HellBlazer
Member
Damn, congrats!
Any chance you could tell us how that number is split between the different distributors?
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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
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Damn, congrats!
Any chance you could tell us how that number is split between the different distributors?
Thanks
I can't really share numbers, but it did sell more on PC, and Steam is the biggest revenue maker. Of course it saw more discounts on PC. It did do great numbers for XBLA, though.Thanks
Congrats, man. I played it on the 360 and really enjoyed it. Look forward to seeing what you come up with next.
SlipperySlope
Banned
Screenshot Saturday? Screenshot Saturday.
- better video is below
First prototype section nearing completion, it sort of combines an enemy area and a town area. The storm effect is almost finished. I just don't have rain yet.
- better video is below
First prototype section nearing completion, it sort of combines an enemy area and a town area. The storm effect is almost finished. I just don't have rain yet.
At my school, a lot of non-STEM majors (e.g. journalism majors) are required to take an introductory Java course. Assignments include printing a smiley face. By the end of a course, many in the class will barely understand for loops. I can't directly compare my experience to theirs because I skipped this course, but I have gotten a sense of what the major roadblocks are by watching them stumble in tutoring sessions. It's mostly syntactical. These people were having trouble instantiating arrays. Replace arrays with lists that don't need constructors and I bet most of them would have gotten it. Start them with ADDI and they will all fail.
Programming is more than just flow charts. Memory management is very different in ASM and C. It can be ignored entirely for writing most applications in C#/Java. Everyone has a different aptitude for programming. The higher level people go, the less of a roadblock syntax will be for them in translating ideas into code. I recommend artists start with editors because they're gonna be wasting a lot of time learning fundamentals when the editor will take care of it for them. That's valuable time that could be spent developing their artistic ability.
Thanks
Huge congrats mate, you are an inspiration to many and I think we are all eagerly awaiting what you do next
I don't think you quite understand that setting up game logic with drag n drop is the same game logic for code in most cases. If you drag an IF, variable, operand and set a number all with icons - Its just like typing "if (x > 1)". The logic remains. Most of us here will never write our own engine so memory management comes down to simple object management and I think everyone can understand a 5 gallon bucket cannot hold more than 5 gallons of liquid. There's a lot that isnt needed to learn if you plan to use Unity, GM, etc. I'm looking at things from this perspective. Also, its worth noting that many people have to take prerequisite courses they aren't interested in. Its awful hard to learn anything when you aren't passionate about it. Forcing someone to learn something they will probably never use and know they probably never will is wasted time that could have been better spent on something else. If someone is interested in programming and wants to give it a go, their minds are already open to the idea unlike someone whos hand has been forced. There's a giant chasm between the two and shouldnt be used as a metric for how difficult ANYTHING is, let alone programming.
If you can't wrap your mind around game logic, no amount of drag and drop tools will help you. You will always struggle.
SlipperySlope
Banned
I redid the first video, didn't like the quality. Also made it darker and the lightning is more prominent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I67S5UbpsKk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I67S5UbpsKk
RelentlessRolento
Member
Late, but here's my #screenshotsaturday (bad capture)
gif captured weird, but progress is getting there.... still alot of early art.
loving the look. Getting Killer 7 vibes, which is a plus
gif captured weird, but progress is getting there.... still alot of early art.
#screenshotsaturday
loving the look. Getting Killer 7 vibes, which is a plus
AusRoachman
Member
My late screenshot saturday again. Playing with winter colors.
Added Volcanoes to my stylized 3d map:
That's just so amazingly unusual! Really great stuff!
Dunno what's happened in the last couple of pages! You've all gone mad!!
Meanwhile, I've decided to add arms and legs to Chopper Mike so he can walk and jump into a boat, or a truck!
Super Chopper Squad is becoming Super Something Squad
gifcam! I love this program.
In fact, I just noticed they have a donate button. I'm sending them some dough. I sure use this thing enough.
RelentlessRolento
Member
Wooh! just sent over some stuff to a sound dude and now I have a musician + SFX person on board.
Takes a huge load off my back.
Takes a huge load off my back.
Oh. I should have mentioned, I use a Mac. Heh, heh.
EDIT: Looked around on that site and someone recommended a Mac program, so I'm gonna give that a try.
Indeed, for many. But there are also many for whom it can be a very good thing
to go the other way around.
(*) You take it out of context way too much. If I wrote: "It isn't really that
difficult as you might think it is. Programming is actually pretty easy because
it has known rules.", then that's not saying programming is easy on any general
scale as you put it by simply writing the sentence above.
Once one knows the rules, then it appears to be easier as one might have thought
it is -- an experience shared by many people while learning stuff. In the end
one may recognize it wasn't as hard as they thought is was or were get told.
Using the words of Jack_AG again; "We need to get past his 'programming is hard
herp derp' mumbo jumbo and call it like it is - it isnt hard, its the logic that
gets you ...". And the logic boils down to rules.
You know what's hard? Communication is hard. If you don't know the receiving
end, i.e. the rules to put the data in such a way that he can understand,
preventing him from misinterpreting the data -- while you constantly try to
adapt the data to figure out the protocol by looking at what you got back, is
quite a hard thing.
See (*).
Bomber Bob
Banned
Congratz man! Dust is slick
I think you can if you use Parallels.
http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
Not sure if you need it with Unity, though.
McFadge
Member
Does anybody else have issues using this? The .gifs I create often come out with bad ghosting artifacts and the like. I see so many people praising it while I find the quality pretty bad with bizarre results, so I figure I must have a setting or something wrong.
ZehDon
Member
I just caught an article on this, and popped back here to say congratulations on such an impressive milestone. I also wanted to say that Dust was one of the games that actually inspired me to take a stab at making my own game. So, please keep doing what you're doing. And take a picture of the Scrooge McDuck money bin for us when it arrives
Candescence
Member
Congratulations, Noogie! It's nice to see Dust become successful, I may not be as absurdly multi-talented as you are, but I want to create something great as well, and you're one hell of an inspiration, mate.
Anyhow. While I'm learning Java (and very soon, likely Unity) at uni (though I am more of a design/storywriter guy than a programmer, I think, I'm not too shabby at it, I guess), my main development tool at the moment is Construct 2. To be frank, I think the info on C2 in the OP is hilariously out of date, and its 'bugginess' is rather exaggerated. If you want to see buggy, look no further than Construct Classic, which had a rather unstable foundation, and could seriously be a buggy piece of shit. C2, on the other hand, is fairly stable, and Scirra is doing an admirable job for 2-man company with only one person actually doing the programming - it's more stable than some programs made by companies with actual bug-testing departments. They could do with having a few more programmers on-board at least, though, perhaps. But C2 has become a fairly mature program with a flexible toolset, and as far as non-scripting game makers go, it excels above the rest, and even exceeds some scripting-based programs (Game Maker has an abysmal toolset, good grief).
As for what I'm actually doing with it, well, that's the interesting part - I haven't really started with an original indie game (though I do have concepts), but rather I'm building a platforming engine in C2 that allows multiplayer capabilities, so multiple players can control multiple characters using the same basic movement system, even multiples of the same character, and even AI control. Partly to facilitate this, I've been developing a fan-game in tandem, based around the Digimon Battle Spirit games, which I call "Digimon: Heroic Battle Spirit", which was showcased at the Sonic Amateur Games Expo very recently (yes, I am aware of the irony of submitting a Digimon fangame to an online expo focused around Sonic the Hedgehog, but it's not like there's anything else like that out there). Oh, and the game itself has a playable demo, so if you want to try it out, go nuts.
Battle Spirit was a good fit, because, as Smash Bros. inspired fighter with simple mechanics, I could test multiplayer, but also gave me room to work on a metroidvania-like singleplayer mode. And, in addition, it enabled me to experiment with mechanics I intend to use in my more original concepts. For starters... You see, I'm someone who would rather use as few cutscenes as possible when conveying a game's narrative - they have their uses in very specific circumstances, but for the most part, I find it bizarre that the vast majority of games rely on a non-interactive form of storytelling (and then there's the cases where the game is just one big cutscene with quick-time-events). Half-Life 2's method of never taking control away from the player was a step in the right direction, but people inevitably complained that they didn't want to be stuck in a room while the NPCs did stuff without your input. The inevitable solution is to actually give the player some input during narrative-driven sequences.
I also had another thought - dialogue menus are nice, but why do we have to stand around doing absolutely nothing else while talking? Usually while performing near-constant eye contact? Nearly every game with a dialogue menu that I can remember is tremendously guilty of this. Can't we have conversations while doing something as simple as walking, or even during a pitched battle? Well, I decided that the dialogue menu should have its own dedicated button. And in HBS, it does.
Am I seriously the only person to actually consider using a system like this? I'm very disappointed in all of you
As you can see, I used speech bubbles to accommodate real-time dialogue, which would normally be otherwise done in speech windows. Very much Starbound-inspired. Stuff such as speech from characters who are way off-screen or narration is placed at the top of the screen in the middle of the HUD for easy reading, and scales accordingly with the screen. There's also a customizable slow-down feature for when the menu is open, the player can choose to have no slowdown, completely freeze the game, or somewhere in-between. Oh, and there's a 'look' command, ala classic adventure games. You can't really access it with a controller, unfortunately, due to the button limit, not that I really plan to build my games primarily around controllers, anyhow, except maybe the Steam Controller. There's three slot layers, but the inner layers, I think, are best suited to a generic set of actions, sort of like the poses in Dark Souls, but they can actually either supplement dialogue choices or act as responses in a dialogue, and thus cause reactions in NPCs. Well, that's the idea, I think. But, yeah, the dialogue menu system works fine in the demo, you can basically yell at nothing and get silence in response, and have a chat with Devimon while exploring the castle or while actually fighting him.
Yes, there's something of a 'fog of war' system for exploration, rooms are only revealed as you enter them, and become hazy when you leave. It creates a neat sense of foreboding while also getting around the fact that I can't really limit the camera to specific rooms with my current setup at the moment, though that does have its perks, including enabling the player to set the camera zoom level at any time, which is nice. I like to give players options when I can.
So far, I'm mainly using assets from existing games and open-source assets, which does kinda result in some art style dissonance in the demo, but it can't be helped, I'm no artist, haha. So, yeah, I'm currently hoping to run into an artist willing to help me out, both for the fangame and for my more original ideas - in terms of character animation, I'm looking at Spriter, mainly because it has an existing C2 plugin (Spine doesn't, and it doesn't look like that's changing anytime soon, and it's too expensive, anyway, while Spriter's pro edition is $25, plus I happen to know Spriter's programmer, Lucid, as a fellow avid Construct user), and for practical reasons (ease of iteration and animation compared to traditional methods, RAM usage), and some really cool features (character customization and skinning, hitboxes, action points, custom variables for animations, etc).
But for now, I'm mainly working on improving the engine and implementing new features. Such as, say, a platformer pathfinder AI, using a combination of C2's platformer behavior and its A*-based pathfinder behavior. It's fairly simple, but it works perfectly in the vast majority of cases, and I think it'll be sweet for, say, NPCs actively wandering the world. I'll need objects to act as custom 'nodes', obviously, but that's a given for the most part.
The two main ideas I have in mind for my original stuff, which I'll likely start prototyping fairly soon... The first is a metroidvania-like game with inspiration from Rogue Legacy, Infinity Blade (and The Dark Meadow, too), Dark Souls (yeah, I know, old hat by now), among others, and a mixture of some of their mechanics, with the previously-explained narrative and exploration mechanics, and a cast of characters on two or three opposing factions who you can potentially side with, and, possibly, with each playthrough, a mostly random set of characters that are still alive by the time the player character shows up.
The second idea is a platform-based tower defense game. Which, thinking about now, would probably be much simpler to implement.
tl;dr: I've got some interesting ideas, and I've been working on an engine in Construct 2 to build those ideas around. And a fangame to go with it. So, yeah.
Wyndstryker
Member
Great thing about this thread is that we have people who actually have gotten success from humble beginnings into a flourishing indie dev.
I wonder how many more gaffers will end up hitting the 1 million sales mark with their projects.
I wonder how many more gaffers will end up hitting the 1 million sales mark with their projects.
Late to the party, but congrats to that amazing and outstanding achievement!
Certainly gives some of us hope!
I was literally thinking about this the last day or two. I think if I ever finish a game, and it hits 10,000 sales on Steam, that will be a big personal achievement. Double or triple that would be a success.
bumpkin
Member
Parallels is one route. You can also use VMWare Fusion. I've used that on my 2010 iMac and 2012 MacBook Pro and it runs a Windows 7 virtual machine pretty well on both.
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion
I'm trying to hone in on what I want my battle system to be so I was hoping anyone would give me some feedback:
I was wondering if it's possible to have three different characters that semi follow a single leader, while still being able to be controlled by one person? I'm looking at a top down style, and wondering if its feasible to be able to space the two trailing characters but still be able to have them interact individually of the player, but still controlled by that player. Sorry if this is confusing, I've been going over it for days.
I was wondering if it's possible to have three different characters that semi follow a single leader, while still being able to be controlled by one person? I'm looking at a top down style, and wondering if its feasible to be able to space the two trailing characters but still be able to have them interact individually of the player, but still controlled by that player. Sorry if this is confusing, I've been going over it for days.
Quoting myself as I no-one PM'ed me - free book if you can use it!:
Hi all, does anyone here use Unreal, or would like to learn UDK/UnrealScript? I'm not really any kind of developer as yet, but trying to get into Unity and as such my wife bought me a book at Christmas - except she bought me an Unreal book!
http://www.packtpub.com/unreal-development-kit-game-programming-with-unrealscript-beginners-guide/book
I got a full refund from PACKT due to the error, but they don't have a returns process so told me I could keep the book! It's £30.99 new, but if anyone is interested please PM me and you can have it for the price of postage, or probably even free if you're in the UK
Pasta_Soup
Member
Working on our first major boss battle in Olympia Rising. It's coming along nicely!
thx, the one I have set my eyes on is the latest (fall'13?) 13" mbp 16gb ram/2,4GHz.
I hope the retina display is compatible with VS, will be my first mac.
Good thing you got a refund. UnrealScript is discontinued in UE4 in favor of C++ (At least that's what they said when they demo'ed it 2 yearsh ago, been looking forward to it ever since.)
I hate UnrealScript
Hey all, loving all the new art popping up in this thread, very inspiring stuff
I have a small update on our game with more to come in the future
http://ashen-game.com/?p=199
again, awesome work everyone, keep it up!
I have a small update on our game with more to come in the future
http://ashen-game.com/?p=199
again, awesome work everyone, keep it up!
Ha! "Major" is right. It looks good.
Hey all, loving all the new art popping up in this thread, very inspiring stuff
I have a small update on our game with more to come in the future
I really like this art style. The animation makes the character look injured, though, as if he's favoring one of his sides or limbs.
SeanNoonan
Member
Started a new one...
Looks nice!Hey all, loving all the new art popping up in this thread, very inspiring stuff
I have a small update on our game with more to come in the future
http://ashen-game.com/?p=199
again, awesome work everyone, keep it up!
Arms are still work in progress? They look both pretty stiff compared to all the jiggling around. Are those bits hand animated or physics?
Very nice movement of the shield on his back and the axe on his belt.
Proxy Blade Zero has been approved and is out right now on Xbox 360!
It's available right here:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/Product/Proxy-Blade-Zero/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550e29
At last, I'm finally done with it. That was a long ride.
It's available right here:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/Product/Proxy-Blade-Zero/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550e29
At last, I'm finally done with it. That was a long ride.
Mr_Appleby
Member
We should try some kind of fusion, man. Like in Dragon Ball Z.
Totally deserved. I loved Dust on my 360.
I wish you to do even better with your next project.
man... i'm going to have to watch dragonball one of these days just to get the references on this board
fusions might have to wait until i've finished integrating the collision/physics engine. it already does a mean flappy bird clone though!In my veins with this.Working on our first major boss battle in Olympia Rising. It's coming along nicely!
bumpkin
Member
You'll probably be good then. My iMac is a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 8GB of RAM, and my MacBook Pro is a 2.3GHz Intel I7 w/ 16GB of RAM. Their systems only seem to get faster as they update them and both of mine are a year or more old.
The only thing I can say is that Epic's UDK doesn't run so hot on either, but Unity is way more efficient in how its built. That runs great on both of my machines natively at least.
ZehDon
Member
Congratulations! Looks sweeeeeet. I know XBLIG can be pretty harsh, so I hope it does well there. I'd check it out, but I live in Australia, and XBLIG doesn't work down under. Are you looking at doing a PC port?
Yes. I've put the game on Greenlight for that: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=182016804
Hah! Loving the hair!Hey all, loving all the new art popping up in this thread, very inspiring stuff
I have a small update on our game with more to come in the future
http://ashen-game.com/?p=199
again, awesome work everyone, keep it up!
legacyzero
Banned
Subbed. Working with GM studio.
Logo!
Logo!
tentative
ChosenPredator
Banned
Hey all, loving all the new art popping up in this thread, very inspiring stuff
I have a small update on our game with more to come in the future
http://ashen-game.com/?p=199
again, awesome work everyone, keep it up!
i like this, for some reason the shield/stick looks real like it could break if a sword it or if it was used to much..i get that sense out of it
Thaumaturgic Tomato
Member
Added Volcanoes to my stylized 3d map:
I've said it before when you first posted a map gif - This is a great looking map. Very attractive stylization
Thaumaturgic Tomato
Member
Hey all, loving all the new art popping up in this thread, very inspiring stuff
I have a small update on our game with more to come in the future
http://ashen-game.com/?p=199
again, awesome work everyone, keep it up!
I hope this isn't placeholder texture work or shading because it is nice. Like a figure carved out of wood. Besides enhancing the shaders and textures, he seems pretty close to complete design-wise. And though it may sound strange for an abstract wooden man, his movement, combined with his gear, actually seems visceral. His nonfeet actually seem to grab the ground. The sense of weight could be further improved, but I am interested in the exploring what kind of world such character would inhabit.
And your website mentions giants. Show us some giants. Giants are awesome.
Working on our first major boss battle in Olympia Rising. It's coming along nicely!
Oh wow, this is your game? I thought the demo was slick, and I love how this boss looks.
Thanks
My advice, work within your limits. I'm far from being the best artist, or designer, and I'm certainly an amateur programmer. Just a matter of faking it all really well. And thanks everyone for the kind words!RelentlessRolento
Member
Got most done of my first ever boss fight I've ever programmed
Will polish it up once I get story stuff sorted out tomorrow
Will polish it up once I get story stuff sorted out tomorrow
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