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[RelentlessRolento]

I mentioned it right above your quote

But I can vouch for it being awesome! Haven't heard much from the band except for a song or two they made with the plugin but it sounds real good

that's I what I get for skimming >_<

you could always pick up LSDJ or something. Nanoloop has a pretty legit iOS app now as well.

 

[SovanJedi]

But what REALLY stands out is this:

Myth #4: Being visible on the App Store just takes a good post on reddit or a good viral video

Once you have a good game, the key to success is visibility on the App Store. Another tale I’ve been told many times (and that I actually wanted to believe) is that you can leverage big communities with a nice forum post or a cool and cheap video. I believe now that this is a waste of time. You can’t influence a community unless you've already been in this community for a long time. And viral videos suffer even more from the "jackpot syndrome" than the apps themselves, in the sense that you can’t at all predict if they will get 12 million views or 300 (although 300 is more likely).

Just accept it: being visible will be a long and tough battle that you’ll have to fight from the day you start to code, to a year after the launch.

This could not be any truer. A lot of indie devs fight over this. Some still believe in 'overnight' marketing. I'm sorry but communities are not stupid. You have to let them know who you are over time, if they even give you the opportunity. And if they don't, respect their choice and try elsewhere.

I wish we would follow this advice more. Sometimes you feel bad because you have to resort to blatant plugging of your product and the fear that you'll become overly arrogant and hated over it can cripple you into humble quietness. I've made posts about our games on NeoGAF, but sometimes it feels like more can be done to get the word out there and it's frustrating at the same time as the fear of it backfiring. Nobody wants to be the next Denis Dyack.

 

[Platy]

That should be doable. I don't see what could prevent you from changing the colors --- an image itself is code after all. However, it does not mean that all editors or scripting languages would let you do that though.

This is exactly what pixel shaders do. How clever you want to be with it is up to you, for example you can use the alpha of each pixel to set whether it's locked or not and tint all with alpha > 0 or something.

I'm guessing at a simpler level, paletted/indexed images can do that too, right? I don't know if there are certain ways to do it more efficiently however, where each pixel of some image contains (for example) a small integer that indexes into your palette of colors, and drawing the image with a different palette just means changing the palette before it's drawn.

I seem to recall that Notch did something like that on a simple level with his Minicraft game from the last Ludum Dare, but his code was not the easiest to read.

It's late so I don't know if this post makes sense. XD

One final note on the palette swap thing, if memory isn't a big concern then the easiest thing is probably to write some code (or use an existing utility) to color swap the sprites before the game starts, so you just have multiple images of different colors and don't have to worry about drawing them in funky ways at all.

Wow ! Thx guys ! =D

Will probably use the indexed one ... but very good to see that there are other oportunities =D

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Velociraptor's image for the character select screen (may piss off Creationists):

 

[Dark Octave]

Velociraptor's image for the character select screen (may piss off Creationists):

He's in mid evolution as well.

Looks very cool. Professional work.

What game is this for?

 

[The Technomancer]

He's in mid evolution as well.

Looks very cool. Professional work.

What game is this for?

If I mash B can I get just the Velociraptor without wings?

 

[Somnid]

Quick poll:

For those that use keyboards for playing platformers on PC what is your preferred binding?

Like Jump, Shoot/attack, talk, pause, menu, dash, weapon change etc?

I know I like Shifts for shooting, ctrls for secondary actions like dashing and space for jumping but I'm sure others like ZXC for classic face button emulation. If you were to map an SNES controller what would it look like?

 

[The Technomancer]

I actually usually play around with various permutations of Shift-Z-X

 

[Ranger X]

Quick poll:

For those that use keyboards for playing platformers on PC what is your preferred binding?

Like Jump, Shoot/attack, talk, pause, menu, dash, weapon change etc?

I know I like Shifts for shooting, ctrls for secondary actions like dashing and space for jumping but I'm sure others like ZXC for classic face button emulation. If you were to map an SNES controller what would it look like?

With keyboards I like:


A,D for moving, J,K,L for other the other things. K jump, J shoot. Something like that. Spacebar jumping is also cool with that configuration

As for SNES style, A jump, X attack/shoot

 

[qq more]

I am way too used to Clickteam's default setup.

Shift = Jump
Ctrl = Shoot or another action


And in my game's case... Z = Slide

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

He's in mid evolution as well.

Looks very cool. Professional work.

What game is this for?

It's for the game we're actually making now that we had to scale back the project. It's a much, much smaller historical fiction adventure game of epic proportions. I just got this guy and the Spinosaurus tonight (if you guys are good little children I may even post it). The code is 60%, but right after that conversation, my programmer got evicted due to his roommates thinking a router was a hacking device. So it's stalled for at least a while.

If I mash B can I get just the Velociraptor without wings?

... be careful what you wish for.

 

[Tashi]

Are there any good guides to breaking down the work that goes into making a game? I always find myself jumping to trying to make something and I just get so overwhelmed, then I get discouraged and stop working on it. It's a brutal cycle.

 

[Zissou]

He's in mid evolution as well.

Looks very cool. Professional work.

What game is this for?

Isn't everything in mid-evolution?

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Are there any good guides to breaking down the work that goes into making a game? I always find myself jumping to trying to make something and I just get so overwhelmed, then I get discouraged and stop working on it. It's a brutal cycle.

There are so many bits and pieces involved that no one book is going to help you. Game Design Workshop (by Fullerton, Swain, and Hoffman) is a good start, though.

 

[Feep]

The code is 60%, but right after that conversation, my programmer got evicted due to his roommates thinking a router was a hacking device. So it's stalled for at least a while.

wat

 

[Turfster]

The code is 60%, but right after that conversation, my programmer got evicted due to his roommates thinking a router was a hacking device. So it's stalled for at least a while.

Uhh... I have no words.

Are there any good guides to breaking down the work that goes into making a game? I always find myself jumping to trying to make something and I just get so overwhelmed, then I get discouraged and stop working on it. It's a brutal cycle.

There's some books out there, but I have never used them, so I dunno. Checking the gamedev.net forums/articles might be a cheaper starting point.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

wat

More specifically, it was the roomie's girlfriend who though he was stealing their cable and internet.

So he got kicked out, I guess, because the other guy wanted to continue getting laid.

Moral of the story?

SEX GETS IN THE WAY OF GAME DEVELOPMENT.

 

[The Technomancer]

Are there any good guides to breaking down the work that goes into making a game? I always find myself jumping to trying to make something and I just get so overwhelmed, then I get discouraged and stop working on it. It's a brutal cycle.

I found also that I was able to make a much more serious start when I stopped having to worry about rendering. Using something pre-built like SFML means that I was able to skip over a lot of low-level stuff that I don't feel is necessary for the hobby level my projects are currently at.

 

[Feep]

SEX GETS IN THE WAY OF EVERYTHING.

.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

SEX.
IT ONLY DOES
EVERYTHING.

 

[DGRE]

I messaged a few of the guys in this thread but I just wanted to put myself out here too.

I make music with my wife and have had a long time desire to try my hand at soundtracking.

Most of my songs would skew towards minimal, acoustic arrangements, but, as you can see how well acoustic worked in Bastion, I think there is a ton of room for diversity in gaming music.

Here's a sample of some of my personal stuff that I write with my wife. Of course, the stuff I would make for games would be without vocals.

http://thebellandthehammer.bandcamp.com

I am totally open to even the smallest projects. The prospect is what I'm most after.

 

[.nimrod]

I actually looked into that a week or two ago and found this page:

http://www.gorenfeld.net/lou/pseudo/

I just found a WebGL implementation that might be helpful and provide a nice playground since you can edit the shader in almost realtime on that website

http://glsl.heroku.com/e#1243.0


EDIT:
Also, while it's not a game here's something me and two friends (fellow GAFer CreativeSK and thegabman who is still waiting for his GAF account to be activated) worked on over the last couple of months:

interactive raymarching of Fractals in WebGL

It's running almost entirely on the GPU in GLSL.
At the moment we only fully support Google Chrome in Windows and we recommend a GTX 460 or better, the Intel HD3000 is probably the minimum requirement.

If the framerate is too low, just choose a higher undersampling setting.

Some images for those that can't run it:

 

[Crazymoogle]

Ah, awesome links and posts so far (particularly the music links; if I get stuck doing my own audio that stuff will be gold!)

I wish I could show some progress but...well...lemme clear some legal hurdles first.

 

[Songbird]

I messaged a few of the guys in this thread but I just wanted to put myself out here too.

I make music with my wife and have had a long time desire to try my hand at soundtracking.

Most of my songs would skew towards minimal, acoustic arrangements, but, as you can see how well acoustic worked in Bastion, I think there is a ton of room for diversity in gaming music.

Here's a sample of some of my personal stuff that I write with my wife. Of course, the stuff I would make for games would be without vocals.

http://thebellandthehammer.bandcamp.com

I am totally open to even the smallest projects. The prospect is what I'm most after.

Pretty music, I really like it. If I was in charge of a game I'd give you a call!

 

[Spoo]

Of course, the stuff I would make for games would be without vocals.

That's a shame; the vocals are my favorite part.

 

[Songbird]

That's a shame; the vocals are my favorite part.

It would be a cool thing to try. I can imagine vocals adding a lot to game soundtracks, but hardly anyone has tried in mainstream games.

 

[DGRE]

That's a shame; the vocals are my favorite part.

Well vocals can be included! Haha. It just seems incredibly unpopular in gaming soundtracks. Maybe something lyricless and more ethereal? I don't know. I'm REALLY OPEN because I would just love the chance to work on something.

By the way: Please download the album if you guys enjoy the music. You can see it says "Name your price." Just enter 0.00 and you're all set. And please feel free to pass it on to anyone you think might like it or any other game devs you know that you think might want to use it.

 

[Blizzard]

Thanks for the Game Maker collision tips, Ranger X!

 

[Dascu]

Velociraptor's image for the character select screen (may piss off Creationists):

Shouldn't its eyes be narrower, like a reptile's?

 

[Item_Screen]

I haven't seen it discussed in this thread yet. I'm wondering everyone's thoughts on Gamesalad.

 

[SHAZOOM]

Thanks to this thread, I'm going through tutorials for Game Maker, Construct and StencylWorks. My background is mostly in art/illustration, and the most experience I've had with code is modifying html/Actionscript, so I'm just thinking of using one of these DIY Game Kits to throw out prototypes and practice doing game art.

 

[Ranger X]

Thanks for the Game Maker collision tips, Ranger X!

My pleasure.
And I made some more progress on my character. Now I have a power-up for running, a power up for Double Jump, also Gliding in the air and finally, a wall jump. It's going pretty well!

 

[jrDev]

Hello,

It's great that this thread was created since I just joined and would like some support from the GAF Community about this app I am working on.

This app has been in development on and off for like 20 months now and I would like to make in roads in finishing it up this year. Even though this is for my portfolio and stuff, I might throw it up on the app store if the quality is there.

The app is called "Reap!", and the logo for it is in my avatar. The basic premise is a fast paced 3D Action-Arena game that involves fighting waves of "reaper" enemies, collecting the souls that they drop to create combos and end with a high score of pooled souls. Sounds simple, but there is a lot of depth being built into the mechanics.

Reap! is being developed using the Unity3D engine and its been a remarkable engine so far.

The support I am definitely looking for though is that I plan on accepting testers on every new build that I make and this is where GAF comes in. Every update post I will ask for 1 new tester to PM me; starting today, the first person to PM me after this post will be added for my new build to test. Of course, you need an iPhone/iPod Touch 3rd gen and up.

Before I go, here is an image to get the idea of the game :

Constructive criticism is welcomed.

Thanks, see you later.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

Looks neat. And gameplay videos? Also, Android?

 

[Xane]

Shouldn't its eyes be narrower, like a reptile's?

Well, it can be both really, considering it's close relationships with birds.

I friggin love the Velo, so cute. <3 I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of your drawings.

 

[jrDev]

Looks neat. And gameplay videos? Also, Android?

Thanks. I haven't made any videos yet. I've only took screen caps and made some GIFs on the animations I am working on at the moment. I will do so when I have the right equipment though.

And no android version yet, but I might in the foreseeable future since the Unity3D engine is so versatile to develop for multiple platforms at the same time (iOS, Android, PC/Mac, Wii, PS3/360, and Flash coming up) which are a number of avenues that I am looking at, if everything goes well.

EDIT: I guess I should post some preproduction material too:

Merik:

Merik's Weapon - The Perma-Scythe:

The art style that I am going for is toon shaded since it works really well for the platform.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

That's super rad.

Shouldn't its eyes be narrower, like a reptile's?

It might have something to do with my artist, Bam, wanting it to be kid friendly. In her words, "kid friendly, but the type of kid friendly we grew up with as kids. We had scary shit as kids".

Hello,

It's great that this thread was created since I just joined and would like some support from the GAF Community about this app I am working on.

This app has been in development on and off for like 20 months now and I would like to make in roads in finishing it up this year. Even though this is for my portfolio and stuff, I might throw it up on the app store if the quality is there.

The app is called "Reap!", and the logo for it is in my avatar. The basic premise is a fast paced 3D Action-Arena game that involves fighting waves of "reaper" enemies, collecting the souls that they drop to create combos and end with a high score of pooled souls. Sounds simple, but there is a lot of depth being built into the mechanics.

Reap! is being developed using the Unity3D engine and its been a remarkable engine so far.

The support I am definitely looking for though is that I plan on accepting testers on every new build that I make and this is where GAF comes in. Every update post I will ask for 1 new tester to PM me; starting today, the first person to PM me after this post will be added for my new build to test. Of course, you need an iPhone/iPod Touch 3rd gen and up.

Before I go, here is an image to get the idea of the game :

Constructive criticism is welcomed.

Thanks, see you later.

Character design is good, HUD is a bit too big.

 

[Platy]

EDIT:
Also, while it's not a game here's something me and two friends (fellow GAFer CreativeSK and thegabman who is still waiting for his GAF account to be activated) worked on over the last couple of months:

interactive raymarching of Fractals in WebGL

It's running almost entirely on the GPU in GLSL.
At the moment we only fully support Google Chrome in Windows and we recommend a GTX 460 or better, the Intel HD3000 is probably the minimum requirement.

If the framerate is too low, just choose a higher undersampling setting.

Some images for those that can't run it:

All i can say is WOW

edit : Is there any way to make a full screen version of this ?

 

[.nimrod]

That's super rad.

All i can say is WOW

edit : Is there any way to make a full screen version of this ?

Thanks!
And yeah it's possible to make it fullscreen, but it would be hard to do in WebGL since it has limited support for non power-of-two sized textures, and we're using deferred rendering (rendering to textures).
So your display resolution would have to be a power of two.

We'll more likely make it a binary executable using standard opengl.

Btw, i just played around with clipping the fractals with a plane:

And neither me nor my friends had written a single shader up until a couple of months ago

 

[jrDev]

Character design is good, HUD is a bit too big.

Do you mean the health points in the top left? That's the only thing I can think of that could be changed. The buttons are just big enough to encompass your thumb tips...and the soul counter at the top is just big enough to display 5 digit scores...

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Do you mean the health points in the top left? That's the only thing I can think of that could be changed. The buttons are just big enough to encompass your thumb tips...and the soul counter at the top is just big enough to display 5 digit scores...

I guess I'd need to see it on a phone.

 

[Dark Octave]

Isn't everything in mid-evolution?

I don't think the raptor is anymore. Not as a raptor anyway.

 

[Spoo]

And neither me nor my friends had written a single shader up until a couple of months ago

This is really cool; I recently started working with shaders (started with GLSL), and then moved to writing Cg fragment and vertex shaders in Unity -- which is pretty fun, but they wrap everything in ShaderLab which is a really high level shader language (it basically includes "surface" shaders, which are just frag/vert shaders generated for you in one line, multiple passes, etc). Fortunately you just embed you Cg code in there and you can write frag/vertex shaders to your hearts content. I still, admittedly suck at it, but it's really cool being able to read Nvidia's documentation on Cg examples, and being able to convert those right over pretty easily for use in Unity.

Speaking of Unity, I ended up doing a few more videos today. Talking about creating objects at runtime, accessing game components / scripts from other objects, and simple caching. Hopefully they (and the other videos available) are starting to become useful to people. You can see them all at http://www.youtube.com/user/csgregh/videos for reminder

 

[jrDev]

I guess I'd need to see it on a phone.

Probably likely, since it works really well on the device, and my other tester didn't bring it up to me.

Here is some crappy quality video (colors are completely off), I need a good capture device. The video shows the character entrance I am working on atm:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4585058/Reap%20Content/ReapVid1.mov

Also, here are some animation GIFs for the character, speed might be off but they are adjusted to work correctly in the engine. But first I have to say that Reap! is being built on this animation direction which the fighting system is dynamic and animations change a lot based on whats going on in the game; so the animations have to link together really well. I've scoped over/redone animations multiple times after test. But enough babbling:
Default Idle:

Offensive Idle:

Also, I'm still looking for another tester, PM me please!!

Thanks.

 

[Mista Koo]

Before I go, here is an image to get the idea of the game :

Constructive criticism is welcomed.

I'd move the HUD elements closer to the corners. I'd also avoid gradients, I think a minimal opaque HUD would look better.

 

[Nemo]

I'm probably in the minority with this, but we used to make stuff in XNA exclusively. Over time some things we tried were on WP7. We're now seriously thinking about adding Android and iOS as well. Are there any good tools out there that make it easier to get XNA stuff to Android and iOS respectively? I know there are good tools out there to go from iOS to WP7 but not vice versa

I've seen some stuff like this: http://xamarin.com/monotouch but I dunno how good these things are. If we don't bother looking at making it easier to port things, and instead start from the ground up what SDKs are mostly used?

I'd move the HUD elements closer to the corners. I'd also avoid gradients, I think a minimal opaque HUD would look better.

I can give a +1 for this. I used to detest gradients, never used them (but later on I got used to minimal looking gradients). For this one I'd use Mista Koo's advice as well or get with a solid blue minimalistic HUD

 

[Blizzard]

This is really cool; I recently started working with shaders (started with GLSL), and then moved to writing Cg fragment and vertex shaders in Unity -- which is pretty fun, but they wrap everything in ShaderLab which is a really high level shader language (it basically includes "surface" shaders, which are just frag/vert shaders generated for you in one line, multiple passes, etc). Fortunately you just embed you Cg code in there and you can write frag/vertex shaders to your hearts content. I still, admittedly suck at it, but it's really cool being able to read Nvidia's documentation on Cg examples, and being able to convert those right over pretty easily for use in Unity.

Speaking of Unity, I ended up doing a few more videos today. Talking about creating objects at runtime, accessing game components / scripts from other objects, and simple caching. Hopefully they (and the other videos available) are starting to become useful to people. You can see them all at http://www.youtube.com/user/csgregh/videos for reminder

UDK lets you write shader language as well (HLSL?) in custom blocks, but I felt like the shader block editor started getting crazy slow several months back and I don't know if they ever improved the speed.

Sadly I'm pretty sure that due to the way the pipeline and/or shaders are set up, you can't really do vertex shaders. This rules out a lot of cool nVidia example shaders, unless your vertex shader is something very simple like growing/shrinking an object outwards.

 

[Spoo]

Sadly I'm pretty sure that due to the way the pipeline and/or shaders are set up, you can't really do vertex shaders. This rules out a lot of cool nVidia example shaders, unless your vertex shader is something very simple like growing/shrinking an object outwards.

Are you talking about not having vertex shaders in Unity, or UDK? Because you can write vertex shaders fine in Unity in GLSL or Cg.

If not in UDK, that's surprising (and I guess kinda sucky) -- but then, I understood UDK had some pretty awesome visual shader programs, so maybe most folks get around things that way. Then again, without the ability to write your own shaders, you'll always be locked out of the extra special and cool stuff.

That said, I'm unaware if Unity / UDK support writing geometry shaders, which is where things seem particularly interesting.

 

[Blizzard]

Are you talking about not having vertex shaders in Unity, or UDK? Because you can write vertex shaders fine in Unity in GLSL or Cg.

If not in UDK, that's surprising (and I guess kinda sucky) -- but then, I understood UDK had some pretty awesome visual shader programs, so maybe most folks get around things that way. Then again, without the ability to write your own shaders, you'll always be locked out of the extra special and cool stuff.

That said, I'm unaware if Unity / UDK support writing geometry shaders, which is where things seem particularly interesting.

Maybe I'm confusing the terms then. I don't think UDK supports the fancy geometry shaders where you use position input to morph an object, though you can write your own shader programs in some sense. You can use some sort of custom vertex/geometry shaders to kinda grow or shrinkthings, but not do the full gamut of normal shader program stuff, sadly.

 

[seventynine]

I haven't seen it discussed in this thread yet. I'm wondering everyone's thoughts on Gamesalad.

I'd like to know this too. Wanna make games, no time to learn code.