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Indie Game Development Thread 3: Indie Jones and the Template of Doom

Jobbs

Banned
rZdHUzkyH5l15B7rVFl1ghc5YNmtSbQnMKQbw8_RNmBMeWar7SPRuWwnVRvmeifAPnbEaMFc=w2560-h950


little gameplay clip we've put together!
just a bit more info: we're a 2-person team. 1 art, 1 code (and design between the two of us). we started working on the project full time in January- before that it was just evenings/weekends.

Your image is broken. Try hosting it at imgur or something?
 

KOCMOHABT

Member
How does everyone feel about MonoGame?

pretty good, and I'd say a helpful community, too. http://community.monogame.net/

Relatively recent games that come to mind are salt & sorcery, cryptark, stardew valley and axiom verge, which were all using XNA / Monogame, so you can say that the quality of games released is really up to par.

If you are going for 2d games it might take longer to setup basics than in engines like Unity, GameMaker etc., since you basically have to roll your own engine. But I it rewards you with a lot more control and insight about low-level workings of games.
I'd say for 2d games it's still worth to consider monogame, I've used it even for game jams.

At the same time there are a lot of useful 2d engines and a bunch of tools (GUI for example) that you can use to speed up development.

The documentation is pretty awesome, you can basically find anything if you google for "#problem xna" since XNA was used and loved so much.

For 3d i cannot recommend it, since it will take you ages until you have a useful base and even then you are very far away from the visuals of Unity, Unreal etc.

It is pretty good if you are looking to learn how game engines and games in general are setup from the ground up, but without the hassle of having to setup every damn stupid little driver thing and some basics like text rendering already set up like a pure c++ directx12 (just an example) renderer would.

It's also good for c# devs, since, unlike Unity, it's not limited to any .net or c# version.
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Well, it took me coding and problem solving and derping for about 14 hours straight, but the monsters in my game now have a chance of randomly spawning random items with random stats that actually show up properly in the game's inventory screen! Inventory mostly functions, mana/health potions can stack while equipment items can't. Items can be dragged around and they switch places. Oh, and it has tooltip window cause I'm going all hightech over here ;p


I also made all the UI elements easily collapsible because UI in a game like this just gets in the way of all my beautiful voxels!

(not sure if I said random enough... random random random!!!!)


This will likely be my #screenshotsaturday
Fbgul1q.gif

Gotta love gif artifacting, oh wellz.
 

Arulan

Member
I decided to learn Unreal. It's my first game engine. Aside the basic tutorials, does anyone have any recommendations for starting out, preferably focusing on C++ over Blueprints?
 

Makai

Member
i don't necessarily
Flinthook, too.

The MonoGame garbage collector is way better than Unity's. But the biggest benefit is you get to use C# as-intended - Visual Studio profiler, etc. Good tooling makes a huge difference and Unity will always have amateur tooling. Microsoft just released this wonder

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/11/18/live-unit-testing-visual-studio-2017-rc/

Probably works on MonoGame without any setup - no way it ever works for Unity.
 

missile

Member
Further worked on the glossy reflection and implemented an attenuation
term which accounts for the decrease in reflectance due to diffraction
effects for a rough reflecting surface. Fresnel only attenuates correctly for
ideal smooth surface, mind you! But an impinging light wave on a rough surface
attenuates further due to destructive interference depending on a couple of
circumstances.

Here is a first version of mine. I've made a couple of simplification to get
the effect done fast, but will work on a more improved and unified version
including wavelength dependency etc..

qctxeIZ.png

Fresnel + attenuation due to diffraction effects

KgL1JG2.png

Fresnel
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Really love the little figures. They look so charming somehow. :)


Gif isn't the problem, the encoder is.

I've been using screentogif for my gif creation lately and it really works great for the most part except stuff like that. The compression it gets compared to other tools I've used is really amazing though.
 

EDarkness

Member
I mean, give Audacity a try before spending money you might not need to - you should be able to set your microphone as an audiosource and record directly to audacity, and for a simple volume increase (its under Effect -> Amplify) a software solution might well be enough.

(I'm assuming Audacity is basically the same user experience under different OSes, I'm on windows)

I haven't tried this yet, but I could. I do find Audacity to be hard to use, but that's no real excuse. I'll give it a try and see how it goes.
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
It turns out that 20mb is too large for twitter gifs, so had to give my screenshotsaturday gif another shot. I'm glad I did though because I came up with a better process for my gif creation from now on.

This is my new gif which I was able to resize so it's not as obnoxiously large AND doesn't have annoying artifacting. It's also only about 2mb as opposed to over 20 with the other one.

uD7kikE.gif


Also, sorry for spamming pictures. This post is actually less about my game and more about being happy about finding a better gif solution and supplying the proof.
 

Minamu

Member
I decided to learn Unreal. It's my first game engine. Aside the basic tutorials, does anyone have any recommendations for starting out, preferably focusing on C++ over Blueprints?
Buy Ben Tristem's Unreal course on udemy.com, it's perfect for you. You get to create 5-6 games from scratch, assets available for free where applicable. It has a major focus on C++, with blueprint only where it makes sense (and it does from time to time, with the teacher's logic). There's a sale going on right now where it's available for about 15 dollars/euros instead of 195. Completely worth it.

---

Are there any games out there today that have a Frostbite level editor? Preferably with assets.
 

Arulan

Member
Buy Ben Tristem's Unreal course on udemy.com, it's perfect for you. You get to create 5-6 games from scratch, assets available for free where applicable. It has a major focus on C++, with blueprint only where it makes sense (and it does from time to time, with the teacher's logic). There's a sale going on right now where it's available for about 15 dollars/euros instead of 195. Completely worth it.

Thanks. For $10 I'll definitely give it a go.
 

_Rob_

Member
Been working on some animated platforming challenges, the more variety the better! Oh and I've also been working on improving the ledge grabbing "save", just as well in this case!

giphy.gif
 
Damn, I really wish I had REDFOXES in a more demo-able state right now.

With this controversy surrounding The Last Night, the greedy cynic in me wants to capitalize on this situation by marketing REDFOXES' own dystopian setting which is essentially if you took the GOP's wet-dream/Trump's America, and spread it over a significant chunk of the galaxy.
 

Makai

Member
Damn, I really wish I had REDFOXES in a more demo-able state right now.

With this controversy surrounding The Last Night, the greedy cynic in me wants to capitalize on this situation by marketing REDFOXES' own dystopian setting which is essentially if you took the GOP's wet-dream/Trump's America, and spread it over a significant chunk of the galaxy.
Time for a temporary crunch. There will never be a better marketing opportunity :p
 

_Rob_

Member
Woah what a situation. This kind of thing is a scary prospect to me, I've been the victim of a racism accusation before about my game (though it was through misunderstanding). It was a difficult and clearly emotionally charged situation to try and clear up, so I can only imagine what it'd be like for a game well known.

Just for clarification before I'm misconstrued, I'm not commenting on this situation directly, I don't know nearly enough about it and certainly don't condone racism!
 

charsace

Member
I've now combined reflection mapping with the double attenuation and it
works wonders. At grazing the diffuse component attenuates so softly with the
reflection setting in stronger and stronger. Damn. Will do some pictures later
on.



Where have you been?



NicE! :)

Work has been killing me. We switching from an mrp system from he 90's to cincom and then something else in like 2 years.
 

missile

Member
Damn, was tracking a bug in my reflection code for a day. xD
Never use fully saturated colors to check reflection code!


Edit:
Work's like a charm now. :D Cool stuff incoming!
 

Nista

Member
You could play around with Cryengine. Not many use it but it's different.

I worked on a game that used Cryengine, and the programmers HATED it. Might be interesting to see what they did with the engine, both good and bad.

Speaking of programming, our indie studio is looking for people familiar with Unity for both mobile and PC strategy projects. If anyone is looking for a full-time remote job around here please let me know.
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
I worked on a game that used Cryengine, and the programmers HATED it. Might be interesting to see what they did with the engine, both good and bad.

Speaking of programming, our indie studio is looking for people familiar with Unity for both mobile and PC strategy projects. If anyone is looking for a full-time remote job around here please let me know.

Lumberyard is an updated cryengine fork that Amazon is maintaining, it looks like they're doing away with the visual scripting stuff, so programmers might be more onboard with it now. Personally I've never liked visual scripting solutions. I think it's more of a gimmick to trick non programmers into programming (which is a noble en-devour!), I don't really ever see it being useful if you actually know how to code though. As a former non coder, I know the prospect of just looking at code can be scary though, so if it helps, meh. Anyhow, happy hunting for a programmer :)

Just curious, would be nice to get some experience in a different engine besides Unity and Unreal.


Minamu, there's tons of game engines to choose from, Unity and UE4 simply being the most popular among indie devs. You don't really NEED a reason to download one and get your toes wet with a tutorial or two. It will probably be harder to troubleshoot problems on less popular engines though. Developing my first game in the Godot engine was needlessly complicated tenfold due to poor documentation and almost no community. Luckily I could hop into godotdev irc and ask questions to the devs directly when it got really bad. I'm hoping it's improved since then. Just something to consider.
 

Makai

Member
Lumberyard might make sense if you're making an MMO. What's Frostbyte like - did they demo their level editor? All I know is from the Mass Effect "what went wrong" article.
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Lumberyard might make sense if you're making an MMO. What's Frostbyte like - did they demo their level editor? All I know is from the Mass Effect "what went wrong" article.

Care to elaborate as to why you'd relegate Lumberyard to an mmo only engine? I actually have very little info on it other than watching a youtube review a couple months back.
 
Care to elaborate as to why you'd relegate Lumberyard to an mmo only engine? I actually have very little info on it other than watching a youtube review a couple months back.

The better question is why is he so interested in Frostbite's map editing tools?
 

Makai

Member
Care to elaborate as to why you'd relegate Lumberyard to an mmo only engine? I actually have very little info on it other than watching a youtube review a couple months back.
Lumberyard's whole reason for being is to sell AWS. They took CryEngine and optimized it for massive scale distributed networking. There's no point if his team didn't like CryEngine.

The better question is why is he so interested in Frostbite's map editing tools?
Someone mentioned it earlier and kicked off this convo.
 
Lumberyard might make sense if you're making an MMO. What's Frostbyte like - did they demo their level editor? All I know is from the Mass Effect "what went wrong" article.

Lumberyard's whole reason for being is to sell AWS. They took CryEngine and optimized it for massive scale distributed networking. There's no point if his team didn't like CryEngine.
I guess I'm coming at it from an art perspective. Lumberyard/CE have some things the other two engines don't that may be fun to play with. For programming yeah idk.
 
pretty good, and I'd say a helpful community, too. http://community.monogame.net/

Relatively recent games that come to mind are salt & sorcery, cryptark, stardew valley and axiom verge, which were all using XNA / Monogame, so you can say that the quality of games released is really up to par.

If you are going for 2d games it might take longer to setup basics than in engines like Unity, GameMaker etc., since you basically have to roll your own engine. But I it rewards you with a lot more control and insight about low-level workings of games.
I'd say for 2d games it's still worth to consider monogame, I've used it even for game jams.

At the same time there are a lot of useful 2d engines and a bunch of tools (GUI for example) that you can use to speed up development.

The documentation is pretty awesome, you can basically find anything if you google for "#problem xna" since XNA was used and loved so much.

For 3d i cannot recommend it, since it will take you ages until you have a useful base and even then you are very far away from the visuals of Unity, Unreal etc.

It is pretty good if you are looking to learn how game engines and games in general are setup from the ground up, but without the hassle of having to setup every damn stupid little driver thing and some basics like text rendering already set up like a pure c++ directx12 (just an example) renderer would.

It's also good for c# devs, since, unlike Unity, it's not limited to any .net or c# version.

That's pretty much how I feel about it regarding 2D games. I just wondered if there was a consensus. I prefer the level of control that I have inside the framework. I find it tedious having to learn and understand how someone else set things up (if I were learning an engine). Also, I'm pretty sure you responded to one or two of my posts on the MonoGame forums :)
 

oxrock

Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
I just read that the steam direct $100 fee would be returned if your game earns $1000. That's good to know. Now to make a game that will actually sell.....
 
Working on music. I was struggling so hard with this song and wound up scrapping all of it but the drums and like half a melody. Changed key and slowed the thing down, and man, what I have going now sounds a thousand times better. I'm so fuckin' happy with this tune.

So happy that trying to make a video game got me into making music. Never thought that would be possible.
 

Astrael

Member
Yay for the third indie game thread! Hopefully I'll feel comfortable sharing some things soon, I've been working on a 2D rpg with my own engine for several years but scrapped just about everything at the start of 2016 when I officially switched platforms from XNA and Playstation Mobile. Using MonoGame right now and I couldn't be happier!

Just finishing up my double major in the next semester or two so I've been splitting time between school, essential gaming, and being productive on my project haha. Right now the main thing I'm trying to hone in on is the overall aesthetic of the game before I start mass-producing new environment assets and sharing more of the work.

So happy that trying to make a video game got me into making music. Never thought that would be possible.

I had a similar experience, when I was a kid all I wanted to do was make video game music, so I learned to make games just so I had a platform to put my work in :) (Sadly I'm not as good of a music producer/sound engineer as I hoped I would be but I like my compositions at least)
 
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