn't really thinking robotic like the voice readers of current erra... maybe something more like a nice female ship computer voice / halo's Cortana etc. I do agree maybe it would rob the per alien emotion coming through for dialogue sequences.
I strategically used the voice work already in-game for dramatic effect, out of order, of course.
And here's my (sloppy) storyboard.
HellBlazer
Member
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.
That looks pretty good from a usability point of view (very Hearthstone-like). Visually, I would say the UI elements like the buttons and sliders could probably use a secondary color... maybe a border or something? I'm not sure, I'm hardly an artist so maybe someone else can give a more detailed/useful suggestion, but I think it looks a little bland with just the one shade for everything. Also, the casting cost numbers above the names of the cards in your deck are a bit hard to make out in white on cyan, shouldn't they be darker like the buttons' text?
Mystic River
Member
Added temperature control into your ship, temperature inside your ship matters, being close to stars makes it more difficult to survive, turning off your systems makes your ship to leak less radiation and be easier to not be found but that also makes your ship colder if far from any heat source, your crew may die too.
Yeah, all great points. Especially the cards we are probably going to redo almost from scratch since they get even more muddled in the actual gameplay and visually just aren't inviting enough.
Ingueferroque
Banned
Seriously cool.
Thanks :-D I'm having a lot of fun with that retro 2D aesthetic, actually - when the lifebars fill up during the match intro, I used a sound that sound like it's coming straight out of Megaman :-D
As for your question about speeches: I think it'd work using your idea of random sounds/screeches, and I'm not even sure there'd be a need for a translation at the end. The alternative would be something like KOTOR with a few random recorded alien phrases that still allow for different intonations/inflexions? After a while you can tell that they're the same phrases, but it still sounds interesting enough to not become boring after hearing the same sound clip over and over. Or you can try to create a fake synth language, but that's going to be a whole other level of audio work, and I'm not sure the pay off would be worth the trouble.
Overall, your game reminds me a lot of Ascendancy (didnt I mention that already?) and I just checked a video of it since I thought there might have been voice clips in there, but there actually weren't (and no alien animations, either). And it still works just as well! So in doubt, no voice over still works :-D
gamedevcoder
Neo Member
Hey there,
My new indie game released last week is called Rainbow Hero. It's an old-school kind of puzzle game as far as mechanics with some painterly stylized graphics and a fairy tale style audio.
Youtube trailer
Game website
Development blog
Development was a bit long (over 4 years) but it was mostly done after hours (otherwise I'm a full time programmer on The Witcher 3). I'm super happy to finally get the game out. Let me know what you think. Any feedback is welcome.
Cheers!
Maciej
My new indie game released last week is called Rainbow Hero. It's an old-school kind of puzzle game as far as mechanics with some painterly stylized graphics and a fairy tale style audio.
Youtube trailer
Game website
Development blog
Development was a bit long (over 4 years) but it was mostly done after hours (otherwise I'm a full time programmer on The Witcher 3). I'm super happy to finally get the game out. Let me know what you think. Any feedback is welcome.
Cheers!
Maciej
exmachina64
Banned
FFVII? Wow, what a radical change from the final product.
Yeah, definitely. Funny thing is, a lot of people would probably think that the game would've held up much better at this point if they had actually stuck with the pixel art. Of course, the game wouldn't have been nearly as big of a deal back when it came out that way. Just one of those interesting "what if" scenarios that'll always leave us wondering.
BlazeHedgehog
Member
Short or Tall?
Short. For me, the facial proportions look better. The eyes are more properly sized versus the rest of her body.
But the tall one could be fixed with some tweaks to the head. Give her a little more prominent nose, angle her eyes a little more (so they aren't tilted as much), move her irises more so it looks like she's not staring off in to space...
Mikado
Member
Long time no post.
This summer has been crazy busy with contract work but things are finally starting to slow down so I had some time to work on a new basemesh for one of our own projects. Banged out a quick animation to test out some rig changes.
That the part I love most about indie development: one gets the chance to get one's hands dirty in so many different areas.
Thanks for the input. I'll play around w the ideas pretty soon and decide what works best for StarDiver and our tiny team/budget. I do recall Ascendancy but I didn't play it back in the day -- suprising considering how much I loved the space games like Masters of Orion, Starflight, Starcontrol, etc. In looking at the google images, Ascendancy, I do recall loading it at some point but never got far enough into it to recall. The images of it reminded me of playing Alien Legacy and Outpost.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Fuck yes! I'm dumb! //because dumb
Fixed my relative touch control. Turns out I did everything right except lock the difference in transforms on first touch. Now I lock it down every time to keep relative distance on touch and unlock it when there's no touch. Before it would recalculate the distance every frame and its order can only happen one way so it would always bug out since that distance was always changing.
Man. Such simple shit can drive you bonkers. I feel so dumb.
Fixed my relative touch control. Turns out I did everything right except lock the difference in transforms on first touch. Now I lock it down every time to keep relative distance on touch and unlock it when there's no touch. Before it would recalculate the distance every frame and its order can only happen one way so it would always bug out since that distance was always changing.
Man. Such simple shit can drive you bonkers. I feel so dumb.
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
I actually think that would work pretty well if you overlap the 'translated voice' over the 'original speech' shortly after it starts (rather than after its finished - not sure which approach you mean from what you said). It's how the UN or EU works with translators in the real world.
And here it is!
What you see off to the left is the maze not built yet while I was getting the block flying to work!
how'd you program that in construct anyway? some kind of math thing? the rotation, I mean. can you walk and jump and stuff while rotated (does your gravity rotate too) or are you just stuck there?
And here it is!
What you see off to the left is the maze not built yet while I was getting the block flying to work!
Ooooh, rotations! Sweet! I still haven't figured out how to make them play properly in C2 without a tangled mess of function calls, so that makes it even more impressive :-D
Ah well, I haven't played those, so I wouldn't know how they handle alien speech. Still, if you ever feel like it, I still think Asc. holds up quite well :-D Love the music, especially!
That reminds me of how Eternal Darkness did it at the beginning of the game, with the characters speaking (mangled?) latin then fading to English, so yeah, it definitely works pretty well!
Thanks for the input everyone. I had chose the short girl before but this ups my confidence.
Forgot to mention before, but yeah, definitely short for me as well, general and face proportion wise! (and I suspect it may be easier to animate, to boot!)
Very cool graphics. Are you planning to release on other stores/platforms than your own website/PC?
Rotation? I just made it so that it adds a certain amount of angle every tick until it reaches the desired angle to stop at. Then I make the event turn off, which is turned on again when you double click.
no, I mean rotating the main character along with the block. that sounds tricky to me for some reason. unless I were to "fake" it.
I'll just repost this because we are currently in process of trying to think of ways to improve and rework the environment. After the UI it was easily the biggest complain we got from the graphical side (though we are still going to rework almost everything, but I was surprised at how positive people were about our graphics), but it's a bit tricky as we don't want to make it too detailed and step away from a style that is easy to create content for and that we can still easily keep our level generation working. I'm not an expert of the matter, but apparently there is a great way to mix the textures on the ground with texture offsets and whatnot, but I'll get the artists to research that a bit more.We are probably not gonna keep the grid completely visible and we'll try to mask the repetitive nature of the grid environment a lot more, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how it looks at the moment.
It was also nice to talk with some guys from Unity (Andy and Alex, if anyone's run into them) and we got them to play against each other which was nice and it was good to hear that they've gotten a lot of feedback recently about the pricing of the educational version and hopefully something good will come out of it even though I'm still pretty happy that they are going with their pricing even if it does mean that we can't afford it at the moment.
show me your skeleton
Member
is this instead of the moon rover? i love it!
oh, that's kind of cool. in stencyl I'm not sure what I'd do to make that happen, but it definitely wouldn't be that simple.
TheGreatDirector
Banned
So I made a facebook and twitter page to go
along with my game.
https://www.facebook.com/GrandSpaceDrama
https://twitter.com/GrandSpaceDrama
In addition I've managed to solve a problem regarding multiple parties. Originally there was a weird graphic change for parties that changed into interactive npcs on the field. Now however, I've made it so they keep their same graphic and the results allow me to create interesting pieces of dialogue based on having specific parties on specific maps.
along with my game.
https://www.facebook.com/GrandSpaceDrama
https://twitter.com/GrandSpaceDrama
In addition I've managed to solve a problem regarding multiple parties. Originally there was a weird graphic change for parties that changed into interactive npcs on the field. Now however, I've made it so they keep their same graphic and the results allow me to create interesting pieces of dialogue based on having specific parties on specific maps.
Candescence
Member
Huh, interesting. Also, how exactly do you limit scrolling to 'zones' like you showed some pages back? Magicam doesn't have that feature yet, so I presume you did it yourself.
gamedevcoder
Neo Member
Thanks. Artwork was mostly done by David Baumgart, an artist behind Dungeons of Dredmor.
I'd love to but it's not easy getting on Steam and GOG. Otherwise the game is already available on Desura and itch.io and more "lower profile" stores are planned.
I created an invisible fixed spot that the camera gets attached to, then tell it to move down every screen height when you hit an invisible "gate".
@Jobbs yeah I'm loving the experience I have with c2 atm, I can envision things quite easily.
@showmethaskele nah son that's still coming!
Hello,
I'd like to introduce myself. I'm the lead programmer and combat designer for our 2D fighting game, Fearless Night. I've had an account here for a few months, but haven't found the chance to post in this thread.
Thought I'd start off by showing the stage we've been working hard on. If anyone is curious about the process of creating a stage for the game I've thought about putting together a dev blog.
Screenshots:
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhY27ujBHzk
For anyone who wants to try it out, here's the latest alpha build (for Windows only).
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/FearlessNightAlpha.zip
I'd like to introduce myself. I'm the lead programmer and combat designer for our 2D fighting game, Fearless Night. I've had an account here for a few months, but haven't found the chance to post in this thread.
Thought I'd start off by showing the stage we've been working hard on. If anyone is curious about the process of creating a stage for the game I've thought about putting together a dev blog.
Screenshots:
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhY27ujBHzk
For anyone who wants to try it out, here's the latest alpha build (for Windows only).
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54811597/FearlessNightAlpha.zip
Wyndstryker
Member
Cools, I definitely feel a Soul Eater/Black Rock Shooter vibe from those screens.
Would you believe we have one animator? It's actually just him and me at the moment.
very nice animation!
I did some more freaky enemy designs today. I know the mimic chest is a little played out right now, but damn it if they're not fun!
I spent far too long working on the dollhouse enemy spawner, drawing several damage states for an already complicated object, but I think it turned out well. Hopefully it will be worth it.
I'm getting a Skullgirls vibe from this. I hope that's okay for me to say! Keep up the good work.
Looks like you got the hang of it. I think it would do well to animate the attack a bit quicker for gameplay purposes, but for showing off it looks great!
I'm not much of a puzzle game player, but the art here is really cute. I can't even imagine having the fortitude to work on games both for a day job and on the side, so good for you being able to do this! Good luck going forward.
I spent far too long working on the dollhouse enemy spawner, drawing several damage states for an already complicated object, but I think it turned out well. Hopefully it will be worth it.
I'm getting a Skullgirls vibe from this. I hope that's okay for me to say! Keep up the good work.
Looks like you got the hang of it. I think it would do well to animate the attack a bit quicker for gameplay purposes, but for showing off it looks great!
I'm not much of a puzzle game player, but the art here is really cute. I can't even imagine having the fortitude to work on games both for a day job and on the side, so good for you being able to do this! Good luck going forward.
Mikado
Member
That's some fine VFX animation. *beardednoddingman.gif*
Oh, I can believe that :-D I wish him the best of luck, but it's looking pretty good already - very Skullgirls oriented, as Abe Bly said above :-D I take it you're using Unity? How are the character animations handled? Is it rotoscoped 3D modeling, or traditional 2D animation?
The hit effect position detection/placement is already looking sharp, it's one of the things giving me the most trouble lately... I'm not sure I could apply what you did to C2, but just in case, I'd be curious to know how you handle those as well :-D
I have a custom engine I've build for the game. I've been working on it years before I knew Unity existed. Though I did a quick port to Unity as an experiment that took two weeks!
The character is mostly traditional animation, but her weapon is actually rotoscoped for consistency. Hit sparks are just placed in the center of the area overlapped by the two hit boxes. Nothing special.
exmachina64
Banned
Good job. I'd be interested in hearing about your process and what it was like building your own engine.
Lord_Balkan
Member
Hey guys,
My friend has been helping me out with some concept art. I will share some more soon, but this is what she doodled so far. We were discussing hair styles. We were thinking about something like the top right mixed with either the top left or bottom left.
Just a reminder- this is a video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5cjW7PTyyY ) I put out a bit ago. Obviously still really early and all the art assets are placeholder. The goal is a first person shooter, that has emergent action. I don't want to talk about this too much until I get further along, but games like Thief, Deus Ex, etc all have in general emergent gameplay with your various tools. The goal is to focus on player driven action with various tools. Simple mechanics and tools that can combine for unique effects.
My friend has been helping me out with some concept art. I will share some more soon, but this is what she doodled so far. We were discussing hair styles. We were thinking about something like the top right mixed with either the top left or bottom left.
Just a reminder- this is a video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5cjW7PTyyY ) I put out a bit ago. Obviously still really early and all the art assets are placeholder. The goal is a first person shooter, that has emergent action. I don't want to talk about this too much until I get further along, but games like Thief, Deus Ex, etc all have in general emergent gameplay with your various tools. The goal is to focus on player driven action with various tools. Simple mechanics and tools that can combine for unique effects.
show me your skeleton
Member
aesthetically i prefer the bottom left but if she's an action-do-stuff lady she should probably have short hair or tie it up.
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