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[Magypsy]

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I have been mostly teaching myself coding for about a year now and I'm absolutely loving it. Began with AS3, then tried out Lua with the Löve2D framework (which is an excellent combination for beginners!) and now I am busy learning C# and Unity.

I'm working on a split-screen multiplayer FPS now. I kinda want to revive that GoldenEye/Perfect Dark/Timesplitters feeling.

 

[razu]

For lurkers and observers I will do a post mortem of Chopper Mike, showing how it all works. Should be in month or so...

 

[mr_square]

Cool thread! Some very useful info here

I'm a professional games developer by day, and a wannabe Indie dev by night. My current projects are Bitstream:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi_T_c3jzhU

Which is already out on iOS, but is currently undergoing a bit of a revamp with some updated graphics and a whole load of new music by the awesome Halc (http://halc.bandcamp.com). Hopefully doing a mini re-launch in a month or so.

I'm also working on an iOS endless-runner sort of game based off the Owl & Pussycat comic (http://pussyowl.com/)

Which I'm really excited about, as I always struggle massively with artwork, so its nice to have a properly good artist on board. A very early prototype from several months ago is here:

http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/topics.php?forum=1170&app_id=170

Although its more of just a test for the art assets. No longer using Monkey either - gone with Cocos2D as I've got experience with it from Bitstream, and just found Monkey a bit too inflexible for what I was wanting to do. The whole run-on-practically-any-platform aspect is amazing though - I've bought a licence so will hopefully revisit it in the future.

 

[charsace]

What's the best way to resize a AABB at run time?

Thanks in advance.

 

[BomberMouse]

What's the best way to resize a AABB at run time?

Thanks in advance.

I guess it depends on how you have defined your AABB. Anyway probably the best way is to express it as a matrix then multiply it against another matrix which contains the conversion since today's GPU are heavily optimized for matrix multiplications.

 

[-COOLIO-]

anyone else here working on an game on the side of full time job?

how do you motivate your drained ass to work on it? coding is so hard to do well when youve used up brain power.

 

[Bentles]

You're supposed to throw prototype code away. If you plan and think everything through it'll take forever. Knock something together, then write it properly!

The more code you write, the better your hacked together stuff becomes, the less you need to rewrite!

You certainly can't plan out everything, but I try to get an idea of how things will fit together before I write anything. It's never exactly as intended and of course you can't plan for the unexpected but it's better than throwing things in with no forward planning. I haven't had to rewrite all that much.

What about debugging? Do you hack at it until it works by just trying things or try to figure out the problem and solve it? I basically never do the former and was kind of amazed the first time I saw people doing it but it seems to be a strategy that can pay off. I'd imagine it can backfire terribly though.

 

[bumpkin]

Ugh... Okay, I'm clearly a complete and utter moron. I'm still fighting with coming up with a bounding box collision detection function that works correctly. When I use basic checks like A.left < B.right, A.right > B.left, etc., I get true when the objects aren't even on the same plane. For example, when A is parallel to another entity way above it, those checks say it's colliding.

What am I missing?

 

[Graphics Horse]

Ugh... Okay, I'm clearly a complete and utter moron. I'm still fighting with coming up with a bounding box collision detection function that works correctly. When I use basic checks like A.left < B.right, A.right > B.left, etc., I get true when the objects aren't even on the same plane. For example, when A is parallel to another entity way above it, those checks say it's colliding.

What am I missing?

Are you ANDing the checks together?

A.left < B.right AND A.right > B.left AND A.top < B.bottom AND A.bottom > B.top

or something.

replace AND with && depending on the language.

 

[JasoNsider]

Ugh... Okay, I'm clearly a complete and utter moron. I'm still fighting with coming up with a bounding box collision detection function that works correctly. When I use basic checks like A.left < B.right, A.right > B.left, etc., I get true when the objects aren't even on the same plane. For example, when A is parallel to another entity way above it, those checks say it's colliding.

What am I missing?

First - don't panic

Second - step through on debug and set watches or inspect your values at run time and you will no doubt find a logic error in there. If stepping through isn't supported start catching those fringe cases in condition statements and output some values in console to see why it may be dropping into a collision erroniously.

Last resort post your code and we'll help.

 

[Popstar]

Ugh... Okay, I'm clearly a complete and utter moron. I'm still fighting with coming up with a bounding box collision detection function that works correctly. When I use basic checks like A.left < B.right, A.right > B.left, etc., I get true when the objects aren't even on the same plane. For example, when A is parallel to another entity way above it, those checks say it's colliding.

What am I missing?

You're doing things backwards. Don't try and check for all the ways boxes could be colliding. Check for the various ways they could be not colliding.

ie: if A.right < B.left then not colliding.

EDIT: I just realized you're the same person I told this to in the old thread. Feel free to ignore.

 

[charsace]

Are you ANDing the checks together?

A.left < B.right AND A.right > B.left AND A.top < B.bottom AND A.bottom > B.top

or something.

replace AND with && depending on the language.

Don't reinvent the wheel here. Google AABB if you don't need rotated collision or OBB if you do.

 

[Alts]

anyone else here working on an game on the side of full time job?

how do you motivate your drained ass to work on it? coding is so hard to do well when youve used up brain power.

For me it's not a matter of motivation, but time. If I can stay awake, I'm working on my own projects (one of which is a game). I don't know if it helps or hurts that my job has me writing code and managing developers. I've heard it go both ways. Personally, I think it helps that I can apply a similar skill to my job and side projects.

Some stuff that helps:

If you're having trouble starting something, competitions are helpful.
http://compohub.net/

If you're having trouble coming up with ideas, maintain a sparkfile. Just an unorganized list of ideas. Write in it whenever something comes to mind. Reread it on occasion.

#screenshotsaturday

Stop watching TV.

 

[Margalis]

Ugh... Okay, I'm clearly a complete and utter moron. I'm still fighting with coming up with a bounding box collision detection function that works correctly. When I use basic checks like A.left < B.right, A.right > B.left, etc., I get true when the objects aren't even on the same plane. For example, when A is parallel to another entity way above it, those checks say it's colliding.

What am I missing?

Definitely sounds like an and/or/not issue. I assume what is happening is your boxes overlap when projected onto an axis.

Rather than mess around in a debugger I would review the logic, and if your code does not have helpful comments add them.

I find that the single easiest way of dealing with tricky problems is writing comments explaining what the code should do, then making sure the code does that.

 

[razu]

You certainly can't plan out everything, but I try to get an idea of how things will fit together before I write anything. It's never exactly as intended and of course you can't plan for the unexpected but it's better than throwing things in with no forward planning. I haven't had to rewrite all that much.

What about debugging? Do you hack at it until it works by just trying things or try to figure out the problem and solve it? I basically never do the former and was kind of amazed the first time I saw people doing it but it seems to be a strategy that can pay off. I'd imagine it can backfire terribly though.

It all depends on the thing you're writing. A compiler or tool that a whole team is going to use all day everyday, I'd engineer that. Pretty much anything in my game I'm writing in Unity = a sketch on paper followed by typing until it works.

Hack is the wrong word I suppose. "Realtime design, based on decades of doing similar things" just isn't as catchy...

 

[ThatObviousUser]

Sorry sorry sorry I haven't done the Construct 2 pros/cons yet. >_< I'll get to it this weekend. If not, throw a boot at my head/PM box.

 

[Hinomura]

anyone else here working on an game on the side of full time job?

how do you motivate your drained ass to work on it? coding is so hard to do well when youve used up brain power.

My little daughter playing what I'm working on and the gaming passion I have are my two strongest motivations.

Problem is, sometimes I'm very very tired, especially when the eight hours of my full time job become ten / twelve hours of demanding work while the sleep hours shorten.

Probably if I hadn't ditched "real" coding (C#/XNA) in favor of scripting (Scirra Classic Construct) I could have given up.

Nowadays we are very lucky with game development since pratically anyone can give it a try (haunting asm coding is a distant memory). Obviously, as with everything in life, being it more feasible doesn't translate to sure results.

 

[hoverX]

anyone else here working on an game on the side of full time job?

how do you motivate your drained ass to work on it? coding is so hard to do well when youve used up brain power.

At first I was going to answer with My thoughts on motivation. Then I realized how little progress I've been making on my game lately lol I've battled with motivation for a long time. Well I shouldn't call it motivation issues as I want to finish this app off so bad. It's just I end up doing other shit and putting it on the back burner. I just procrastinate.

 

[Ashodin]

First post in this thread! I'm part of my own start up indie dev group (couple of people I know) and we're working on an indie RPG based off of an old TECMO RPG, Secret of the Stars.

 

[chubigans]

Today be #screenshotsaturday! Let's get some project pics up in here!

 

[udivision]

First Dungeon: The Pyruspa Forest.

 

[Ashodin]

Cutscene with full BG and character portrait:

 

[udivision]

Oh nice, RPG Maker VX/Ace?

 

[Ashodin]

Oh nice, RPG Maker VX/Ace?

VX Ace, yeah.

 

[charsace]

First Dungeon: The Pyruspa Forest.

DAT PARALLAX!

Cutscene with full BG and character portrait:

Like the art style.

 

[udivision]

VX Ace, yeah.

Cool, I've been dabbling with Ace myself.

It seems like you've increased the resolution for your game, but haven't changed the text to reflect that. You may need Poccil's extendtext.exe that'll make the textbook in the VXA interface larger so you can input more text on each line.

 

[Bamihap]

Thanks for putting the Green Light Bundle in the OP.

Development of Castaway Paradise is going great. We'll soon show of ingame video footage.

 

[Ashodin]

Cool, I've been dabbling with Ace myself.

It seems like you've increased the resolution for your game, but haven't changed the text to reflect that. You may need Poccil's extendtext.exe that'll make the textbook in the VXA interface larger so you can input more text on each line.

Hm? Are you referring to how the lines end before the end of the text box on the right? I'm just playing it safe with the text, really. I could add more if I wanted to.

 

[Blizzard]

What's the best way to resize a AABB at run time?

Thanks in advance.

Apparently Notch has been fighting similar problems, if it makes you feel any better.

So then I spent a few hours implementing AABB/Triangle intersection testing. Fun stuff.

AABBs work in minecraft because there are no diagonal walls! I need capped cylinders.. sigh, more math.

 

[charsace]

Apparently Notch has been fighting similar problems, if it makes you feel any better.

Right now I'm working on OBB collision response. I'm using the setup where there is a center, half lengths and a rotation matrix. I'm using SAT for the collision solving. I have the SAT working, just have to figure out how to record the separation vector.

 

[Popstar]

This hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread I believe.

It&#8217;s here! The MIT licensed Torque 3D GitHub repo is ready!

The day you&#8217;ve all been waiting for has arrived. The MIT licensed version of Torque 3D is now available on GitHub. For those that just want to jump in and fork or download the engine, the links to the two repositories on GutHub are listed below. Just promise to come back and read the rest of the blog, OK? (We especially want you to check out and share our new services page)

 

[eot]

On the topic of collision detection here's a method I quite like just for its elegance. It's also very good .

https://mollyrocket.com/849

 

[Heart of Black]

A bunch of Debug text up there, as the HUD is still being messed around with.

Currently working in Game Maker & will be migrating code over to C# for deploying on a Vita using the PSM SDK. Working to have a build that I'm comfortable with people playing by Indiecade... may or may not happen.

Game is called "Treachery in Beatdown City"

 

[clashfan]

+1 for C# too. As an experienced C++ game coder, I used to worry about what C# actually did. But then it dawned on me that it doesn't really matter all that much, and it just works. Vintage me would hate modern me, but modern me doesn't care! Modern me also never looks for ways of making my code fit into memory, like we used to on PS1. Modern me doesn't miss that one bit...

When I was a very young developer I though you where a wimp is you didn't code in assembly. Then I moved to C and though objects was for wimps. After I moved to C++ I though managed code/JVM was for wimps...
If you are doing a indie game that is not resource intensive then you can almost choose any language. C#/Java/as3, they all will do the job. Pick what gets the game done the quickest for your platform(s).

 

[BigWeather]

Screenshot from the game I've been working on, "Into the New World." It's pre- to mostly-alpha, but has some functionality missing. Uses programmer assets, debating on the look some but meant to look like an old map.

Edit: Thanks a ton BomberMouse for letting me know how to do the quote trick so the image wasn't huge.

Edit the second: Blizzard gave me a heads up that some browsers have issues with quoted img tags so here is a non-quoted smaller (75%) image.

 

[BomberMouse]

Quote the image. Like this

 

[Blizzard]

To me that post is fine, and the quoted one is annoying unless I right click to view in a new tab, which is still annoying since I have to middle click or lose the thread. Your picture is less than 1680x1050 which is my screen size. On mobile devices it might be too big, sure.

Otherwise, I have to hold down the mouse button to view the full size version, if I move the mouse at all, Firefox tries to drag the image and I get the faint overlay, and the bottom got cut off because it was at the bottom of the thread so I had to keep holding the left button down while simultaneously moving the scrollwheel in an epic feat of coordination.

Plus it doesn't work in Internet Explorer and I think I heard it has an annoying aspect in Chrome.

All that said, I like your graphics, BigWeather.

 

[Fou-Lu]

As much as I'd love to get into making my own games, I feel as though I just don't have the talents to make something I'd be proud of, especially visually, and the thought of using pre-generated assests makes me cringe. I wouldn't mind being part of a team, but I haven't been met with any interest IRL, and most online projects are either looking for experienced people, or else are obviously not going to get anywhere.

I have made and scrapped several game design documents that never got anywhere, which are now lost somewhere in the void of years old backups.

 

[Heart of Black]

As much as I'd love to get into making my own games, I feel as though I just don't have the talents to make something I'd be proud of, especially visually, and the thought of using pre-generated assests makes me cringe. I wouldn't mind being part of a team, but I haven't been met with any interest IRL, and most online projects are either looking for experienced people, or else are obviously not going to get anywhere.

I have made and scrapped several game design documents that never got anywhere, which are now lost somewhere in the void of years old backups.

I'd recommend looking to see if any game jams are around you, especially the Global Game Jam which is a pretty huge one. That was how I made my first game with a group, and it was really fun.

 

[BigWeather]

To me that post is fine, and the quoted one is annoying unless I right click to view in a new tab, which is still annoying since I have to middle click or lose the thread. Your picture is less than 1680x1050 which is my screen size. On mobile devices it might be too big, sure.

Otherwise, I have to hold down the mouse button to view the full size version, if I move the mouse at all, Firefox tries to drag the image and I get the faint overlay, and the bottom got cut off because it was at the bottom of the thread so I had to keep holding the left button down while simultaneously moving the scrollwheel in an epic feat of coordination.

Plus it doesn't work in Internet Explorer and I think I heard it has an annoying aspect in Chrome.

All that said, I like your graphics, BigWeather.

Oh, I didn't know about all of those issues with the quoted image -- I've actually uploaded a smaller one and I'll link to that instead. Still a neat trick to know.

As for the graphics, thanks! I like the look too, but it still needs some more polish. Right now there are three map states: totally unexplored (just the parchment look), explored but not in view (the black and white), and currently in view (the color version of the black and white map symbols). I'm planning to add a fourth, for areas not explored by the player but explored by others -- it'll be black and white but look more like the classic old maps with sea monsters and other decorations. =)

My plan is to get the game functionality complete and into beta and then revisit. I'm perfectly happy to stimulate the economy hiring an artist to help, but only once I'm sure that the game is fun (for me and others) and getting ready to release.

 

[BigWeather]

As much as I'd love to get into making my own games, I feel as though I just don't have the talents to make something I'd be proud of, especially visually, and the thought of using pre-generated assests makes me cringe. I wouldn't mind being part of a team, but I haven't been met with any interest IRL, and most online projects are either looking for experienced people, or else are obviously not going to get anywhere.

I have made and scrapped several game design documents that never got anywhere, which are now lost somewhere in the void of years old backups.

What is your primary interest? Coding? Art? Sound? Design? I'd jump in and see how far you can go. Don't worry about being proud of your work at the beginning, create the best assets you can now and run with them. Pride will eventually come. Even if you don't feel proud of the look you'll feel proud of sticking with it and of all of the knowledge you gained along the way.

 

[Blizzard]

My plan is to get the game functionality complete and into beta and then revisit. I'm perfectly happy to stimulate the economy hiring an artist to help, but only once I'm sure that the game is fun (for me and others) and getting ready to release.

I may be the only person bothered by image quote stuff, but yeah resizing it yourself is probably ideal. Thanks!

I'm also in the same situation where I'm happy to hire a pixel artist if I can find one, but first I need to get a game working so A) I can tell if it's feasible and fun and B) so I have something to actually show artists or composers if I go hunting for help.

 

[BigWeather]

I'm also in the same situation where I'm happy to hire a pixel artist if I can find one, but first I need to get a game working so A) I can tell if it's feasible and fun and B) so I have something to actually show artists or composers if I go hunting for help.

B is an excellent point. Nothing wastes more time (and money) than going back and forth on assets. If the whole game (and, more importantly, the "feel") is together then the artist will have more to go on in terms of design. Also, the artist will have a much better idea of what form the assets must take in terms of size, needing roll-over, click, etc. states for UI elements, etc.

 

[Fou-Lu]

I'd recommend looking to see if any game jams are around you, especially the Global Game Jam which is a pretty huge one. That was how I made my first game with a group, and it was really fun.

That's an interesting thought, Vancouver does do the Global Game Jam too... And I'll be moving there to continue my degree next year most likely.

What is your primary interest? Coding? Art? Sound? Design? I'd jump in and see how far you can go. Don't worry about being proud of your work at the beginning, create the best assets you can now and run with them. Pride will eventually come. Even if you don't feel proud of the look you'll feel proud of sticking with it and of all of the knowledge you gained along the way.

I'm actually into everything except coding, (I've tried a few times to learn, but haven't ever pushed hard enough) design is what holds the greatest interest to me, but I did just begin an amateur foray into sound production (holding out on a synth for christmas) and I've always enjoyed doing pixel art, though I'm not so good at it.

Edit: Interesting timing, my brother has to make a game for his game design class, and he asked me to help with pixel art and the story.

 

[BigWeather]

I'm actually into everything except coding, (I've tried a few times to learn, but haven't ever pushed hard enough) design is what holds the greatest interest to me, but I did just begin an amateur foray into sound production (holding out on a synth for christmas) and I've always enjoyed doing pixel art, though I'm not so good at it.

Edit: Interesting timing, my brother has to make a game for his game design class, and he asked me to help with pixel art and the story.

Nice! There's your opportunity, and in the areas you are more interested in as well.

 

[SirDigga]

Here is something a group of us have been making. Our game is called Perplex Beats which is a rhythmic puzzle game with a new control system that creates a new style of gameplay that is really fun to play. The player uses the controls to solve reaction-based puzzles in time with the music.

The music in Perplex Beats range from Rock to Hip-Hop, Funky-House to Pop. The game also includes a mode for advanced players called "Perplex Mode" where the user has to match the correct symbol and colour in time of the music. Therefore each cube has a unique symbol and all four colours on each side which is also rotated to match the symbol and colour of the notes travelling towards the user.

We recently made a tutorial video because we are trying to get our game selected for Steam Green Light

Gameplay Tutorial Video

Steam Green Light Page

Perplex Beats was created using XNA which has been a challenge because when we first started a couple of years back there were so many limitations its a lot better now. Oh we also added a cool announcer to keep the mood light because we are fans of the announcers from Killer Instincts and SSX games.

I hope you guys like our little music / puzzle game.

 

[Blizzard]

Function pointers and templates, along with operator overloading, are perhaps the single most annoying source of confusing syntax in C++. I was mucking around with creating a generic callback to use with GUI widgets, using two of the aforementioned features, and used this site as a reference to figure out why my syntax didn't work: http://www.newty.de/fpt/fpt.html

Incidentally, I was happy to find out that what I thought I came up with on my own had apparently already been invented and called the functor. Or something like that. Basically a generic non-templated wrapper around a templated subclass, which allows an abstract method of the callback wrapper class to be implemented by the templated subclass, calling an arbitrary callback method on an arbitrary object.

The great part is that the first time I got everything compiling, I used some sort of syntax like "pCallbackObject->*pCallbackMethod;". That compiles! And runs! Yet it does nothing, because apparently you need to do "(pCallbackObject->*pCallbackMethod)();" instead. I should know this offhand but I guess I'm going to claim that I use function/method pointers so rarely, I always forget the syntax. =(

 

[eot]

I've been messing around with Unity a bit and (please correct me if I'm wrong) it seems like all the code you write is tied to a given game object. So there doesn't seem to be a way to write code in a main gameplay loop unless you do something silly like make one gameobject that contains every other object. It's object oriented as all hell but it seems like it would make interactions between different objects a bit more cumbersome. Let say I'm making a tetris game in SDL, then I can have a gameplay loop that has pointers to all the pieces and the board within its scope and that makes handling interactions between them easy. Having all the game logic compartmentalized in fifty different places seems inconvenient.

 

[Teknopathetic]

"I've been messing around with Unity a bit and (please correct me if I'm wrong) it seems like all the code you write is tied to a given game object. So there doesn't seem to be a way to write code in a main gameplay loop unless you do something silly like make one gameobject that contains every other object. It's object oriented as all hell but it seems like it would make interactions between different objects a bit more cumbersome. Let say I'm making a tetris game in SDL, then I can have a gameplay loop that has pointers to all the pieces and the board within its scope and that makes handling interactions between them easy. Having all the game logic compartmentalized in fifty different places seems inconvenient."


That's essentially what you would do in Unity as well. There's actually a really old Tetris example that was made by a community member and there was just one Manager object that controlled everything. It's unfortunately really old and out of date and I can't find the thread about it on the Unity forums any more.


Edit: Hey, I found it. Still a few Unity versions old but I'd imagine it'd still work fine, it's pretty simple stuff.

 

[redlemon]

So I have to do a final year project for my course and I’ve decided I want to have a shot at making a game. My initial idea was to do a shoot-em-up but in trying to do some research I’ve discovered I can’t get past the first stage in most of the horizontal ones. I have some programming experience but nothing game related.
What I want to ask is what genre’s could a beginner make a simple complete game of in the span of 9 months or so?