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[TintoConCasera]

I found a really interesting article. I've been wanting to try out an offbeat idea for rendering for a while, to see if I like it more than the traditional way. Basically emulating brush strokes with quadratic curves, because I've always wanted my game to look as much like an oil painting as possible. Might turn out to be a dead end, but at least I'll have satisfied my curiousity :]. I'm going to make this part of the image editor I was talking about ^. https://agg.sourceforge.net/antigrain.com/research/adaptive_bezier/

You crazy man. Post results when you have some! I'd love to see that stuff.

 

[mopspear]

I keep meaning to post something in here (I did start the thread after all) but I'm always "one more thing" until I feel like I want to show something. I'll add this:

One of the robot types in my game moves from node to node in a loop. I was trying to make some elegant solution that relied less on manually setting what nodes should be in what order. It was wasting so much time that I gave up on that and just set them manually anyway. Once I took it all in, I thought "I only have to do this a couple times and no other enemy would use this code". It wasn't worth it to be elegant this time. The other times were. This time wasn't. There's something to be learned here.

 

[Johnny Concrete]

I keep meaning to post something in here (I did start the thread after all) but I'm always "one more thing" until I feel like I want to show something. I'll add this:

One of the robot types in my game moves from node to node in a loop. I was trying to make some elegant solution that relied less on manually setting what nodes should be in what order. It was wasting so much time that I gave up on that and just set them manually anyway. Once I took it all in, I thought "I only have to do this a couple times and no other enemy would use this code". It wasn't worth it to be elegant this time. The other times were. This time wasn't. There's something to be learned here.

What kind of game and what engine are you using? Or are you not ready to reveal that?

---

I'm (sometimes) working on a rather stupid thing: it's using Quake 1 assets, but it's a top down twin stick shooter/ARPG in UE5. So you enter a small arena (based off the Q1 levels) and you kill waves of enemies, until they are depleted and the door opens to the next arena.

Features planned:
- Full ARPG stuff (enemies dropping loot and such), you can switch clans (changing your colors and giving you buffs and debuffs).
- You can carry 2 weapons at the same time, but they have to be of unique ammo type (shells, nails, rockets, cells) - killing an enemy with ammo type A will drop ammo type B (forcing you to use both weapons).
- Making it with couch co-op in mind
- Bunnyhopping needs to be in (timing the jump gains you speed)

I thought ripping the assets from a game would at least saving me a lot of time making them, but I didn't account for the fact that these 3D models are from 1996 and don't have skeletal meshes. They do come with keyframed animations (all of the animations are in 1 file), so I had to create an animation system in UE5 where I blend between the keys. This way I can still use the original animations.

I also made a LUT that uses the original Quake color palet. Pretty cool.

It's just a hobby project and I like working on it. Not meant to be for sale (would get me sued by Microsoft anyways probably...)

 

[uncreativename]

What kind of game and what engine are you using? Or are you not ready to reveal that?

---

I'm (sometimes) working on a rather stupid thing: it's using Quake 1 assets, but it's a top down twin stick shooter/ARPG in UE5. So you enter a small arena (based off the Q1 levels) and you kill waves of enemies, until they are depleted and the door opens to the next arena.

Features planned:
- Full ARPG stuff (enemies dropping loot and such), you can switch clans (changing your colors and giving you buffs and debuffs).
- You can carry 2 weapons at the same time, but they have to be of unique ammo type (shells, nails, rockets, cells) - killing an enemy with ammo type A will drop ammo type B (forcing you to use both weapons).
- Making it with couch co-op in mind
- Bunnyhopping needs to be in (timing the jump gains you speed)

I thought ripping the assets from a game would at least saving me a lot of time making them, but I didn't account for the fact that these 3D models are from 1996 and don't have skeletal meshes. They do come with keyframed animations (all of the animations are in 1 file), so I had to create an animation system in UE5 where I blend between the keys. This way I can still use the original animations.

I also made a LUT that uses the original Quake color palet. Pretty cool.

It's just a hobby project and I like working on it. Not meant to be for sale (would get me sued by Microsoft anyways probably...)

That sounds fun :]. Also very doable, there must be a trillion tutorials out there on how to do twin stick shooters. Keep us updated

 

[TintoConCasera]

What kind of game and what engine are you using? Or are you not ready to reveal that?

---

I'm (sometimes) working on a rather stupid thing: it's using Quake 1 assets, but it's a top down twin stick shooter/ARPG in UE5. So you enter a small arena (based off the Q1 levels) and you kill waves of enemies, until they are depleted and the door opens to the next arena.

Features planned:
- Full ARPG stuff (enemies dropping loot and such), you can switch clans (changing your colors and giving you buffs and debuffs).
- You can carry 2 weapons at the same time, but they have to be of unique ammo type (shells, nails, rockets, cells) - killing an enemy with ammo type A will drop ammo type B (forcing you to use both weapons).
- Making it with couch co-op in mind
- Bunnyhopping needs to be in (timing the jump gains you speed)

I thought ripping the assets from a game would at least saving me a lot of time making them, but I didn't account for the fact that these 3D models are from 1996 and don't have skeletal meshes. They do come with keyframed animations (all of the animations are in 1 file), so I had to create an animation system in UE5 where I blend between the keys. This way I can still use the original animations.

I also made a LUT that uses the original Quake color palet. Pretty cool.

It's just a hobby project and I like working on it. Not meant to be for sale (would get me sued by Microsoft anyways probably...)

Sounds super fun! Reminds me a lot of a previous project of mine that was also a twin stick shooter. Keep us posted!

 

[mopspear]

What kind of game and what engine are you using? Or are you not ready to reveal that?

---

I'm (sometimes) working on a rather stupid thing: it's using Quake 1 assets, but it's a top down twin stick shooter/ARPG in UE5. So you enter a small arena (based off the Q1 levels) and you kill waves of enemies, until they are depleted and the door opens to the next arena.

Features planned:
- Full ARPG stuff (enemies dropping loot and such), you can switch clans (changing your colors and giving you buffs and debuffs).
- You can carry 2 weapons at the same time, but they have to be of unique ammo type (shells, nails, rockets, cells) - killing an enemy with ammo type A will drop ammo type B (forcing you to use both weapons).
- Making it with couch co-op in mind
- Bunnyhopping needs to be in (timing the jump gains you speed)

I thought ripping the assets from a game would at least saving me a lot of time making them, but I didn't account for the fact that these 3D models are from 1996 and don't have skeletal meshes. They do come with keyframed animations (all of the animations are in 1 file), so I had to create an animation system in UE5 where I blend between the keys. This way I can still use the original animations.

I also made a LUT that uses the original Quake color palet. Pretty cool.

It's just a hobby project and I like working on it. Not meant to be for sale (would get me sued by Microsoft anyways probably...)

It's not much to see since my older post about my game. A ton of code has been fixed but nothing interesting to see. Your game reminded me of an idea I had to make a JRPG FPS. I never got a good idea of what it would be. I re-read your post and saw you are doing it top-down so nevermind haha. But I like the sound of what you're making.

 

[Gp1]

As a hobby. If you are going to develop a game now, what would be the first thing you would try to learn?
Like... Where to begin with?

 

[TintoConCasera]

Started working on a boss for the climax of the demo I'm working on. This big demon dude has a lot of attacks, both melee and spells and can move around the arena by walking, flying and dashing around. I'm currently polishing it and finishing up his behavior but I'm happy with how it's coming along.

If I'm honest I never though I'd be able to pull this off lol.

As a hobby. If you are going to develop a game now, what would be the first thing you would try to learn?
Like... Where to begin with?

I'd download an engine (either Godot or Unity, UE5 is probably way too bloated for a beginner) and start from there. Forget about making assets or music or whatever, just follow some tutorial to get started with the engine.

But here comes the thing: even for that you'll need to know how to code. It's either coding, or messing around with blueprints and "visual languages" and the like which might be fine for a small project but for something cooler and/or bigger you probably want to do it by coding. Plus those "visual languages" always end up being a total spaghetti.

So I'd advise to start learning to code. You don't need to be an expert to make something small, but you need to know the basics.

edit: now that I think about it, for something small you might be fine with using something like ChatGPT. Just make sure to try and understand what you are doing instead of just copy&pasting.

 

[mopspear]

As a hobby. If you are going to develop a game now, what would be the first thing you would try to learn?
Like... Where to begin with?

Are you personally looking to start making games? We can help you with this from our COMBINED WISDOM!

 

[Gp1]

Are you personally looking to start making games? We can help you with this from our COMBINED WISDOM!

Started working on a boss for the climax of the demo I'm working on. This big demon dude has a lot of attacks, both melee and spells and can move around the arena by walking, flying and dashing around. I'm currently polishing it and finishing up his behavior but I'm happy with how it's coming along.

If I'm honest I never though I'd be able to pull this off lol.

I'd download an engine (either Godot or Unity, UE5 is probably way too bloated for a beginner) and start from there. Forget about making assets or music or whatever, just follow some tutorial to get started with the engine.

But here comes the thing: even for that you'll need to know how to code. It's either coding, or messing around with blueprints and "visual languages" and the like which might be fine for a small project but for something cooler and/or bigger you probably want to do it by coding. Plus those "visual languages" always end up being a total spaghetti.

So I'd advise to start learning to code. You don't need to be an expert to make something small, but you need to know the basics.

edit: now that I think about it, for something small you might be fine with using something like ChatGPT. Just make sure to try and understand what you are doing instead of just copy&pasting.

That's exactly the idea, I'm thinking in prototyping something with AI, with minimal knowledge in anything game design related besides dabbling with one of the first editions of UEditor.

 

[TintoConCasera]

That's exactly the idea, I'm thinking in prototyping something with AI, with minimal knowledge in anything game design related besides dabbling with one of the first editions of UEditor.

Keep us posted man, and let us know if we can be of any help! Me, probably not lmao, my knowledge doesn't go further than Godot and moving some vertices on Blender.

Well, there's also Trenchbroom! Man do I love that shit, it's a map editor meant for Quake and Source games but there's plugins to easily import the maps to Godot and Unity. Super easy to make stuff with that.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Been deep in the optimization mines since Sunday, but I think I'm done. Turns out my enemy management logic was flawed and I wasn't fully disabling enemies that weren't on the current room, so once I had a real level, all those enemies were causing a massive drop in performance and the game ran at like 30fps on the Deck.

Once I had that fixed I decided to go all-in and implemented shader and particles precompilation (basically executing all of them behind a loading screen). Something interesting I learned here is that the shader pipeline is different depending on the current AA mode, so I had to run that precompilation with all the AA modes I allow.

Which btw, I used to allow some levels of MSAA but I've removed those, and now I only offer No AA or FXAA (for those with poor hardware) while also giving a slider for Resolution Scale that goes up to 2.0, which makes the game look real nice. What do you think of that?

 

[SomeNorseGuy]

Been deep in the optimization mines since Sunday, but I think I'm done. Turns out my enemy management logic was flawed and I wasn't fully disabling enemies that weren't on the current room, so once I had a real level, all those enemies were causing a massive drop in performance and the game ran at like 30fps on the Deck.

Once I had that fixed I decided to go all-in and implemented shader and particles precompilation (basically executing all of them behind a loading screen). Something interesting I learned here is that the shader pipeline is different depending on the current AA mode, so I had to run that precompilation with all the AA modes I allow.

Which btw, I used to allow some levels of MSAA but I've removed those, and now I only offer No AA or FXAA (for those with poor hardware) while also giving a slider for Resolution Scale that goes up to 2.0, which makes the game look real nice. What do you think of that?

Sounds like you're on top of things. Hope you post a link when the demo is ready, I'm itching to perform some goblin hate crimes.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Sounds like you're on top of things. Hope you post a link when the demo is ready, I'm itching to perform some goblin hate crimes.

Thanks man! Hope you like it. It'll be short, like 15 or 20 minutes long. Just the prologue section without any cutscene and lacking a mini-boss that I want to include before the last combat section and the final boss I'm working on. Once I have the big dude ready I'll publish it, so it should be "soon"!

 

[Mengy]

I'd download an engine (either Godot or Unity, UE5 is probably way too bloated for a beginner) and start from there. Forget about making assets or music or whatever, just follow some tutorial to get started with the engine.

But here comes the thing: even for that you'll need to know how to code. It's either coding, or messing around with blueprints and "visual languages" and the like which might be fine for a small project but for something cooler and/or bigger you probably want to do it by coding. Plus those "visual languages" always end up being a total spaghetti.

So I'd advise to start learning to code. You don't need to be an expert to make something small, but you need to know the basics.

Good advice.

I play around with Godot and GameMaker. Just as a hobby, I've never made anything worth selling, though I'd love to take one of my prototypes someday and finish it up enough to be presentable.

I love coding but I hate all the little things you need to do to make a game "finished".

 

[TintoConCasera]

Good advice.

I play around with Godot and GameMaker. Just as a hobby, I've never made anything worth selling, though I'd love to take one of my prototypes someday and finish it up enough to be presentable.

Yeah same here, always did it as a hobby up until my current game which is the first one I'll ever publish. At the very least it'd be really, really cool to me to have people play something I've developed myself.

It's a very fun hobby.

I love coding but I hate all the little things you need to do to make a game "finished".

I ended up loving 3D modeling, specially since all I do is low effort low poly stuff lol. But I get what you mean, and for me what I hate the most is sound design: looking online for that sound effect that's just what I need and then tweaking it until I'm happy with how it sounds in game... can get boring and very time consuming.

 

[Mengy]

I ended up loving 3D modeling, specially since all I do is low effort low poly stuff lol. But I get what you mean, and for me what I hate the most is sound design: looking online for that sound effect that's just what I need and then tweaking it until I'm happy with how it sounds in game... can get boring and very time consuming.

I love 3D modeling too, did a lot of it for work in software like Solidworks, Pro-E, and Autocad, but 3D modeling is time consuming, particularly in gaming where you need 3D motion too. For the little retro prototypes I make for the fun of it, 2D is simply much easier to do.

 

[TintoConCasera]

I love 3D modeling too, did a lot of it for work in software like Solidworks, Pro-E, and Autocad, but 3D modeling is time consuming, particularly in gaming where you need 3D motion too.

Yeeh it sure is, but it's fun to me at least. It's kinda like making your own toys and then making them do cool poses. But yeah sometimes it can get boring, specially if you have to make several walk cycles for the same model because maybe the can hold a shield or not, or different weapons...

For the little retro prototypes I make for the fun of it, 2D is simply much easier to do.

Easier for you haha! I moved on from 2D to low poly 3D because I couldn't draw even if you pointed a gun at my head lmao.

I remember trying to animate 16x16 sprites and that was super hard.

 

[kikkis]

Started learning blender. I think i will use that as level editor for unity. I think i can just use some programming tricks from source file to instantiate prefabs on unity side.

 

[Plies]

Still waiting for GameTank to come back in stock so I can begin my game development journey.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Started learning blender. I think i will use that as level editor for unity. I think i can just use some programming tricks from source file to instantiate prefabs on unity side.

Good luck with the blending man. If you want something easier, I believe Unity has a plugin to import Trenchbroom maps.