[Fodder76]

I want to make love to this trailer. Where are you guys based?

I suppose that's as big a complement as one could ask for, thanks!

We are based in Chicago, IL, USofA.

I'll be sure to link to the full trailer here when we release it.

With our other game, we are participating in the 'BecauseWeMay' promotion, marking it down 50%. Its VERY different from our new game though, its a game about collecting and racing puppies, so I doubt many people here would be into it. Unless you have kids, in which case you should pick it up immediately. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvVy6TZ2ZwI

[asa]

fodder76, you are the guy who send me email earlier, your new game looks rad!

[Peter303]

I've put a few games out on iOS but not made any serious money.

My latest one is this http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beans...502779286?mt=8 and is currently free.


The game is a fairly simple endless climber but once you start collecting gems in chains of 3 the score multiplier increases and you can get some massive scores. I was inspired by Treasure's Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun for that. There's a load of quests to complete too which unlock more abilities.

I think I should've spent more time on coming up with a better name and better icon though.

[udivision]

I put my project on a DevLog in TIGSource, and was wondering if there are anymore similar forums for indie game developers?

[usea]

I put my project on a DevLog in TIGSource, and was wondering if there are anymore similar forums for indie game developers?

I really like the tigsource devlogs.

Maybe try gamedev.net? They have developer journals, but I don't know how you get yours added.

[fin]

We've just released our new indie game Ichi!

Looks awesome!

[Ranger X]

You don't have to spend as much. Just find people with hardware. Or rent a screensharing mac online.

I dunno why I didn't think about that. It's a good idea lol
I'm so concentrated into planning my stuff and centered on my project that I can't think about the simplest things sometimes. :P

[Andrex]

Whoah Paper Knight's Story is only $33 from being funded. :O Two weeks left too, it'll definitely make it (hell if there's any doubt I'll kick in the $33 left.)

Congrats udivision! Hope development goes smoothly.

[udivision]

Whoah Paper Knight's Story is only $33 from being funded. :O Two weeks left too, it'll definitely make it (hell if there's any doubt I'll kick in the $33 left.) Congrats udivision! Hope development goes smoothly.

Thanks! I'm pretty stoked about it. I'm going to invest a lot of time into development once that stuff is squared away, which will mean some interesting new feature details, screens and videos.

[AwShucks]

Shred Nebula on XBLA.

And no we made no money on it. Leaderboards probably still have under 4k people :(

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Whoah Paper Knight's Story is only $33 from being funded.

If I had my paycheck already, I'd put in the final $33.

[udivision]

We made it! Big thanks to everyone who helped!

Now to start the serious work... then get distracted by e3, then start work again.

[Somnid]

Man Kid Icarus -> Xenoblade -> Diablo (with me buying Dark Souls, Vanquish and Bayonetta in between but haven't really started any) has killed me timewise. I've made no progress in nearly 3 months. Why can't real jobs have a summer break?

[usea]

Man Kid Icarus -> Xenoblade -> Diablo (with me buying Dark Souls, Vanquish and Bayonetta in between but haven't really started any) has killed me timewise. I've made no progress in nearly 3 months. Why can't real jobs have a summer break?

I feel you :(

I'm going to get some stuff done today on my game, but the divekick tournament is going to start soon and I must watch it!

[bumpkin]

Man Kid Icarus -> Xenoblade -> Diablo (with me buying Dark Souls, Vanquish and Bayonetta in between but haven't really started any) has killed me timewise. I've made no progress in nearly 3 months. Why can't real jobs have a summer break?

Pretty much. Ironic that all I ever said as I got closer to graduation was "I can't wait to never have to go to school again!" Too bad I was completely unaware that adulthood is nothing but work, work, work, work. Forget about hindsight being 20/20; it's downright depressing. haha.

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Why can't real jobs have a summer break?

Is this a serious question?

[fin]

Hey can anyone make sense of this license?

http://create.msdn.com/en-US/educati...roller_buttons

I'm assuming it's free range cause they are only button icons, but it's Microsoft so you never know... Or does anyone have link to some cooler icons? I can't seem to find any.

Also, need some opinions. My game isn't going to be much fun using a KB+M, it's best played with a controller. But it's going to be released on PC... Should I spend the time to make sure it plays well/everything works with KB+M? Is it going to be ridiculed for playing like shit with a KB? What's the general reaction to games like Super Meat Boy,Sonic, Street Fighter etc...Here's a diagram of the controller inputs. What would you recommend for default KB controls? My main concern is the movement. It's much faster, for me at least, to move with the analog stick rather than WASD.

[IamMikeside]

Hey can anyone make sense of this license? http://create.msdn.com/en-US/educati...roller_buttons I'm assuming it's free range cause they are only button icons, but it's Microsoft so you never know... Or does anyone have link to some cooler icons? I can't seem to find any. Also, need some opinions. My game isn't going to be much fun using a KB+M, it's best played with a controller. But it's going to be released on PC... Should I spend the time to make sure it plays well/everything works with KB+M? Is it going to be ridiculed for playing like shit with a KB? What's the general reaction to games like Super Meat Boy,Sonic, Street Fighter etc...Here's a diagram of the controller inputs. What would you recommend for default KB controls? My main concern is the movement. It's much faster, for me at least, to move with the analog stick rather than WASD.

If I were you, I'd definitely try to get it playing well on a KB - not everyone uses a controller.

Most people would appreciate being able to set their own controls, but for the default (just based on that image, having not seen/played your game) I'd look at;
WSAD for movement
Space for jump
Shift for gravity
Esc for pause

Then for slow down/speed up either I'd use the mouse buttons or whatever's comfortable for your right hand on the PC - maybe left and right buttons or something?

[charsace]

I need help understanding perlin noise. For an algorithm that's as popular as it is, there isn't a lot of easy to understand documentation. It only took me a couple of hours to understand and implement midpoint displacement. Not the same for Perlin Noise. 3 days I've been researching it and still don't fully understand it.

[fin]

If I were you, I'd definitely try to get it playing well on a KB - not everyone uses a controller. Most people would appreciate being able to set their own controls, but for the default (just based on that image, having not seen/played your game) I'd look at; WSAD for movement Space for jump Shift for gravity Esc for pause Then for slow down/speed up either I'd use the mouse buttons or whatever's comfortable for your right hand on the PC - maybe left and right buttons or something?

Thanks, I'm digging the mouse buttons idea.
This would probably be a later medium or early hard difficulty track.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O64VlnZH1nc

[.nimrod]

I need help understanding perlin noise. For an algorithm that's as popular as it is, there isn't a lot of easy to understand documentation. It only took me a couple of hours to understand and implement midpoint displacement. Not the same for Perlin Noise. 3 days I've been researching it and still don't fully understand it.

It's explained quite well here http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.eli...s/m_perlin.htm

Basically, it's a sum of noise functions at different scales (octaves).

If you wanted to generate terrain for example, your base level would be noise with very big amplitudes and low frequency. What you then get is the very rough shape of mountains.
But since they might be very smooth and you want to add detail, you then add another layer of noise with a smaller amplitude an higher frequency.
The more detail you want, the more layers of noise you have to add, with each layer having a lower amplitude and higher frequency than the last. If we weren't limited by floating point precision, we could have infinite detail that way.

You can then even apply that to as many dimensions as you want, i played around with volumetric terrain created on the gpu for a while (the fine detail comes from normal maps in those pics):



with some warping applied:

[Blizzard]

It's explained quite well here http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.eli...s/m_perlin.htm

Darn, I was going to link that exact same website from Google but you beat me to it. :P

[ferr]

I don't know if it counts as a 'game' but I made a Blackjack game for Win Phone 7 recently. It took 6 weeks to make and pulls in $100-150 per month from ads. I'm thinking about switching over to iPhone development since WP7 lacks micro-transactions last I checked.

I have boatloads of unpublished (unpublishable) 'games' written in C# WinForms. I find myself writing up game ideas during boring meetings as well. Just keep at it, definitely pick up a language like Python or C#. C# is very easy to program in and can be used as a starting point for exploring ideas or creating prototypes.

[wondermega]

getting ready for E3 - one week to go!

[usea]

Also, need some opinions. My game isn't going to be much fun using a KB+M, it's best played with a controller. But it's going to be released on PC... Should I spend the time to make sure it plays well/everything works with KB+M? Is it going to be ridiculed for playing like shit with a KB? What's the general reaction to games like Super Meat Boy,Sonic, Street Fighter etc...Here's a diagram of the controller inputs. What would you recommend for default KB controls? My main concern is the movement. It's much faster, for me at least, to move with the analog stick rather than WASD.

I realize this was answered already. You might think your game is more fun with a controller, but I a ton of people will prefer to use keyboard or kb/m. Street fighter is a great example, as I personally know more people who play that with keyboard than a stick or pad. It would be a huge mistake to assume everybody plays the same way.

[Minamu]

Hey can anyone make sense of this license? http://create.msdn.com/en-US/educati...roller_buttons I'm assuming it's free range cause they are only button icons, but it's Microsoft so you never know... Or does anyone have link to some cooler icons? I can't seem to find any.

I'd like to know this as well, actually. As for our game, we have keyboard support for player one, but not player two (it's a coop game). Not much we can do about it, and the colored buttons are very central to the mechanic.

[-COOLIO-]

wrong thread

[Crazymoogle]

I'd like to know this as well, actually. As for our game, we have keyboard support for player one, but not player two (it's a coop game). Not much we can do about it, and the colored buttons are very central to the mechanic.

2 (A) You can distribute these images as part of your software anywhere in the world without fee (but so can anyone else). Derivative works (edits) are also okay.

2 (B) You have permission to sell your software for money even though it includes these images. The images are still non-exclusive though.

3 (A) This doesn't grant you rights to use, say, the Xbox360 logo or anything like that.

3 (B) If you bring a patent suit against MS or whomever contributed these images, you lose the license to these images instantly

3 (C) If you include these images in your game, and there are (C) (TM) or patent attribution notices somewhere in them, you must add the notice somewhere in your game (eg: credits screen)

3 (D) If you release the source code for your game later and it includes the images at all you need to include the license document

3 (E) The usual "not my fault if these PNG files explode" notice

I am not a lawyer, but according to the license
a) yes, you can use this content for free
b) there doesn't appear to be anything restricting you to using it on XNA or MS only projects
c) technically for legal reasons you can never "own" these images or edits thereof, but since it's royalty-free and you're given permission to sell your software for financial profit, it doesn't really matter.

[Bamihap]

Looks awesome!

Thanks! Try out the demo: www.ichi-game.com/demo . I would love your feedback.

[Minamu]

I am not a lawyer, but according to the license a) yes, you can use this content for free b) there doesn't appear to be anything restricting you to using it on XNA or MS only projects c) technically for legal reasons you can never "own" these images or edits thereof, but since it's royalty-free and you're given permission to sell your software for financial profit, it doesn't really matter.

Thank you! :) Sent your info to my graphic designers who started on something similar today (or will tomorrow).

[asa]

Congrats on the kickstarter Udivision, I hope moneys are enough, 1000-2000$ seems low for a such large scope game.
Sorry to say, but it is almost so little that doing a KS for such sum seems kinda pointless. I'm talking more of a "doing this for living" point of view, but even for a hobby project it's kinda low.
I would advice you to first finalize a small section(like the first 30minutes) of the game, and get that out for the current kickstarters and followers.
Then, if you still want to continue with the project, do another KS for the rest of the game, maybe use the first section as a demo for the new kickstarter, put the acquired knowledge from the first project in use and create a better game!
(and ask more money, if you're going to depend on the KS funding for the duration of the development)
I wish you best of luck!


My own little project is trucking along. I made a new mainmenu today, I think it fits nicely on my whole 80's/90's aesthetics:

And video of the same thing: http://youtu.be/pvin9IojJyY

[asa]

damn, double post.

[usea]

Menu looks awesome, though I don't like the camera panning back and forth so much. But the aesthetic is rockin.

[udivision]

Congrats on the kickstarter Udivision, I hope moneys are enough, 1000-2000$ seems low for a such large scope game. Sorry to say, but it is almost so little that doing a KS for such sum seems kinda pointless. I'm talking more of a "doing this for living" point of view, but even for a hobby project it's kinda low. I would advice you to first finalize a small section(like the first 30minutes) of the game, and get that out for the current kickstarters and followers. Then, if you still want to continue with the project, do another KS for the rest of the game, maybe use the first section as a demo for the new kickstarter, put the acquired knowledge from the first project in use and create a better game! (and ask more money, if you're going to depend on the KS funding for the duration of the development) I wish you best of luck!

Thanks, and awesome menu by the way.

Looking aback, you're probably right. Considering I have a only 2 man team, it may be more work than the money is worth. However, I didn't know exactly what to expect when I started the Kickstarter. We went low because we thought until we had rep for good games (or at least for decent ones) it'd be hard to convince anyone to fund our project.

I don't want to go back on the promise to the funders, that'd tick everyone off I'm sure. It's gonna be tough, but we're just going to have to power through this.

[MangoMoustache]

Well, I've been working on an indie title called Primal Carnage for the past year and a half or so. It's a third person dinosaur / first person shooter multiplayer game. We're releasing this summer and we just put out a new alpha gameplay trailer a few weeks ago. Check it out if dinosaurs are your thing.

Trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxOssrojWsg



Now, we may not be indie in the sense that we didn't make our game engine from scratch (as we use Unreal Engine 3), but our approach to development is still very indie. We're all basically working in a virtual office. We communicate over VOIP since most of our team is pretty spread out across a few different states/countries. We did recently get an on site "office" but it's essentially a two bedroom apartment converted into an office with gaming computers everywhere. I'm pretty excited to see what happens in the next few months, it's an odd feeling knowing that people will soon be playing something you worked so hard to bring to reality.

[IamMikeside]

Well, I've been working on an indie title called Primal Carnage for the past year and a half or so. It's a third person dinosaur / first person shooter multiplayer game. We're releasing this summer and we just put out a new alpha gameplay trailer a few weeks ago. Check it out if dinosaurs are your thing. Trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxOssrojWsg Now, we may not be indie in the sense that we didn't make our game engine from scratch (as we use Unreal Engine 3), but our approach to development is still very indie. We're all basically working in a virtual office. We communicate over VOIP since most of our team is pretty spread out across a few different states/countries. We did recently get an on site "office" but it's essentially a two bedroom apartment converted into an office with gaming computers everywhere. I'm pretty excited to see what happens in the next few months, it's an odd feeling knowing that people will soon be playing something you worked so hard to bring to reality.

looks like fun - I'll keep my eye on this

[Hazaro]

Well, I've been working on an indie title called Primal Carnage for the past year and a half or so. It's a third person dinosaur / first person shooter multiplayer game. We're releasing this summer and we just put out a new alpha gameplay trailer a few weeks ago. Check it out if dinosaurs are your thing. Trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxOssrojWsg Now, we may not be indie in the sense that we didn't make our game engine from scratch (as we use Unreal Engine 3), but our approach to development is still very indie. We're all basically working in a virtual office. We communicate over VOIP since most of our team is pretty spread out across a few different states/countries. We did recently get an on site "office" but it's essentially a two bedroom apartment converted into an office with gaming computers everywhere. I'm pretty excited to see what happens in the next few months, it's an odd feeling knowing that people will soon be playing something you worked so hard to bring to reality.

Were you at PAX East? I had an Exhibitor badge and pointed out a glitch if you held sprint and another key you'd warp back and forth.

Had a nice time playing it there.

[MangoMoustache]

Were you at PAX East? I had an Exhibitor badge and pointed out a glitch if you held sprint and another key you'd warp back and forth. Had a nice time playing it there.

Yup, I was at PAX East. If you saw a guy walking around with a camera and a moustache that was me. We had Primal Carnage set up as a 16 player LAN across three different booths at PAX, so we got a lot of people playing. It was really interesting watching people play with no instruction. We ended up making a ton of changes to combat common issues between players (IE: making controls more intuitive), and bug fixes like the one you mentioned.

PAX East overall was incredibly fun, and it was awesome talking to people about our game. If anyone has the chance of going to PAX, I highly, highly recommend it. It's amazing exposure for whatever project you're working on. Or if you're just a gamer, I liked it better than E3 in terms of the scale and epicness of booths and games available to play.

On a related note, this is the main Primal Carnage booth at PAX East.

[Sega1991]

Been tracking Primal Carnage almost since the beginning. Didn't you guys start out as a UT2004 mutator?

Was skeptical about being able to play as Dinosaurs, too, but a friend mentioned how much I liked Left4Dead and I can definitely see a few small parallels in that recent trailer, which looks awesome, by the way. Dunno why I wasn't subscribed to your Youtube channel earlier, you definitely post more there than you do on Moddb, it seems.

[Fodder76]

Hey guys,

This happened a little sooner than I thought, but the full trailer is up, and right now its the top story on Touch Arcade!

http://toucharcade.com/2012/05/29/un...hitting-stuff/

Let me know what you think.

[Minamu]

This Friday, my school will be showing off our 10 week game dev projects on this livestream :)

http://www.livestream.com/hislive

The stream will start at 10am and I'll be on, in suit, not a gaf shirt unfortunately, at 11am for 25 minutes, my local time which is gmt+1 (not too sure about summer time though). So we'll be on during Thursday night or really early morning I suppose for most Americans. Six teams of about 15 people each will present a trailer and do a short post mortem of the games. It'd be nice if we got some gaffers to watch us :)

[charsace]

This Friday, my school will be showing off our 10 week game dev projects on this livestream :) http://www.livestream.com/hislive The stream will start at 10am and I'll be on, in suit, not a gaf shirt unfortunately, at 11am for 25 minutes, my local time which is gmt+1 (not too sure about summer time though). So we'll be on during Thursday night or really early morning I suppose for most Americans. Six teams of about 15 people each will present a trailer and do a short post mortem of the games. It'd be nice if we got some gaffers to watch us :)

Good luck man.

Finally got perlin noise to work. Why is it that no one mentions that whole numbers will return 0 all the time? Its something that's really important.

[Minamu]

Good luck man.

Thanks :)

[Kritz]

So, if anyone wants to see what bad student video games look like, here's the group project I spent the last 13 weeks making by myself. It's the first 3D game I've ever made, and only the third game I've "completed" as part of my course. (Note that we only had to complete a prototype, not an actual completed thing)

Oh, it also requires that unity browser plugin thing, I think.

Group projects are interesting. People are super excited for the potential of what can happen in the game in the first week. We're planning stuff and our ideas seem solid (and at that, down to earth! I made sure nobody tried to start anything we couldn't reasonably pull off), everyone says "oh I can do this part of the game". We make a TODO list, and get on our way. The idea was pretty simple. We had to make a game prototype showing off our knowledge of game design practices. My team mates decided they wanted to make a game about a drunken wizard. I named it, because I like Idle Thumbs. I also made the entire video game, because nobody else in the group wanted to ever do anything.

11 weeks into the project, I had made some pretty shoddy AI, some pretty shit projectile mechanics, the first level you see there, my own camera system (didn't like Unity's default camera so programmed my own) and a few other things. The rest of my team had made two models, both of which didn't animate correctly (they are the two models used in the game). Also a katana. For some reason people like making katanas in 3D modelling software. I don't get it. These two models were made by two people together. The third person made the HUD. It goes up and down. It is less than five lines of code. Kill me now. So, as a result, most of the mechanics in the game are incredibly rushed, unpolished and a result of "this is my first 3D game so I have no idea what I'm doing" mixed with "nobody on this team is going to help me make a video game, but I'll be damned if that stops me."

Sorry for the rant. Truth be told, now I'm past the hump of making my first 3D prototype, I'm kind of excited to try and make something by myself. Or find some guys in my uni who want to put a serious effort into making something cool. It's kind of crazy how much you learn in terms of programming and art design and level design that you want to immediately apply to the next thing.

And the best part about this class is just watching a room of 30 people work on their own little games. Some guys made a really cool physics game, others made this beautifully made QTE game that wasn't so much a game than it was a cutscene. Some people made the worst platformer I've ever played. It's all fantastic watching the first works of people learning about game design.

I will never be a man that makes video games. But it's kind of great to do these classes, even if it's just for the perspective of how much work goes into the most horrible experiences.

[Minamu]

Anyone know anything about lighting in udk when using level streaming? We keep getting "lighting needs to be rebuilt" since we have several maps on the same coordinates and switch them out in real time. I'm not sure how to bake the lighting to make the ground textures tile correct etc because of that (since udk won't allow us to place levels at random positions, which would allow us to bake all maps at the same time).

Edit: I made a post about it in the UDK thread as well.

[Blizzard]

Finally got perlin noise to work. Why is it that no one mentions that whole numbers will return 0 all the time? Its something that's really important.

Whole numbers from which function(s)? If you'd like to share your learnings with the class that'd be great, since I might want to learn perlin noise myself some day. :P

[charsace]

Whole numbers from which function(s)? If you'd like to share your learnings with the class that'd be great, since I might want to learn perlin noise myself some day. :P

In the method that you send the point to to create the texture, if you send it an integer that function will always return 0. So the generated texture will be all black if you do it in grayscale.

[charsace]

And perlin noise filtering is hard to get working if you are trying to do it with only the cpu. I personally can't get it to work in xna without shaders. This site helped me:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPU...chapter26.html

[wondermega]

also here is a boss battle (mockup) from GunHead, we are expecting to put this in the E3 build



Imagine this type of music playing in your head while you watch it

also pardon the jerky animation, I anim'd in photoshop which is not exactly the most elegant solution. The purpose of this gif is merely to show the programmers how the sprite elements fit together and behave.

[fin]

Well I think I'm finally done the major coding. GUI system, logging in, stat tracking, KB and mouse support, controller support (Unity OnGUI with a controller is a bitch) all done! Now time for artwork and some sound. I'm setting myself a deadline July 1st. After that I'm saying fuck it and putting it out there.

Also there is a sale on the asset store: http://unity3d.com/unity/asset-store/

50% off

I bought Essential Explosions yesterday. Definitely worth $10 IMO, it's got like 145 sounds. Although the volume of some need to be cranked a bit. Also interested in getting NGUI $45, Component Copier $2.50, Smooth Moves $35, Input.Touch $10, and Bitmap2Material $75. Thinking about the Login System $10 too. Not sure if I want to buy that, better to learn it yourself and code it.