I've locked down the core mechanics, and still a WIP but the beef of the game is ready for level design. Platformer puzzle design is challenging, but very refreshing. Now it just needs a bunch of polish.
Part of the problem I've been having is that a lot of the Unreal tutorials I find are all "Now let's assume we want to do this all in Blueprint. Look at how great blueprint is! Blueprint blueprint blueprint" and since I much prefer doing at least the low-level base stuff in code, even if it's not a language I'm good with, it's kind of annoying to have everything explained in blueprint.
Part of the problem I've been having is that a lot of the Unreal tutorials I find are all "Now let's assume we want to do this all in Blueprint. Look at how great blueprint is! Blueprint blueprint blueprint" and since I much prefer doing at least the low-level base stuff in code, even if it's not a language I'm good with, it's kind of annoying to have everything explained in blueprint.
When I first started using GameMaker, every tutorial was drag and drop. It was frustrating.
Speaking of tutorials, I would love for those who take the time to release them to show the outcome of the tutorial BEFORE they start coding it because it makes it so much easier to understand what they are talking about when they go through each step they took. I'm not ungrateful, but it would help a lot. I find myself skipping to the end to see it in action and then come back to the start.
It's still in progress, but it's pretty cool. I was with Tom at GDC, and he got himself hired by Epic to do a C++ tutorial series afterwards. It's good stuff
Feeling pretty good about the core gameplay now, added some more polish and started swapping out the NES placeholder assets for legally-acquired placeholder assets.
Still toying with ideas about where to take it from here - bosses, items/upgrades/unlocks etc - but it feels like a concept that can become fun through sheer variety/volume of content.
1. what productive game dev activities can be performed during "waste" time like waiting in line or taking a dump?
2. what (free) android apps are useful for performing these activities?
Here is my list so far:
1: design/planning - app: trello, evernote
2. concept art/UI design - app: ??
3. inspiration/stealing ideas (ui, vfx, game design) - app: any other app for study as opposed to entertainment - play/use a bit, open evernote and make notes
4. watch video tutorials (w/ headphones) - app: youtube - not the best learning environment but if the time is wasted anyway something might be absorbed
5. documentation? - app: evernote
I like to think about my designs and stuff that I'm going to work on next. I write down notes and stuff using Google Keep. That's all I do really. I try not to do design thinking too much while I'm driving anymore, that was stressing me out more than helping.
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
1. what productive game dev activities can be performed during "waste" time like waiting in line or taking a dump?
2. what (free) android apps are useful for performing these activities?
Here is my list so far:
1: design/planning - app: trello, evernote
2. concept art/UI design - app: ??
3. inspiration/stealing ideas (ui, vfx, game design) - app: any other app for study as opposed to entertainment - play/use a bit, open evernote and make notes
4. watch video tutorials (w/ headphones) - app: youtube - not the best learning environment but if the time is wasted anyway something might be absorbed
5. documentation? - app: evernote
any other ideas?
I use Google Keep for to-do tracking and keep a pencil and paper with me. Just constantly sketching ideas down. I keep two notepads. One for projects I am currently working on, and one for ideas and doodles.
However, when I am not working and have downtime, I play random games. When I play the games I look at everything as a developer. The special effects, the transitions, how the game is built, etc. It helps me to unravel my mind and see different ways to do different things by introducing new ideas. This has been by far the best way for me to get rid of designers block and or come up with unique creative additions/mechanics.
I find video tutorials for basic concepts to be invaluable for that sort of thing. That way, even if I don't understand everything on my first watch (at least not without pausing and trying it out), at least I get a good grasp on the workflow, what can be done and what the intended solutions to the most common jobs are.
I know there are transcript tools that take videos and extract the text.
But what would be rad is if there was a tool that made an interactive transcript so when you moused over a word it would display a video still of what was on the screen at the time the word was said.
That way you could read the text as your own faster speed than the person was talking, but you would still see exactly what they wanted to show at the same time, all without the video maker having to go through the effort of picking out specific screenshots to present.
I've also started a blog to discuss this game I am working on. When I set aside some free-time this weekend, I will be adding some more in-depth information about how I achieved some of the effects within GameMaker and why I did them the way that I did. I will spam less here, and post more there.
....wow it was really dumb of me to assume that I could jump from one engine to another easily.
Well... I assume that core creative problem solving skills transfer pretty well to whatever engine. Framework knowledge though, not so much...
I think that the problem is that I sort of assumed that an engine would be like a DAW. Where, for instance, if you know about sound, it's just a pretty simple learning curve of "This is where the Parametric EQ is, this is where the Filters are", etc. So the DAW takes a bit of learning, but basically you're doing the same general thing, and it's really just a question of how much control you have and how that control is represented.
But doing stuff like these Unreal tutorials, even something that I take for granted in Unity like declaring a public variable for view in the Inspector and for use in other scripts requires some arcane craziness going on and it turns out it's really only public with the #includes and UPROPERTY(BlueprintReadWrite) and stuff. Like it's such a vastly different framework that my Unity knowledge feels practically useless.
I have waffled on whether to go whole hog on the context for this question, and I suppose I'll see what kind of answers I get with the short version and come back Saturday with the long version.
Those of you who have worked with either Unity or Unreal: would you say that it seems beyond the capability of either engine to perform piecewise movement in a single physics update? By which I mean, it seems like in both engines you'll have a velocity assigned to your object (either because it has a RigidBody in Unity or because it's a Pawn or an Actor with a ProjectileMovementComponent in Unreal), and the physics system is going to move it according to the velocity and then modify the velocity by some pre-determined impact rules, while emitting other collision events as it observes them. What I want to do is have an object that moves some fraction of its available velocity, then updates its direction and continues, until it runs out of velocity for that physics tick.
But the way I say it, it sounds like I'm saying "I want to use the built-in physics, but I want the built-in physics to do something different than what it's doing", and obviously it can't. Is this impression correct?
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
No, you can't do that and probably shouldn't do that. If you need more precision then you need to slow down the simulation or up the simulation's framerate. Unreal has a physics sub-step option that allows you to do that, see https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/physics-sub-stepping
Your option if that is what you really want to do is likely to go interact with the physx objects directly combined with that sub-stepping. You might be able to set up a collision callback to do it
You might want to turn physics off and do the movements/sweeps yourself too
Yeah, when I was fiddling around with a platformer in Unity I coded my own collision handling for that, where I calculated the length of the vector for that update, then basically did "move until collision, align vector perpendicular the surface normal, repeat until out of vector length" for my character.
Honestly, it's kind of overkill.
I use finite state machines for my platforming code. Simple calculation of distance and status helps to make perfect collisions and keeps things from acting bonkers from any outside influence. It keeps everything nice and tidy.
To elaborate (call it the medium version?), I'm setting up a platformer with curved surfaces that the character can run along. Rather than use actual curves (which gets into some odd math; I remember, back when I first prototyped this system, that traveling a specific length along a bezier curve takes more guesswork than real math and isn't something you want to do every frame), I use a series of linked line segments. Hence the idea of piecewise movement through the environment; you move only as far as the extent of the current line segment in one direction, then transition to the next line segment on hitting the end of it and continue parallel to that one. That way no matter whether the terrain curves toward or away from the character, they stay attached (until you hit something that's actually defined as the end of a surface). It sounds like I'll have to leave the platform collisions in their own special subsystem, and translate the rest of the GameObject/Actor into the new position after the movement's been figured out, and rely on maximum speed capping or some other smoothing mechanism to figure out other forms of collision.
Good to know I'm on the right track, at least. Thanks, everyone!
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
What if you get more than one collision per update?
Everything gets handled in the order they meet conditions, if there is an instance where there are two exact situations, the index value of the all instance ID's are taken, lowest number first.
To elaborate (call it the medium version?), I'm setting up a platformer with curved surfaces that the character can run along. Rather than use actual curves (which gets into some odd math; I remember, back when I first prototyped this system, that traveling a specific length along a bezier curve takes more guesswork than real math and isn't something you want to do every frame), I use a series of linked line segments. Hence the idea of piecewise movement through the environment; you move only as far as the extent of the current line segment in one direction, then transition to the next line segment on hitting the end of it and continue parallel to that one. That way no matter whether the terrain curves toward or away from the character, they stay attached (until you hit something that's actually defined as the end of a surface). It sounds like I'll have to leave the platform collisions in their own special subsystem, and translate the rest of the GameObject/Actor into the new position after the movement's been figured out, and rely on maximum speed capping or some other smoothing mechanism to figure out other forms of collision.
Good to know I'm on the right track, at least. Thanks, everyone!
Actually this makes it (potentially) easier. You can toggle physics on/off at will, and you should still be able to get collision events, it just won't affect your object. You can then update the position every frame according to your calculations. When moving you can ask for a collision sweep from old->new to check for any other hits
It's Saturday!
Post what you guys have been working on, would love to see what you're doing!
Okay!
Here's some WIP progress on our Gamejam game. The idea is that you'll have to manipulate the environment, move objects around and so on, in order to avoid getting wet.
been working on yet another generic match 3 game, just made it playable yesterday (unity web player no longer works in chrome, and for some reason I could only play the game in Safari.... /fail)
But what I'm most proud of is making a debug/wizard console that lets you swap pieces and see the results of some functions, it makes things much easier to test
hit 'tab' in game to bring up the console and type 'help' to see a list of commands
Posts
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Part of the problem I've been having is that a lot of the Unreal tutorials I find are all "Now let's assume we want to do this all in Blueprint. Look at how great blueprint is! Blueprint blueprint blueprint" and since I much prefer doing at least the low-level base stuff in code, even if it's not a language I'm good with, it's kind of annoying to have everything explained in blueprint.
When I first started using GameMaker, every tutorial was drag and drop. It was frustrating.
Speaking of tutorials, I would love for those who take the time to release them to show the outcome of the tutorial BEFORE they start coding it because it makes it so much easier to understand what they are talking about when they go through each step they took. I'm not ungrateful, but it would help a lot. I find myself skipping to the end to see it in action and then come back to the start.
It's still in progress, but it's pretty cool. I was with Tom at GDC, and he got himself hired by Epic to do a C++ tutorial series afterwards. It's good stuff
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Still toying with ideas about where to take it from here - bosses, items/upgrades/unlocks etc - but it feels like a concept that can become fun through sheer variety/volume of content.
1. what productive game dev activities can be performed during "waste" time like waiting in line or taking a dump?
2. what (free) android apps are useful for performing these activities?
Here is my list so far:
1: design/planning - app: trello, evernote
2. concept art/UI design - app: ??
3. inspiration/stealing ideas (ui, vfx, game design) - app: any other app for study as opposed to entertainment - play/use a bit, open evernote and make notes
4. watch video tutorials (w/ headphones) - app: youtube - not the best learning environment but if the time is wasted anyway something might be absorbed
5. documentation? - app: evernote
any other ideas?
I use Google Keep for to-do tracking and keep a pencil and paper with me. Just constantly sketching ideas down. I keep two notepads. One for projects I am currently working on, and one for ideas and doodles.
However, when I am not working and have downtime, I play random games. When I play the games I look at everything as a developer. The special effects, the transitions, how the game is built, etc. It helps me to unravel my mind and see different ways to do different things by introducing new ideas. This has been by far the best way for me to get rid of designers block and or come up with unique creative additions/mechanics.
....wow it was really dumb of me to assume that I could jump from one engine to another easily.
Well... I assume that core creative problem solving skills transfer pretty well to whatever engine. Framework knowledge though, not so much...
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
But what would be rad is if there was a tool that made an interactive transcript so when you moused over a word it would display a video still of what was on the screen at the time the word was said.
That way you could read the text as your own faster speed than the person was talking, but you would still see exactly what they wanted to show at the same time, all without the video maker having to go through the effort of picking out specific screenshots to present.
at the same time?
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?69183-MAY-UE4JAM-May-14-May17-Kick-off-and-Theme-Announce-on-May-14-Livestream
I'm gonna take part with a small team, hopefully this'll get me back in the habit of finishing things and being productive!
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
I've also started a blog to discuss this game I am working on. When I set aside some free-time this weekend, I will be adding some more in-depth information about how I achieved some of the effects within GameMaker and why I did them the way that I did. I will spam less here, and post more there.
http://splishgame.tumblr.com
I think that the problem is that I sort of assumed that an engine would be like a DAW. Where, for instance, if you know about sound, it's just a pretty simple learning curve of "This is where the Parametric EQ is, this is where the Filters are", etc. So the DAW takes a bit of learning, but basically you're doing the same general thing, and it's really just a question of how much control you have and how that control is represented.
But doing stuff like these Unreal tutorials, even something that I take for granted in Unity like declaring a public variable for view in the Inspector and for use in other scripts requires some arcane craziness going on and it turns out it's really only public with the #includes and UPROPERTY(BlueprintReadWrite) and stuff. Like it's such a vastly different framework that my Unity knowledge feels practically useless.
Those of you who have worked with either Unity or Unreal: would you say that it seems beyond the capability of either engine to perform piecewise movement in a single physics update? By which I mean, it seems like in both engines you'll have a velocity assigned to your object (either because it has a RigidBody in Unity or because it's a Pawn or an Actor with a ProjectileMovementComponent in Unreal), and the physics system is going to move it according to the velocity and then modify the velocity by some pre-determined impact rules, while emitting other collision events as it observes them. What I want to do is have an object that moves some fraction of its available velocity, then updates its direction and continues, until it runs out of velocity for that physics tick.
But the way I say it, it sounds like I'm saying "I want to use the built-in physics, but I want the built-in physics to do something different than what it's doing", and obviously it can't. Is this impression correct?
You might want to turn physics off and do the movements/sweeps yourself too
Honestly, it's kind of overkill.
Good to know I'm on the right track, at least. Thanks, everyone!
Everything gets handled in the order they meet conditions, if there is an instance where there are two exact situations, the index value of the all instance ID's are taken, lowest number first.
Post what you guys have been working on, would love to see what you're doing!
Actually this makes it (potentially) easier. You can toggle physics on/off at will, and you should still be able to get collision events, it just won't affect your object. You can then update the position every frame according to your calculations. When moving you can ask for a collision sweep from old->new to check for any other hits
Okay!
Here's some WIP progress on our Gamejam game. The idea is that you'll have to manipulate the environment, move objects around and so on, in order to avoid getting wet.
(Also my first try at branding videos... Stuff still needs sound, but what do you think of those bits?)
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/221516245/match3/match3/match3.html
But what I'm most proud of is making a debug/wizard console that lets you swap pieces and see the results of some functions, it makes things much easier to test
hit 'tab' in game to bring up the console and type 'help' to see a list of commands
source/project is available here in case anyone wants to build it themselves: https://github.com/acpirate/Match3POC
I would really like someone with programming experience to take a look over the code and give me style pointers