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Indy Game Development: any GAF'er ever make their own game, or even make money on it?

You are using XNA, right ? I haven't use it in a long time, but I think you can pass "SpriteEffects.FlipHorizontally" as one of the parameters of the SpriteBatch.Draw() function.

But that wouldn't be enough, you still need to modify your sprites' position, anchor point and rotation values every time you flip your sprites.

position =new Vector2 (-position.x, position.y); //edit: it depends on how you manage each bone's position
anchorPoint = new Vector2 (1 - anchorPoint.x,anchorPoint.y);
rotation = - rotation;

PS: I'm bad at C#/XNA

Thanks for the post. You were close. With Your post and an XNA book I found the answer.

And here's what I got done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHfeoJ3p7rw&feature=youtu.be
 
So me and Jan Willem (one half of Vlambeer) decided yesterday that we had to make something for our buddies at Ronimo, to celebrate the release of Awesomenauts.

We had five hours before the releaseparty started, so in that time we made a little Smash Bros clone featuring four of the six Awesomenauts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHX6LhcTeg

All of this was from scratch. We didn't reuse any old assets or anything.
 
So me and Jan Willem (one half of Vlambeer) decided yesterday that we had to make something for our buddies at Ronimo, to celebrate the release of Awesomenauts.

We had five hours before the releaseparty started, so in that time we made a little Smash Bros clone featuring four of the six Awesomenauts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHX6LhcTeg

All of this was from scratch. We didn't reuse any old assets or anything.
So awesome.
 
So me and Jan Willem (one half of Vlambeer) decided yesterday that we had to make something for our buddies at Ronimo, to celebrate the release of Awesomenauts.

We had five hours before the releaseparty started, so in that time we made a little Smash Bros clone featuring four of the six Awesomenauts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHX6LhcTeg

All of this was from scratch. We didn't reuse any old assets or anything.

Game looks crazy good for being made in such a small time span.
 
So me and Jan Willem (one half of Vlambeer) decided yesterday that we had to make something for our buddies at Ronimo, to celebrate the release of Awesomenauts.

We had five hours before the releaseparty started, so in that time we made a little Smash Bros clone featuring four of the six Awesomenauts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHX6LhcTeg

All of this was from scratch. We didn't reuse any old assets or anything.

I lurk in this thread because I aspire to create something, someday (but have no time and limited knowledge), but I just wanted to say that if you fleshed this out, but kept the same style I would buy the crap out of it.

Extremely well made, given the time constraints.
 
So me and Jan Willem (one half of Vlambeer) decided yesterday that we had to make something for our buddies at Ronimo, to celebrate the release of Awesomenauts.

We had five hours before the releaseparty started, so in that time we made a little Smash Bros clone featuring four of the six Awesomenauts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHX6LhcTeg

All of this was from scratch. We didn't reuse any old assets or anything.

I suddenly want to make a Smash Bros clone too...

Looks cool! And holy shit, 5 HOURS?!
 
Haha, thanks guys!

Me and JW have had a lot of rapid game making practice together the past two years, so we're extremely well tuned to eachother's development process, which is why we can pull this kind of stuff.
 
So me and Jan Willem (one half of Vlambeer) decided yesterday that we had to make something for our buddies at Ronimo, to celebrate the release of Awesomenauts.

We had five hours before the releaseparty started, so in that time we made a little Smash Bros clone featuring four of the six Awesomenauts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHX6LhcTeg

All of this was from scratch. We didn't reuse any old assets or anything.
D: Can you release this (for free if necessary so the community can play/update it)? I want to play it!

By the way, you got mentioned on Notch's Twitter.

Notch said:
Fwiw, I don't even call Mojang inde any more. Vlambeer is indie. Polytron is indie. Stephen, Ed, Terry, Derek, Tommy and Chris are indie.
 
Also, I feel a bit silly for asking this, but would anyone be interested in making a thread for it? Pimping your games in the iOS and Android threads seem to be perfectly acceptable but making a new thread for it is probably not ok, so I'm not sure how to spread the word about the PC version; I don't think this thread gets a whole lot of hits from outside dev-gaf. I guess having someone else do it is a bit dirty, though I've seen similar things done before.
umm yeah, you definitely don't wanna do that :/

I wasn't aware this wasn't allowed.

The game have been on my rader ever since I first read about it. Had I not coincidentally looked at your Twitter today I would not have known about the release and sooner or later possibly forgotten about it all together.


Now I'm off to buy the game on GamersGate. Will have some impressions later.
 
I wasn't aware this wasn't allowed.
If any mods read the thread, I am curious as to what the guidelines are. If I am creating an indie game and want to make a thread so people in say, a beta test can provide feedback, and I can answer questions to interested people, is that frowned upon as long as I clearly specify that I am the developer and not a viral marketer? Or is the proper route to just mention it in the indie thread(s) and direct people to a different (e.g. beta-test-specific) forum?
 
If any mods read the thread, I am curious as to what the guidelines are. If I am creating an indie game and want to make a thread so people in say, a beta test can provide feedback, and I can answer questions to interested people, is that frowned upon as long as I clearly specify that I am the developer and not a viral marketer? Or is the proper route to just mention it in the indie thread(s) and direct people to a different (e.g. beta-test-specific) forum?

AFAIK it's under (F) No Spam in the TOS. From what I've seen it's okay if another gaffer wants to make a thread or OT for your game but you cannot so as to avoid looking like you're just advertising on the forum. (If someone else posts, they're basically staking some portion of their posting rep that the game is something worth talking about.) Otherwise, you gotta post about your stuff in other threads (like this one) in a non-give-me-moneyz sort of way.
 
I don't see why there would be a problem with informing people of your game, eliciting feedback, or trying to get beta testers. Anything with more substance than "hey look! buy my game!"
 
Don't know if this is the best place to ask but I assume some of you know Objective C and have experience with iPhone development. I'm having some trouble with accessing a pointer in a class I made. Soo...

So I have some classes, I'll only show the relevant parts for simplicity.

Code:
// SharedData.h

@interface SharedData: NSObject
{
     NSString *tempString;
     mapRoute *userRoute;
}

@property(nonatomic, retain) mapRoute *userRoute
@end

The .m file just has a synthesize for userRoute;

Code:
// mapRoute.h

@interface mapRoute
{
     NSString *myString;
}

@property(nonatomic, retain) NSString *myString
@end

Again the .m file just contains the necessary synthesize

So my main problem is not knowing how to access myString from an external file that has a SharedData object. I can easily access everything in SharedData...

Code:
SharedData *share = [self SharedData] // A method that returns the SharedData object

share.tempString=@"Testing"; // Works

share.userRoute.myString=@"Testing"; // Doesn't work

Is there a specific way I'm supposed to be calling myString? Is there something else I need to do to initialize userRoute? All the .m file has are synthesizes for it's various properties
 
Is there a specific way I'm supposed to be calling myString? Is there something else I need to do to initialize userRoute? All the .m file has are synthesizes for it's various properties
I'm not 100% sure that I follow what it is you're doing in the snippets you posted, but the primary reason to do the synthesize for your data members (class variables) is to make the compiler automatically generate your getters and setters. In other words, it creates functions you can use for either...

Code:
// Will set the value of myString in your instance
[share setMyString:@"foo bar"];

// Will get the value of myString in your instance
NSString *gotMyString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"myString is set to: %@", [share getMyString]];

Hope this helps!
 
Is there a specific way I'm supposed to be calling myString? Is there something else I need to do to initialize userRoute? All the .m file has are synthesizes for it's various properties

I think your problem is userRoute is nil, otherwise it should be working

do this :
share.userRoute = [[MapRoute alloc] init];
share.userRoute.myString=@"Testing";

but you should do it by overriding the init method of ShareData :

Code:
-(id)init
 {
    if (self = [super init])
    {
           self.userRoute = [[mapRoute alloc] init];
    }
    return self;
 }
 
I think your problem is userRoute is nil, otherwise it should be working

do this :
share.userRoute = [[MapRoute alloc] init];
share.userRoute.myString=@"Testing";

but you should do it by overriding the init method of ShareData :

Code:
-(id)init
 {
    if (self = [super init])
    {
           self.userRoute = [[mapRoute alloc] init];
    }
    return self;
 }


THIS WAS IT! Thanks a bunch. I was basically stuck on this problem for hours trying to figure it out. Now, I'm going to see if some of you could answer another question.

I have a TabController where 1 tab let's you put in an address and it fetches the google directions info. It has a "Find" button that switches the view to the second tab. The other is a map that displays the route over a map. Is there a method that is called everytime the tab's current view is changed?

Basically my problem is that after finding the first route, if I enter another one even if it switches to the Map view, the map isn't updated because the route loading stuff is in the viewDidLoad method of the Map view. Is there a method that's called any time a view becomes the primary one in a tab that I can overwrite?
 
Basically my problem is that after finding the first route, if I enter another one even if it switches to the Map view, the map isn't updated because the route loading stuff is in the viewDidLoad method of the Map view. Is there a method that's called any time a view becomes the primary one in a tab that I can overwrite?

You can override this method in your application delegate file BUT I'm not sure if it is called when you change view programmatically :
- (void)tabBarController:(UITabBarController *)tabBarController didSelectViewController:(UIViewController *)viewController;

Make sure that your application delegate :
- conforms to the TabBarControllerDelegate
- is your tabBarController's delegate

OR

there are two methods you could override in your custom view controller
- (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
[super viewDidAppear:animated];
}

and

- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
[super viewDidAppear:animated];
}

As a side note, if you are changing views in your UITabBarController programmatically, why aren't using a UINavigationController instead?
 
Ok so for the next part of the prototype I'm building I want to work on projectiles.

Here are the things I want to accomplish.

1. Shooting while running and jumping
2. Have a max of 3 "bullets" on screen at once
3. Have a max distance for each "bullet"
4. Have a charge shot (hold fire button for a certain amount of time and the shot is different)
5. Be able to shoot in both left and right directions

I think that covers everything.

Shooting while running and jumping shouldn't be that hard I would imagine. Where I have the different states (Am I running? Am I in mid-air) I'll just add the controller input code. (gamePadState.Buttons.B = blah blah blah)

For a max of 3 bullets, I could also have a variable that counts how many shots on are on screen. Each time the fire button is hit, it check what the variable is at. If that variable is below 3, then a bullet comes out. If not, nothing happens. Seems easy enough. When a bullet disappears, the counter variable goes down by 1.

I'm not sure how I would go about implementing a max distance. I can't use a timer because if it hits an object or enemy on screen it needs to stop. However, if the player is shooting at something out of the guns range, it needs to stop short forcing the player to move closer. I guess I could just measure distance traveled from the position it was shot. So let's say on the X coordinate the player is at 450. Max firing distance can be set to 500. When the bullet is fired it takes the players position (450) and adds it to the max distance (500) and when the bullet's X coordinate is 950, the bullet dies and disappears. Would that the best way to go about it?

Charge shot doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to implement. I could start a timer each time the fire button is pressed. If the button is released under .3 seconds or something, it fires a normal shot. But if it is held longer, the shot begins to charge (starting up a new animation and bullet sprite) and I can go even longer if I choose to. Seems simple enough.

This might not be too hard either. I could use SpriteEffects.FlipHorizontally to change the sprites direction. Depending on which side it's flipped to, I will just set the bullets to go in the negative or positive X coordinate direction.

And finally, I would imagine that an abstract class called Projectile should be created with common methods and variables for each type of projectile.(Player, charge shot, enemy)

I'm just thinking out loud here, I'm wondering if my thought process is sound. Thanks.
 
I finished the generic Minesweeper clone for practice.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55797038/mine_practice/index.html

It took just under 4 hours total to make from scratch using Flixel, FlashDevelop, and Paint.net, looking at other (non-Minesweeper) code and the internet for examples and to learn how to do things. I feel that 4 hours is unfortunately way too long for Minesweeper. There's no sound either. If you're bored/want a challenge, how fast can you make Minesweeper using your engine/library of choice?

Also I suspect my code is super inefficient even for Minesweeper. =P
 
Uhm... so..

Code:
1.  Generate board with specific number of bombs.
2.  Click Square
3.   a.  If mine -> gameover
     b.  If non-mine, reveal the number of adjacent mines.
       (a)  If number of adjacent mines is zero, reveal all adjacent tiles
4.  Repeat from 2 until player wins/loses.

Fin?

I don't think the time taken is too important... did you do it iteratively or recursively? ;o
 
Uhm... so..

Code:
1.  Generate board with specific number of bombs.
2.  Click Square
3.   a.  If mine -> gameover
     b.  If non-mine, reveal the number of adjacent mines.
       (a)  If number of adjacent mines is zero, reveal all adjacent tiles
4.  Repeat from 2 until player wins/loses.

Fin?

I don't think the time taken is too important... did you do it iteratively or recursively? ;o
I hope you already started timing yourself. :P Hurry, implement it!
 
So me and Jan Willem (one half of Vlambeer) decided yesterday that we had to make something for our buddies at Ronimo, to celebrate the release of Awesomenauts.

We had five hours before the releaseparty started, so in that time we made a little Smash Bros clone featuring four of the six Awesomenauts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHX6LhcTeg

All of this was from scratch. We didn't reuse any old assets or anything.

Quite impressive, as others have said. Congrats!
 
I kinda want to but I'm sure it will take me a few hours and it's already near 4 a.m. Starting tomorrow would be cheating at this point, sucks I saw it tonight. :p
Do it today anyway! You didn't do much besides write out pseudocode. =P I'm kind of curious how long it takes other people to do that in whatever environment they prefer.
 
I don't see why there would be a problem with informing people of your game, eliciting feedback, or trying to get beta testers. Anything with more substance than "hey look! buy my game!"

just don't do it. if you can get someone else to do it (as mentioned above) then that's another story, but if it is your own game then you are asking for trouble, they are pretty harsh about enforcing those rules
 
GitHub. Git is complicated but once you get used to it there's not a lot better.




Sync your git repo to a dropbox/Gdrive/Skydrive folder or something.

Try bitbucket.org. You can make private and public repositories using git or Mercurial/hg.

I set up a repository with github, a free one. Don't like that its public though. Is bitbucket good?

Almost finish creating the skeletal animation. I animate it by joints and each joint can have a varying amount of Translation timestamps. Now to look into winforms to make an editor.
 
just don't do it. if you can get someone else to do it (as mentioned above) then that's another story, but if it is your own game then you are asking for trouble, they are pretty harsh about enforcing those rules
Having somebody else do it is the same as just doing it yourself. It's totally disingenuous.
 
Having somebody else do it is the same as just doing it yourself. It's totally disingenuous.

Well if someone else does it, even if it's someone you know IRL, they're still doing it without hope of financial gain.

The rules are obviously there for a reason but it's still a bit annoying not being able to spread the word about the game on the place where I spend the most time on the internet
 
comboshoot2.jpg


New stuff:
Combo/event visualizer.
Fruit types changed to banana, red apple and avocado(colors differentiate more now: red, yellow, green).
You can now see the enemy type right ways, add lot more strategy to the game, also makes ccccombos easier to make.
Minus score for failed enemies and stray bullets.

Things to do:
special items,
growind difficulty level,
menus,
highscore table.
new gameover terms.
and loads of other stuff too
phew!
I'm trying to get all the planned features implemented by next week, we shall see...

newest video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UBgwoVbrms
 
comboshoot2.jpg


New stuff:
Combo/event visualizer.
Fruit types changed to banana, red apple and avocado(colors differentiate more now: red, yellow, green).
You can now see the enemy type right ways, add lot more strategy to the game, also makes ccccombos easier to make.
Minus score for failed enemies and stray bullets.

Things to do:
special items,
growind difficulty level,
menus,
highscore table.
new gameover terms.
and loads of other stuff too
phew!
I'm trying to get all the planned features implemented by next week, we shall see...

newest video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UBgwoVbrms
Man, I love the progression of this!! Is there a way to make the controls and movement faster, or will that get too quick of a mess?

edit, that name is sweet as well
 
I finished the generic Minesweeper clone for practice.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55797038/mine_practice/index.html

It took just under 4 hours total to make from scratch using Flixel, FlashDevelop, and Paint.net, looking at other (non-Minesweeper) code and the internet for examples and to learn how to do things. I feel that 4 hours is unfortunately way too long for Minesweeper. There's no sound either. If you're bored/want a challenge, how fast can you make Minesweeper using your engine/library of choice?

Challenge accepted!

This probably took me about 6 hours or so. Had to learn how to play minesweeper. But I added a lot of features.

Difficulties
Sounds
Cheat
Right-Click prevents a cell from being clicked
Added some little animations

But yea made with Unity, written in UnityScript. Picked up a font from DaFonts, found some old school sounds, read up on how MineSweeper works. Took me a while to figure out that you should only check for more bombs it the number of adjacent bombs is zero. I would click on a tile and it would reveal the entire grid. But eventually figured it out.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77761952/MineSweeperUnity/WebPlayer.html



The two things I left out that kind of bug me were:
First Click can never be a bomb *Fixed*
Retry current stage

I actually might try and port this to android and see how it plays on my tablet. Then maybe put it up for free on Android. It's a nice break from my hover bike game!

ENJOY!
 
Challenge accepted!

This probably took me about 6 hours or so. Had to learn how to play minesweeper. But I added a lot of features.

Difficulties
Sounds
Cheat
Right-Click prevents a cell from being clicked
Added some little animations

But yea made with Unity, written in UnityScript. Picked up a font from DaFonts, found some old school sounds, read up on how MineSweeper works. Took me a while to figure out that you should only check for more bombs it the number of adjacent bombs is zero. I would click on a tile and it would reveal the entire grid. But eventually figured it out.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77761952/MineSweeperUnity/WebPlayer.html

The two things I left out that kind of bug me were:
First Click can never be a bomb
Retry current stage

I actually might try and port this to android and see how it plays on my tablet. Then maybe put it up for free on Android. It's a nice break from my hover bike game!

ENJOY!
Good work -- web player doesn't work right off the bat for me, but that might just be something on my system. I made a Unity "mimesweeper" game that was a semi-minesweeper game with different rules, but apparently that didn't work anymore either the last time I tried to access it on dropbox. I assumed something had just expired and didn't explore it further.

I want to look into java and was wondering which framework is similar to XNA.
Take a look at Slick2D (http://slick.cokeandcode.com/).
 
for mobile development, and assuming my games resolution scales perfectly (flash), would i more or less have all my bases covered with:

a 16:9 phone version,

a 16:9 tablet version,

and a 4:3 tablet version?
 
Good work -- web player doesn't work right off the bat for me, but that might just be something on my system. I made a Unity "mimesweeper" game that was a semi-minesweeper game with different rules, but apparently that didn't work anymore either the last time I tried to access it on dropbox. I assumed something had just expired and didn't explore it further.

Did it end up working for you? I'm not sure how DropBox works. Does my computer need to be on? The webplayer file sizes are total of ~440kb from a 23mb project folder. Not sure how Unity compresses everything.

I'm going to try and port it to android and ios today I think.
 
Did it end up working for you? I'm not sure how DropBox works. Does my computer need to be on? The webplayer file sizes are total of ~440kb from a 23mb project folder. Not sure how Unity compresses everything.

I'm going to try and port it to android and ios today I think.

It worked for me last night and still does. I'm glad you did it because I was going to use Unity to do it. I had planned way too much of it out before starting so I kinda felt i was cheating.
 
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