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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
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Someone got any news on the delivery state of the Oculus Rift development kit?
I guess the high-backers get their kit first, for sure, but I would like to
know if the ordering number tells anything about when anybody else will get
theirs, i.e. has any non-backer got the kit already? I don't know. Anyhow, I
can't wait getting it.
Am intending to support the Rift for my first game, since the game perfectly
fits into VR space. With respect to my game, I worked a lil on the background
story for the last few days and did some programming as well. I'm currently in
the process of trying out some surface adaptation/refinement strategies.
I guess the high-backers get their kit first, for sure, but I would like to
know if the ordering number tells anything about when anybody else will get
theirs, i.e. has any non-backer got the kit already? I don't know. Anyhow, I
can't wait getting it.
Am intending to support the Rift for my first game, since the game perfectly
fits into VR space. With respect to my game, I worked a lil on the background
story for the last few days and did some programming as well. I'm currently in
the process of trying out some surface adaptation/refinement strategies.
Expect late April at the absolute earliest if you weren't a backer.
From an Oculus Kickstarter update:
"Dev kits should start shipping out to the earliest backers on March 29th"
"We expect to deliver roughly 1,000 - 1,500 units a week"
So roughly March 29th + Math.floor(your order number / 1250) * 7 days + a couple days delivery (for US) or 1-2 weeks for international. I'm not expecting mine until early-mid June.
So much for "We've crossed the 24-hour mark, with over 7,000 Oculus Rift developer kit backers, all of which will receive their kits in December."
"Dev kits should start shipping out to the earliest backers on March 29th"
"We expect to deliver roughly 1,000 - 1,500 units a week"
So roughly March 29th + Math.floor(your order number / 1250) * 7 days + a couple days delivery (for US) or 1-2 weeks for international. I'm not expecting mine until early-mid June.
So much for "We've crossed the 24-hour mark, with over 7,000 Oculus Rift developer kit backers, all of which will receive their kits in December."
Despite the really busy month (lots of time wasted preparing for classes and lectures) I managed to finish a little game, thanks to the 1GAMCRUNCH that took place this weekend. This is my first attempt at working with HTML5/JS (ImpactJS is quite alright), and the result is a Breakout clone with a twist - you can use your paddle to break out the blocks, but that leaves the "death" area unprotected.
It's playable directly within the browser. Too bad there wasn't enough time to include more stuff (like local leaderboards, music and auto-pausing the game on moving the mouse out of canvas - I wasted several hours on making that last thing work, to no avail).
Ported the There Came an Echo prototype to MonoGame 3.0 tonight. All native XNA calls worked perfectly, though the lack of an inherent Content Pipeline is super annoying. Apparently, they're going to fix that, though.
Does anyone know how Mono itself works? Like, if I wanted to use Microsoft .NET libraries regarding speech synthesis and speech recognition, could those be made to work in Mono?
Does anyone know how Mono itself works? Like, if I wanted to use Microsoft .NET libraries regarding speech synthesis and speech recognition, could those be made to work in Mono?
Tiu Neo
Member
I know they where porting some speech libraries to mono, but I'm not sure if the current version has it. I'll take a look.
EDIT: Here, do you use any of those namespaces? http://go-mono.com/status/status.aspx?reference=4.0&profile=4.5&assembly=System.Speech
It seems complete, or at least mostly complete, on 4.0.
Dynamite Shikoku
Congratulations, you really deserve it!
How important do you guys think it is to have a Facebook page for your game in addition to a regular website? I don't know if I want to spend time making one
My undersanding is tht Mono is meant to be completely compatable with the .NET runtime, so in theory it should work with any .NET stuff. (Assuming you're only interested in Mono on Windows...)
I don't think it's overly important. Although, given that I have a £0 ad budget, I think getting friends and family to share the links has been a success. The trailers for Chopper have been viewed around 7,000 times.
In other news, Chopper Mike has been added to a touch arcade poll: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=182942&page=7 I've totally hit the big time now. No votes, but totally big time
Tiu Neo
Member
I don't think it's overly important. Although, given that I have a £0 ad budget, I think getting friends and family to share the links has been a success. The trailers for Chopper have been viewed around 7,000 times.
In other news, Chopper Mike has been added to a touch arcade poll: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=182942&page=7 I've totally hit the big time now. No votes, but totally big time
Eh, why not? Voted for it.
I'm not sure, but maybe it's easier to get an PSM license than a PSN license? And, at least on PS3 and Vita, PSN gets you a lot more visibility.
PSM requires no fees to develop for and no special hardware, then £65 to publish or test on devices, whereas actual Vita development requires you to set up an official company, sign NDAs and fork out somewhere in the region of £1500 for a devkit from what I've read. I might be a little off on some of these points (the devkit price, for example, is based on an old presentation from the SCEE website I think) but it's massively more complicated to be an official PS developer. Essentially PSM is aimed at hobbyists and small indie devs, whereas actual PSN development is for larger companies. I think you also have to submit design docs to Sony and get approval before you can be a registered developer, but I might be wrong.
If you mean differences between the two that are unrelated to the setup and business side, then registered developers get full hardware access, whereas PSM is very basic, everything runs on a (slow) VM and you can't use the rear touch, or even use buttons and touch at the same time (as smartphone users have to use virtual controls, which prevents touch inputs from being registered for the game I believe).
EDIT: In short, if you're an individual or a very small indie group then you don't really have any choice but to use PSM. If you're a full company with reasonable resources then you'd be barmy to pick PSM over the full devkit route (unless it was as a (very) small side project while developing for another platform or something).
Looks really great. Sucks you have to change the design a bit, but hopefully you'll revisit that in the future.
Diablohead
Member
she also had sharp knees.
I paid for drawn artwork and for the OST but the rest is my own, I doubt that I will show much for a while now as i'm in the middle of sorting it out and it doesn't look any different to the older screens from before, I also need to re-enable all the lights and stuff to this new scale while making it still run on older iOS hardware...You working on that by yourself, Diablohead? Looks impressive.
Looks really great. Sucks you have to change the design a bit, but hopefully you'll revisit that in the future.
for sure, I still want to make a love child of super metroid but it's going to have to be something I can fund better and get some help with, hopefully with any money this game makes.
Makes perfect sense. Thank you!
There were a few different ordering schemes. People with 40k order numbers might actually get say, the 20k'th unit. I don't know the exact numbers though.
However, the latest info supposedly from Oculus support suggests that people who backed after the Kickstarter might get their units in June, or starting in June? It's probably safest just to hope for a devkit in 2013 barring delays.
Paddington Bear
Member
Is the 1500£ devkit for Vita or PS3? Or both?
I think that's (approximately) £1500 each, but that's just what I remember. I'll see if I can find the slides I got it from.
EDIT: Slide 4 of this presentation: http://develop.scee.net/files/prese...012-Jordan Game Summit-PlayStation Mobile.pdf
(Linked from here, "PlayStation® Development: An Introduction" at the Jordan Gaming Summit 2012).
€1700 = £1442.25 = $2198.95 (different regions will presumably have their own rounded prices, these are just from Google conversions).
Unity provides a framework to create games then lets you export that game to any one of the supported platforms (some of which you have to pay for and some (like the consoles) you have to be a registered developer for and pay probably quite a lot. We don't know yet how much PSM export will cost yet, but I doubt it will be free, unfortunately).
Whether a given Unity game will actually run at an acceptable frame rate on any given platform depends on the game, so something designed for PS4 probably won't work on iPhone, but might on PC etc. Some platforms may have features that aren't available on others as well.
If a game is quite simple, or designed from the start to run on a given piece of hardware as a minimum, it should be easy to port to different devices (theoretically it should take mere seconds to "port" it across, but I'd expect that in most cases you'd have to tune it separately for different devices). Making PS3/Vita games that are the same on both should be a viable option for a lot of devs and I'd have thought that PS4/Vita would be possible for quite a few smaller PS4 download titles, with things like texture detail, lighting etc obviously scaled down on Vita.
You could also start out on a PSM game, then transition up to full Vita/PS3 if/when it starts to need more power, provided you were a full company with Vita/PS3 dev kits of course. To be honest, with the current state of PSM, that "if/when" would probably just be a "when" if you were doing anything more than the most basic 3D game, but hopefully Unity support will mean more optimisations or a raising of the bar for the lowest spec supported phones.
Note: I haven't really used Unity, so some of this post is speculation and/or educated guesswork, other people with more experience may have some corrections!
Paddington Bear
Member
Totally agree! Thanks for your help! Ill be back haha
Mr. Luchador
Member
Has anyone used 'Adventure Game Studio' before?
I played around with it some years ago. Seemed geared more for point and click games, and people made some interesting things with it, but I didn't stick with it for too long.
Oh damn, that's it!
Awesome.
I opened Unity and it scared me. So MonoGame it is. = D
Would this not work on Mac/Linux for some reason?
Try so tuts on Unity before giving up on it. It scared the living fuck out of me too, but its much easier than it looks. Unity is also a good tool to learn about the entity component design pattern.
Mr. Luchador
Member
Thanks.
That's the impression I got, regarding point and click genre, so I'm sort of excited. It looks like its free, so I guess there's no harm trying it.
Tiu Neo
Member
It's on the framework, so it probably will. The only way this could not work is if there where specific/native libraries that where platform dependent, but I don't think that's the case.
I'm not sure if it'll work with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, if you plan to port it. You can probably test that on the free version.
Unity keeps punching itself in the dick. I can't even get to merge two boxes in the editor before it crashes. Using 4.1.1 and the latest version of Probuilder.
That said, I just checked the website, and they appear to have downgraded to 4.1.0, so I'm going to give that a try.
For the next eight weeks, I'm going to dedicate myself to Unity. The goal is to have one working level for a game concept by the time I'm done so I can graduate.
That said, I just checked the website, and they appear to have downgraded to 4.1.0, so I'm going to give that a try.
For the next eight weeks, I'm going to dedicate myself to Unity. The goal is to have one working level for a game concept by the time I'm done so I can graduate.
Sword Familiar
178% of NeoGAF posters don't understand statistics
I would love to see this game in motion. Any chance you'll make a trailer or something for it in a near future?
Also, what are you making this in?
As mentioned in the Oculus thread, Unity also (unless they change their minds) is apparently going to require a $1500 pro license if you want to even distribute any Oculus Rift stuff. Someone correct me if you can distribute things during the 4-month trial period, but legally I'm not even sure if you can do that, so you'd just be making stuff for yourself for 4 months?
Meanwhile, UDK just confirmed Oculus support is free, so I'll probably try to jump back in with that. I especially hope they release an eventual UE4 UDK.
So a game I made the music for and helped test was just released! It's a fun little gravity-flipping / block-painting puzzle platformer called Howmonica. Playable in-browser here:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/613484
Kongregate and Gamejolt links for those who prefer them.
And here's the title theme / main bgm I made:
Soundcloud
Also available on Bandcamp with a sweet song from another composer as pay-what-you-want.
Would love to hear some feedback on the game and/or the music!
Congrats on the release! Been following this for awhile now. Just bought on Android (great excuse to spend money with my new S3!) and will post back with impressions once I get a chance to try it out.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/613484
Kongregate and Gamejolt links for those who prefer them.
And here's the title theme / main bgm I made:
Soundcloud
Also available on Bandcamp with a sweet song from another composer as pay-what-you-want.
Would love to hear some feedback on the game and/or the music!
Chopper Mike is live!! Enjoy!
Click for App Store...
Click for Google Play...
It says it's compatible with the iPhone 3GS, which is worrying. I added a thing to require a front facing camera, so it should be impossible to download. If anyone has a 3GS and is willing to try downloading it, I'll be your friend forever! Will reimburse if it does let you buy it!
Congrats on the release! Been following this for awhile now. Just bought on Android (great excuse to spend money with my new S3!) and will post back with impressions once I get a chance to try it out.
MikeHaggar
Member
just throwing it out there again that i'm looking for a talented pixel artist/animator to work with. i'm a solid programmer with a passion for making something awesome. i have several ideas for games and am open to discussing any concepts you may have. i'm also flexible as to which platform(s) the title will be released for. i only ask that you be serious and devoted. pm me if interested.
Tried to look for 2D particle engines for XNA today, and I couldn't find something worthwile. That Mercury Particle Engine looked quite good but there's a problem when trying to render with a projection matrix and the current codebase is all broken.
Writing things that are already done is a pain in the ass when you know that you'll end up having something kind of half-assed (unless you want to spend a significant amount of time), but I guess I'll end up writing my own particle system.
But just in case, does anyone know if there's a good solution?
Writing things that are already done is a pain in the ass when you know that you'll end up having something kind of half-assed (unless you want to spend a significant amount of time), but I guess I'll end up writing my own particle system.
But just in case, does anyone know if there's a good solution?
Mr_Appleby
Member
oh geez! I feel much better about being #3300 then.
going to have to brush up on the "new" (ie. not so old) openGL though, my knowledge is still all pre-shaders stuff. I do have something I'm working on that I'm hoping to get going with the Rift, and maybe even in a couple of weeks from now I can start posting some screenshots here. It's kind of a revival of the old Freescape games but with some modern touches, like a framerate >12fps. It's all done in regular old C/OpenGL which has been really fun tbh. and so far portable too, I've had no problems going back and forth between windows and linux builds. No problems so far anyway. The hardest part is probably going to be keeping myself working on this project and ditching it for something new, like I usually do.
FormallyMegadrive
Member
Anyone who uses Unity have any tips on external version control? Apparently there's a way to do it since 3.5 but I haven't looked too much into it. I really want to use Unity but lack of any proper versioning is worrisome to me. Forking out for asset server or that team one isn't an option.
Apparently you can change metadata and scene storage to text and ignore /Temp and /Library and version that way but I haven't seen much to support this. Its between Unity, MonoGame and possibly Loom.
I'd like to use git or mercurial.
Apparently you can change metadata and scene storage to text and ignore /Temp and /Library and version that way but I haven't seen much to support this. Its between Unity, MonoGame and possibly Loom.
I'd like to use git or mercurial.
Mr_Appleby
Member
I've just started using BitBucket to host a Git repo for a Unity project. I didn't set it up but I believe it's free. We've only made a handful of commits overall, and our project is very small in terms of assets etc. so I can't really say if it will suit you but so far it's been fine. Unity doesn't seem so bad compared to my last project which used 2 different code generation tools, neither with any kind of team integration, which lead to mad merging headaches. We used Assembla to host a Git repo for that. One tip for Assembla is when creating a repo you have to scroll down a page or so to see the free options.
I used DPSF for Sequence. Worked pretty well, though performance wasn't *SUPER* great.
I'd be interested to see one, but try RB Whitaker's tutorials. It works pretty well if you just want something simple, and could also be a good jumping off point for a more advanced engine.
http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/2d-particle-engine-1
FormallyMegadrive
Member
I've previously used git and it didn't work out too well lol. Mostly from me not knowing about text metadata and not knowing what to ignore. I use BitBucket For other projects in the past and it is indeed completely free with pay options. What does your .gitignore contain?
Mr_Appleby
Member
NemesisPrime
Banned
I am using MS Team Foundations System... it is free for up to 5 devs atm. Also has Git support or classic central server source control.
Paying to get a fish-eye projection on the screen ... ouhh ... that's
ridiculous. Clever move from Unity, they know how to make the "indies"
dependent.
That's cool! Am in a similar situation as the Freescape developers back in the
days, building a 3d engine for a very limited hardware, which is way cool and
a different game altogether, kind of a real craftsmanship using bits and bytes
as the sole material and pure mathematics to tie it all together. Freescape
and Novagen had perhaps the first real 3d engines at their hands, long way
before Carmack even knew about the dot-product! Keep going, mate! I want to
play cool indie Rift games! lol at 'modern touches'. xD
Would be cool to have it right now, but on the other hand I have enough work
on my hands forming the base of my game, so I'm fine till the end of July
where I want to have a clear vision of how I'm going to generate the content
for my game.
Technobabel
Member
Had a booth at PAX East showing off Dungeon Hearts. I wasn't in the Megabooth so I didn't get their level of traffic, but I still had a steady stream of people playing on Mac and iPad and some small crowds gathered to watch:
Overall the reaction to the game was very positive. I had a big TV up high mirroring the Mac that caught a lot of people's attention. People usually had no idea what they were watching at first (although they still had fun watching it apparently), but after I went through the first battle and explained the gameplay everyone got really into it. Had a bunch of people play, then go grab their friends and bring them back to play as well, which felt pretty great
Overall the reaction to the game was very positive. I had a big TV up high mirroring the Mac that caught a lot of people's attention. People usually had no idea what they were watching at first (although they still had fun watching it apparently), but after I went through the first battle and explained the gameplay everyone got really into it. Had a bunch of people play, then go grab their friends and bring them back to play as well, which felt pretty great
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