LordRaptor
Member
lol
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Indie Game Development Thread 3: Indie Jones and the Template of Doom
- Thread starter Makai
- Start date
lol
So, the dev team has finally gotten together again, and us programmers will be building game prototypes for two separate games for about a month, and then we'll pick whichever one the team thinks has more potential and begin working on it on our spare time (since everybody has a day job, anyway). I've already finished a simple HP system, projectiles and static enemies, but I still have to implement character-specific special abilities and attack patterns, moving enemies and hopefully at least one tandem special ability.
Guess a little competition and a clear-cut delivery date for the prototype is actually good, since I can't just meander about thinking I'll get it done eventually if I want my prototype to be picked over the other guy's.
Guess a little competition and a clear-cut delivery date for the prototype is actually good, since I can't just meander about thinking I'll get it done eventually if I want my prototype to be picked over the other guy's.
Michael Armbrust
Member
I don't see what the advantage would be, unless the demo has really specific requirements that are different than the full game.
Fully switching over to a new engine or sticking to the current one makes more sense imo without knowing your exact situation.
What kind of game is it, and what do you mean by demo specifically? For online release or to show a publisher etc? I agree with the other guy, either stick with GM until you're done or redo it all in a different engine.
That looks awesomeI did a one hour game jam this weekend...
SCALD
In Scald, you must collect as many gems as you can. Avoid the fireballs and don't fall into the lava
You can play it here: https://sean-noonan.itch.io/scald
The jam theme was "the floor is lava". I know, my entry isn't particularly original. I clocked in around 3 hours - difficulty balancing took longer than expected and I wanted to get some audio in. Also, the game is much easier with headphones
Would super appreciate some retweets too: https://twitter.com/SeanNoonan/status/876257979678457856
Good job. Was it a self-imposed game jam or what? I'd retweet but I don't have twitter :/
SeanNoonan
Member
It was the weekly One Hour Game Jam: http://onehourgamejam.com/
MikeHaggar
Member
I don't mind you sharing and thanks for the kind words! Yes, there's a very real product behind the screenshot. We've just been so busy getting the project up and running that we've neglected sharing--something which we are looking to change in the next week or so. I'm excited to share what we are working on with everyone here at neogaf
I'd certainly suggest if you're going to take the plunge, you do it sooner that later. It'll only get more difficult the deeper you get and if you're already having feelings of doubt about your current setup you may already have your answer!
I can see the benefit of building a quick and dirty prototype in another engine, hell Nintendo even did that with BOTW. As for a demo though, I think it depends on your intended audience. You certainly don't want an audience to get the wrong impression bad or good, and the amount of useful feedback I'd imagine would be limited if you intend to jump to another platform shortly after.
Fair enough. Was just wondering about the vector of approach, i.e. posting
a screenshot and two sentence about the game asking how to make a proper
Kickstarter.
The horse is cool, but the guy in the back seems to be a lot more funny! xDI don't know how the hell I'd missed this before, but Clive 'N' Wrench's wild west level had no horses! Cue a couple of days designing and animating one and here we are!
I'd never attempted to animate a horse before, and although it's only an idle at the moment I'm pretty pleased with it! I never released quite how twitchy an animal they are, but as always, reference is key!
Ha! I know that feeling and I think every graphics programmer needs/has it.
I mean, I was watching pretty cool graphics years ago and was thinking that
there isn't much left to do in graphics programming but just for the fun of
it. But if you go a lil deeper, you will realize that the field is utterly
diverse, esp. with today's computational resources it has become an entire
different playground altogether allowing everyone to program his/her own
graphics styles to create way different ambients. I even discovered a couple
of new things with my pixeling stuff and I think (I hope so at least) I can
exploit it on an even larger scope (working on a specific interpolation
technique) for rendering an almost noise free images from single (or minimum)
sampling of the environment which could speed up many of the GI rendering
algorithms. Anyhow, doing graphics programming today has a lot more breath
than ever before, because today we can tinker around with what took the
pioneers of the field days if not weeks to compute!
At the moment I got a little bit interested in understanding the reflection
of objects depending on their surface scale/roughness. So there is this
transition region from ideal smooth to rough surface reflection. Ideal smooth
isn't any problem, ideal rough isn't any problem either. However, there is a
region close to ideal smooth where the roughness is of the scale of the
wavelength of light. Within this region the reflection (and attenuation) is
described by diffraction theory. On a coarser scale, like we use today in
computer graphics, i.e. reflection and attenuation from microfacet models, the
refelection and attenuation are described/computed from geometric optics.
That's basically why all such models explode (without further ado) when
letting the roughness go to zero. So having a transition model would be cool
where you can adjust the roughness at will, but also get some good reflection
and attenuation when the roughness is within the diffraction regime. Sure,
computing realistic diffraction effects is out of the question, but you may
come up with some a good (computer graphics) replacements.
Funny thing is, I'm not even interested in realistic graphics. Nothing is more
boring for a gamer (despite the effort needed to compute such graphics).
Without a certain ästhetic you stood no chance. Man, I was computing a super
highres image with all the reflection, gloss etc. in place and called my gf to
have a look at that nice image. She said; "a couple of spheres, ok, but...".
lol She even didn't noticed the fine reflection and stuff until I took them
all away. Anyhow.
The interest for this smooth to rough surface transition in reflection stems
from an idea of mine doing some cool stylized renderings/reflections for the
ästhetic of my game. In reality the hard edges of object undergo diffraction,
that is to say the reflection and attenuation for hard edges do behave
differently from what we know from geometric optics. And since I want to go
low-poly, I want to make these low-poly edges stood out giving them a specific
and unique look/glanz. That is to say, when shading, I'm going to compute the
distance to each edge and change the shading (reflection model) accordingly.
This should emphasis low-poly models much more than ever before. I hope so at
least.
CertifiedFP
Member
I'd certainly suggest if you're going to take the plunge, you do it sooner that later. It'll only get more difficult the deeper you get and if you're already having feelings of doubt about your current setup you may already have your answer!
I can see the benefit of building a quick and dirty prototype in another engine, hell Nintendo even did that with BOTW. As for a demo though, I think it depends on your intended audience. You certainly don't want an audience to get the wrong impression bad or good, and the amount of useful feedback I'd imagine would be limited if you intend to jump to another platform shortly after.
Yeah honestly, at this point I'm just going to stick with GMS2 for the rest of this project out of respect for what work I've already done so far. Like, the time for "quick and dirty prototype" was quite a while ago - What I have now is a mechanically complete skeleton of a game that's already perfectly nailed every facet of the gameplay I intend to delivery. I mean for everything that matters most of my gripes I'm facing right now are probably just a craftsman blaming his tools for all I know.
Anyway, finally got full animations in place for going prone and crawling in REDFOXES, as well as making sure that the player can't crawl fully sideways in an N/S vent and vice-versa.
http://puu.sh/wop1M/dbc9a59501.webm
(...I swear GAF used to have WebM embedding...)
Hee hee hee, that's cute - in spirit, that kind of referential humor reminds me a lot of Gex: Enter the Gecko, and I like that very much :-D
In other news: finally some color!
Any obvious issues or stuff I should fix before moving on to do the rest of them?
This looks incredible coloured, as for issues I see a possible couple. On the stiller left pose her tassles don't appear to move in the wind, I think it's less noticable around her neck but the ankle ones look juxtaposed against her hair and coattails. Oh and she also appears to be holding her breath, I think a subtle rising of the shoulders would really help.
Oh well, there's plenty of that kind of humour in the game!
Bosses named Annie Oaktree, Droo the Ripper and Vlad the Impala for a start! Not to mention all of the parody shop names in many levels (Eg. "Ray The Otter's" 1930's butchers).
(Artwork courtesy of Luigi Lucarelli)
Ach, I removed those extra bits because I thought it looked overanimated when standing still :-D I'll see if I can make them work sometime down the line...
Also, might want to quote that gigantic image!
Ah, thanks! I see how you could think that. I can most likely work on that through coloring the lines, so I'll try that and see where we end up!
Michael Armbrust
Member
Any obvious issues or stuff I should fix before moving on to do the rest of them?
I like it but at first glance I thought she had a mustache. It feels like there's an extra line or two with her mouth and nose being so close together.
tamaster92
Member
Been a little bit
Been working hard (and playing a lot lol) mostly trying to figure some AI stuff out which has got me bogged down for a while!
Mostly done now though, got some bugs to fix with the current position UI system then its on to some polish-esque stuff to complete a prototype
Here is a gif of my AI racers slowing down because they are too far ahead of the player, then speeding up once close again (very exaggerated so you can see mind)
I also got the AI to take control of the player after a race so they keep driving in the background, added difficulty ratings relating to speed, added a rear view option, made a race mode and a time trial mode seperate + a bunch of bug fixes with the AI
Been working hard (and playing a lot lol) mostly trying to figure some AI stuff out which has got me bogged down for a while!
Mostly done now though, got some bugs to fix with the current position UI system then its on to some polish-esque stuff to complete a prototype
Here is a gif of my AI racers slowing down because they are too far ahead of the player, then speeding up once close again (very exaggerated so you can see mind)
I also got the AI to take control of the player after a race so they keep driving in the background, added difficulty ratings relating to speed, added a rear view option, made a race mode and a time trial mode seperate + a bunch of bug fixes with the AI
timetokill
Banned
.. god damn it
Out of curiosity. Since we know this coloring style (of yours) from Honey, IHee hee hee, that's cute - in spirit, that kind of referential humor reminds me a lot of Gex: Enter the Gecko, and I like that very much :-D
In other news: finally some color!
Any obvious issues or stuff I should fix before moving on to do the rest of them?
would be interested to see how it may look with other colors, perhaps more
vibrant, a cool suite whatever. Not saying you should use other colors per se,
I like them, actually.
Do you mean a different palette, or a different coloring style altogether?
Got it! Well, I can definitely try a few different "color swaps" - it'll just be for fun, as I can't recolor all anims handily, but it'll make for something new to see for a change :-D
Does anybody have any links or good reads for learning to think like a coder or a Dev? I'm not really sure what I'm looking for, but most tutorials I look at are pretty code focused, which is great, but I feel like there's something I'm missing about how to plan things out or think about development rather than just following tutorials
Absolutely beginner level btw, never done anything in education coding related
Absolutely beginner level btw, never done anything in education coding related
Yeah, lets have a look.
Skip most of the tutorials, start small (whatever it is) and go from there.
You'll learn most of the things while doing. There is no magic. (PS: The thing
with skipping most of the tuts is that they (most often) distract from
thinking about the problem itself with the result that people to 10^32 tuts
yet haven't understood anything).
Meanwhile...
Well, microfacet gloss needs a lot more work to get it right somehow and I'm
not near anything final, but I managed to get at least the GGX distribution
working but without any shadowing, weighting etc. terms for the moment (needs
more work). But cool thing is that the gloss here now features the long
tails/lobes being a specific feature of the GGX microfacet distribution;
(old gif was a Phong (cosine) one)
I couldn't agree more with this. Amateur tutorials can be great for specific problems, but without fundamental understanding of why you're doing something, you'll never learn to do anything but parrot.
This looks really nice, forgive me if you've posted it before and I've missed it; but have you managed to get colour refraction or AO working between objects?
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
You learn by doing. If you want to learn how to code/think like a coder, you write code. If you're an absolute beginner, obviously you'll want to start by learning how to program. Following a tutorial step by step can be helpful to get you started and to give you examples to look back on, but you have to learn how to tackle problems yourself. Code your own stupid little projects just to test yourself. Start simple and gradually increase the difficulty as your knowledge grows. Watch a tutorial of how a particular thing works then imagine a different use for it and implement it into one of your projects. Bottom line is that you learn to code by coding. Something like this Udacity course is a great place to start your journey. One thing tutorials leave out by the way, is the planning stage of a project. Writing out pseudo-code beforehand, laying out a guideline for your project can be immensely helpful sometimes. Anyhow, goodluck.
Ask and ye shall receive!
Some (not all!) of them are direct references I hope you might recognize (if I didn't got them horribly wrong), so if you want to try a little guessing game, have at it :-D
AO works but color refraction don't. Yeah, was talking about doing a parallax
gloss, shifting the texture depending on IOR and per pseudo-wavelength (RGB),
but I've found that my ansatz was already a bit to specific modelling the
"transmission" independently leading to such problems that the transmittance
won't fit the reflectance resp. the gloss behavior on the other side (outside)
of the surface which would lead to too many test-cases etc.. So I decided now
to build a better model with a proper BTDF (T for transmission) aligned with
the correct glossy BRDF giving a combined BSDR. That's a bit more complex but
in the end I don't need to test and tweak too many parameters because the
glossy BRDF and BTRF will draw from the same roots. This would lead to proper
glossy transmission, yet I don't want to really compute proper glossy
transmission, which is way too expensive for games, but that's where the
parallax stuff comes into place manipulating the object textures to get the
refraction effect with gloss while tweaking down the whole model for
computational efficiency. That's the plan.
Neat, I think #6 is my favorite. I'd say #4 as well, but I could imagine that blending into a background too easily.
*edit* With Pehesse's permission, here are some amateurish recolor attempts at a cyberpunk / 80's palette for something completely different:
Pretty close. Nice.
Hey Pe, Blizz is more up to what I was thinking as well. Along these lines.
Er, I'm not sure what the difference is in our two approaches? Do you want me to make the palettes apparent?
LordRaptor
Member
It's basically understanding logic, so things like flow charts or electrical logic gates might be a good idea to start with to try and understand?
The reason visual scripting is popular with non-coders is it basically breaks programming down into a flowchart which more visually-attenuated people find easier to parse
No. What I asked myself, initially, was how your figure would look when using
different colors, perhaps using more color contrast, more vibrant ones etc.
perhaps guided by a given theme or something (like Blizz did using cyberpunk).
I try to imagine your figure in a different color setting than what I've seen in
Honey, you know?
Well... that's what I did, if you look at #4 (cool colors, low saturation, based on what you asked) and #3 and #5 (high contrast, high saturation). I mean, that's why I asked what you were looking for earlier and stated "palette swaps" as what I understood. Sorry I misinterpreted what you wanted.
Regarding Honey's palette, it's actually a lot more saturated than what I'm using for Pacha.
It's been a while since I looked at Honey screenshots so I just went back and checked Steam to be sure.
I think I understand the nebulous concept missile is getting at, though opinions will of course vary on colors. When I look at Honey screenshots, even though some colors may be quite saturated or vibrant, I get the general "feel" of a muted, anime-appropriate palette. The color choices are good, the foreground characters pop out, and everything works together. Example: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/s...811f4171dd3e87bad0.1920x1080.jpg?t=1478020022
For whatever reason, the coloring on Pacha gives me the same feeling, though of course we haven't seen it against a background. Maybe part of it is the two-tone anime shaded style. Maybe part is the very smooth coloring style you use. Neither of these things are inherently bad, and they work very well for you in Honey, obviously!
What I think missile is saying is that the "feel" is that each palette is a little muted and pastel, even if that's not technically the case. Even the very dark #5 character feels a bit smooth and blended together, and the warm pastel hues of #3 counteract the contrasting colors so the result still feels somewhat smooth and subdued.
thanks for the help guys, i'll give it some thought
I think I understand better, and there may be indeed a difference of perception about color values. After all, my art teachers did tell me over and over I had crap sight and understood nothing about color, so eh :v
Anyway, I just thought the original idea sounded fun, so I tried my best. Sorry to disappoint. Let's not derail the thread any further on these considerations - if someone wants to guess the references for some of the palettes, feel free, if they want to try their hand at their own interpretations or palettes, be my guest - I'm done with that for now!
That's it.
Some of the colors eat each other away, to add something more nebulous
to the discussion. xD
Well, yeah, technically, the eye gets saturated by seeing lots of, say,
similar (here muted) colors making you "blind" seeing much difference (there
is even a technical term for this I need to remember). So a strong color
contrast is needed in-between to refresh the eyes, preventing them from
saturating the cone receptors, making the object look flat (if so) despite it
isn't.
It's annoying...
You coders in here experience something similar as I do? For, I at times do
some experiments to see if something works and suddenly find that it works
better and better with me following the rabbit hole deeper and deeper to get
even more out of it as I initially thought. Then I look at the result and say
something like "well, that's fine, works, nice!" and delete all the code
afterwards to not clutter the original code and because it was just an
experiment, to realize days or weeks later that it would be cool to have
the code still, but haven't. lol What's that?
You coders in here experience something similar as I do? For, I at times do
some experiments to see if something works and suddenly find that it works
better and better with me following the rabbit hole deeper and deeper to get
even more out of it as I initially thought. Then I look at the result and say
something like "well, that's fine, works, nice!" and delete all the code
afterwards to not clutter the original code and because it was just an
experiment, to realize days or weeks later that it would be cool to have
the code still, but haven't. lol What's that?
That's why iteration is excellent! I'm by no means any good at coding (my scripts are a proper Frankenstein affair), but every change I make gets double saved just in case I need to roll back or as you say want to peek at something else!
That's precisely one of the benefits of version control systems like git. You can go back and pull the code's state at a given commit point.
^ ^
It's like writing a couple of lines to test something in-between the original
code, adding some more lines of code to just see if this or that works, too,
and even add a few more and more line etc., and delete everything if it works.
lol It's nothing you would really want to keep at that very moment. It even
appears trivial. Weeks later, when exploring further what I was experimenting
with, I need to start a new because I've delete the code between the, well,
lines, realizing the code wasn't too bad after all. xD
It's like writing a couple of lines to test something in-between the original
code, adding some more lines of code to just see if this or that works, too,
and even add a few more and more line etc., and delete everything if it works.
lol It's nothing you would really want to keep at that very moment. It even
appears trivial. Weeks later, when exploring further what I was experimenting
with, I need to start a new because I've delete the code between the, well,
lines, realizing the code wasn't too bad after all. xD
Maybe get into the habit of just commenting it out as opposed to just removing it?
Did that. Even the commented code clutters the main code too much at times.
Yeah sure.
Well, would be great to have a continuous file record, recording whatever was
typed into a document, such that you can rewind back like you want. Won't
perhaps make any sense on a global scope, but locally a couple of days to
rewind back to would be cool, no?
Which looks better?
Old: http://imgur.com/M4FxFDj
New: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_2cuDdGYdI
I prefer the new, but I could see it being a bit too tame and am trying to think of ways to punch it up a little.
Old: http://imgur.com/M4FxFDj
New: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_2cuDdGYdI
I prefer the new, but I could see it being a bit too tame and am trying to think of ways to punch it up a little.
Michael Armbrust
Member
Are you wanting the warning signs to completely block your vision? That feels more frustrating than ominous. A simple change like making the black partially transparent might work better.
Not sure which of the two methods I like best, but I'm leaning more towards the first. The enemy is so bad that not just are warning messages going off, but they're going off at such an extreme amount that they're breaking/glitching. Playing that up by adding more glitches/chaos might look really nice.
Also would it be possible to make each hexagon have unique subtext? Not like the player would read them all, but that way it feels more realistic that tons of warning messages are popping up.
I feel the same way, I thought it was a loading screen at first. Semi transparent hexs could work.
Thanks guys, we've been on quite a journey the past few years. Few life changing events occurred to the both of us which put a few huge dents in the development, but we're finally on the last stretch. I'm certain this game will make a lot of people happy, just basing that off the feedback we've had, and the look on peoples faces when they play a level for the 10th time in a row
Thanks for the input! I agree that the chaos/glitchiness is something I want to lean into, but the two are actually implemented very differently and I think I'll try some more work on the new to get it to be more manic. Transparency is a good call, too.
But then I have to copy the coder over, right? Too demanding.Separate non-compiling files for old code?
I could imagine what may help me. Guess an editor can save a selection of
code in a specific file when pressing a certain key combination. That way you
could just select the code in question, press the given key with the code
being appended to a file, and then pressing backspace to delete the selection
right away. Is it possible to make something like that within Visual Studio?
Or perhaps a program that listens in the background for any selection and that
special key combination saving the selection to a file, sort of a special
clipboard program?
May share one or two stories? However, good to have you back!... Thanks guys, we've been on quite a journey the past few years. Few life changing events occurred to the both of us which put a few huge dents in the development, but we're finally on the last stretch. I'm certain this game will make a lot of people happy, just basing that off the feedback we've had, and the look on peoples faces when they play a level for the 10th time in a row
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
When possible I quarantine it into a separate function and stick it in the bottom of the script where I don't have to look at it. If that's too much work or it's too ingrained in everything, I just comment it out. I hate having to repeat my work, especially if I got it to work precisely the way I wanted the first time. My code may be less clean at as a result honestly, but I never collaborate so it's never been an issue. Saving myself time and effort takes precedence over pretty much everything as an indie dev.