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Game Dev - Unreal 4.13 Out Now!

DelzhandDelzhand Hard to miss.Registered User regular
edited September 2016 in Games and Technology
The previous thread is located here: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/116540/game-development-omni-thread-unity-xna-udk-etc#latest

Some highlights of the last few pages:

Derek Yu on Finishing Games
Some great advice that goes beyond just "make pong"
http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game

Unity 4.3.1
Unity's 2D tools have been greatly improved, along with a host of other fixes
http://unity3d.com/unity/download
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qE8cuHI93c
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020583/Animation-Bootcamp-An-Indie-Approach

this is a fucking FANTASTIC talk

really interesting stuff about using minimal keyframes with lots of interpolation

How to Market Your Game for $0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA
Just the slides: http://www.indiegamegirl.com/konsoll-2013/[/quote]

FEB 2015 UPDATES:
UE4 is FREE: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free
Unity 5 has moved previously pro-only features to the free version: http://unity3d.com/5

THE BIG LIST OF GAME DEV RESOURCES:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o9VvQ2CqXXktuE1diTuM1ZBE79LxW1t3GKD3tdgt6xw/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true

Delzhand on
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    FawstFawst The road to awe.Registered User regular
    Games! Coding! Asset creation! Hooray!!!

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    EchoEcho ski-bap ba-dapModerator mod
    Did someone post a link to a Youtube channel with Gamemaker tutorials, or did I just imagine that? Think I'll take Gamemaker for a spin this weekend.

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    TheKoolEagleTheKoolEagle Registered User regular
    gamemaker is a pretty great tool, especially for just proofing out a concept. I remember I used it to make a simple bullethell game that had a chance to multiply zombie pac-men upon their death, I should see if I still have that game sitting somewhere...

    uNMAGLm.png Mon-Fri 8:30 PM CST - 11:30 PM CST
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    HallowedFaithHallowedFaith Call me Cloud. Registered User regular
    Echo wrote: »
    Did someone post a link to a Youtube channel with Gamemaker tutorials, or did I just imagine that? Think I'll take Gamemaker for a spin this weekend.

    Ignore the drag and drop, make everything in scripts. GML is great once you get your feet wet.

    I'm making video games. DesignBy.Cloud
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    EchoEcho ski-bap ba-dapModerator mod
    Yeah, I'm doing as much as possible in code. I just want to mess with some stuff without bothering with writing too much the actual engine.

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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    Echo wrote: »
    Did someone post a link to a Youtube channel with Gamemaker tutorials, or did I just imagine that? Think I'll take Gamemaker for a spin this weekend.

    Ignore the drag and drop, make everything in scripts. GML is great once you get your feet wet.

    IMO you should use the drag and drop to get started in your events. Then when they get complicated re-write them with code. It takes about the same amount of time and it keeps from cluttering the "code" part of your game structure with things that only take 1 d&d statement anyway.

    Example: bullet object whose only job is to die when it leaves the room. If I want to do something more like have the bullet bounce 3 times then die I'll do that in code (actually a bad example, thats still only 3or4 drag and drop objects) but until then drag and drop works fine and lets me see at a glace exactly what is going on when I open the object.

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    ElvenshaeElvenshae Registered User regular
    Delzhand wrote: »

    GameMaker Standard Free
    This is probably a limited time deal, but apparently you can upgrade from Free to Standard at no cost.
    https://www.yoyogames.com/studio

    Where's the information on the free upgrade?

    I've messed around with Studio on Steam.

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    surrealitychecksurrealitycheck lonely, but not unloved dreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
    HOW DO I MAKE GAME SEND HELP

    also

    i have made some bugs 2 beautiful 2 live...

    kill all codes

    obF2Wuw.png
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    DelzhandDelzhand Hard to miss. Registered User regular
    Elvenshae wrote: »
    Delzhand wrote: »

    GameMaker Standard Free
    This is probably a limited time deal, but apparently you can upgrade from Free to Standard at no cost.
    https://www.yoyogames.com/studio

    Where's the information on the free upgrade?

    I've messed around with Studio on Steam.

    Here's the post that came from: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/28518389/#Comment_28518389

    I followed the link to a page that said it expired early this year, but the post was from the end of November so maybe the promotion was running again? I'm not sure, I've not used GameMaker.

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    surrealitychecksurrealitycheck lonely, but not unloved dreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
    my bro and i are using a google doc to keep track of things

    so far:
    THIS IS THE NEW TO DO LIST NOT LIKE THE OLD TO DO LIST

    it is handsome

    1) MAKE GAME
    2) FIX XFFECTS UPDATING BADLY IN SLOW MO
    3) FUK BITCHES
    4) …
    5) GET MONEY
    6) TIDY UP VARIABLE NAMES AND FOLDER STRUCTURE
    7)i want our game to not have to have its core mechanics explained by as youtube video with linkin park music 8 months after release

    obF2Wuw.png
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    FawstFawst The road to awe.Registered User regular
    If I'm not mistaken, the free upgrade to Studio for GameMaker expired on 12/3. I meant to upgrade to the Pro version for $25 before that expired yesterday, but I'm not too worried about that. The only benefit that would give me is mobile testing which is only good on Android devices. Seeing as how I don't have any, there's no need for it. When I do eventually put a game out on iOS, it won't be a big deal to have to pay $50 for the upgrade when I'm already going to have to drop $200 for the module and another $100 on becoming an iOS developer with Apple.

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    21stCentury21stCentury Call me Pixel, or Pix for short! [They/Them]Registered User regular
    Are you making a game that's a mix between Bayonetta and Burgertime, Scheck?

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    HallowedFaithHallowedFaith Call me Cloud. Registered User regular
    I have a proposal for Microsoft.
    Send me a Surface Pro 2, and I will design a game for it, on it, using only it. I document the process and and then keep the tablet as payment for showing how awesome that machine is and what it can mean for indie-gamers who have lives.

    I've been drooling over it for a while, the drawing is such a key advantage, the idea of being able to draw and write code on a single device is soooo awesome. I like to program and doodle whenever I can, and since I spend a lot of time waiting when I am hanging out at the VA or taking trains back and forth out of the city, the idea of being an indie developer 'on the go' just has a nice appeal. Being able to break away from the tether of the 'workstation' and design on the fly, especially since I seem to have my best ideas for solving code problems or changing gaming mechanics when I have my thumb up my butt standing around waiting for other people.

    I'm really excited to start saving my pennies and see where my design/development process goes once I can be mobile with it.

    I'm making video games. DesignBy.Cloud
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    surrealitychecksurrealitycheck lonely, but not unloved dreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
    Are you making a game that's a mix between Bayonetta and Burgertime, Scheck?

    burgernetta

    obF2Wuw.png
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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    Question for forum...how would you do a billowing space cloud backgroung similar to this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykMApgD7B-8

    or the nebula background of ftl:

    Nebula.jpg

    I thought of using a sprite animation but at any meaningful resolution and length (so the looping isn't obvious) it would be huge. The other option I'm thinking about is procedural generation but have never done anything like that, not sure how to get started.

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    DelzhandDelzhand Hard to miss. Registered User regular
    I haven't played FTL, but what I'd recommend is a low-emission particle system where you have a single large-ish "cloud" particle that varies in color, with opacity as a curve over lifetime. Randomize the initial rotation, rotation over lifetime should be pretty low but non-zero.

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    KrathoonKrathoon Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    I checked into the Irrlicht engine. It seems to be pretty useful. I am more of a C++ guy, so Unity and the fact it is not free is kind of a turn off. It feels like I would be going more uphill than just flat out coding stuff and pulling together free libraries.

    I may look into gamemaker for prototyping or making my first game. There was that Torque 2D game engine, but I am somewhat irked by the proprietary scripting. I would rather use something more standardized.

    The Swiss army nature of the game engine packages seems over whelming compared to just directly piecing the game together.

    Krathoon on
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    KrathoonKrathoon Registered User regular
    That Derek Yu post is so much gold. Totally bookmarking it.

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    Dac VinDac Vin S-s-screw you! I only listen to DOUBLE MUSIC! Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    S1h4F2M.png

    Crossposting from the VGX thread. I don't think a gamedev thread can go on without mentioning the petermolydeux twitter, he posts a lot of good and original ideas for a video game

    Dac Vin on
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    DelzhandDelzhand Hard to miss. Registered User regular
    Krathoon wrote: »
    I checked into the Irrlicht engine. It seems to be pretty useful. I am more of a C++ guy, so Unity and the fact it is not free is kind of a turn off. It feels like I would be going more uphill than just flat out coding stuff and pulling together free libraries.

    I may look into gamemaker for prototyping or making my first game. There was that Torque 2D game engine, but I am somewhat irked by the proprietary scripting. I would rather use something more standardized.

    The Swiss army nature of the game engine packages seems over whelming compared to just directly piecing the game together.

    Unity is free. C++ isn't one of the scripting languages, though. I said this in the last thread and I'll reiterate it here: If you are writing your own game from scratch, you're going to spend a lot of time handling things that Unity can give you a huge head start on. You're going to have to build an asset pipeline, handle game basics like collision, cameras, and input, etc. If you're going to pull in existing libraries for those things, why not use a suite where those things are guaranteed to work with each other?

    Unity lets you focus on making a game instead of fighting the fundamentals.

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    KrathoonKrathoon Registered User regular
    Ok. I will give Unity a shot with the new 2D tools and tutorial.

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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    Delzhand wrote: »
    I haven't played FTL, but what I'd recommend is a low-emission particle system where you have a single large-ish "cloud" particle that varies in color, with opacity as a curve over lifetime. Randomize the initial rotation, rotation over lifetime should be pretty low but non-zero.

    Ty for the advice.

    I'm almost positive you can't rotate sprite particles (not sure about builtins) in gamemaker studio. It was one of the features they stupidly removed in studio to "optimize performance".

    But the very fact that I typed that post encouraged me to search through the gamemaker help more diligently. Lo and behold there is actually BUILT IN effects that do nearly what I want.

    screenshot.png

    Also I added some of the voice for the game, debating on whether I want to add the rest. The voice is one of my 5 year old daugher's run through an effects filter in Goldwave.

    This is pretty much the finished product that I'm going to sell for 1.99 (when I get my payment processor sorted out). My guesstimate is you can get 2-3 hours of gameplay out of it until you get skilled enough that it gets boring.

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/221516245/valance1.0.0.20/Valance-Default-1.0.0.20.exe

    The question I have for the forum; If you purchased this game as it is now would you feel ripped off?

    Also please let me know if there is anything I can do to make the whole thing looks more professional.

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    GlalGlal AiredaleRegistered User regular
    For some reason that download is crawling for me (5kb/sec) so I can't check out the game proper, but just from the screenshot the presentation needs work. The pixelly font clashes with the high resolution font on top (and the other assets, really, nothing else is going for the 8 bit feel) and the HUD in general feels a bit placeholder; maybe dig through some fonts free for commercial use and find one that'll fit in with the theme more? I'm also not convinced by the multicolour text, it makes it stand out but also look out of place. I'd pick a UI colour theme and run with it, using drop shadow or hud elements to keep them readable.

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    DelzhandDelzhand Hard to miss. Registered User regular
    In the interest of sharing resources, here's a site I've had bookmarked for a while. Very useful if you're doing anything with hex grids. Every section has an interactive demo, which is kind of amazing.

    http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

    There's a particularly useful section on line drawing.

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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    Delzhand wrote: »
    In the interest of sharing resources, here's a site I've had bookmarked for a while. Very useful if you're doing anything with hex grids. Every section has an interactive demo, which is kind of amazing.

    http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

    There's a particularly useful section on line drawing.

    Bookmarked so hard....I was struggling with this for my roguelike POC and when I switched from offset to axial coordinates things made so much more sense. What I never learned was how to calculate a rectangular area into an array of axial coordinates (so the map fit the screen). But I'm totally immersing myself into that page possibly for an artificial life toy I've been fantasizing about.

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    DelzhandDelzhand Hard to miss. Registered User regular
    If it's any consolation, I haven't figured that out either. I end up just making a huge rhombus and slicing off what I don't need.

    2cj6sm9l.png

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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    Glal wrote: »
    For some reason that download is crawling for me (5kb/sec) so I can't check out the game proper, but just from the screenshot the presentation needs work. The pixelly font clashes with the high resolution font on top (and the other assets, really, nothing else is going for the 8 bit feel) and the HUD in general feels a bit placeholder; maybe dig through some fonts free for commercial use and find one that'll fit in with the theme more? I'm also not convinced by the multicolour text, it makes it stand out but also look out of place. I'd pick a UI colour theme and run with it, using drop shadow or hud elements to keep them readable.

    Thanks for taking a look.

    The pixel font is Press Start 2P from the open font library: http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/press-start-2p

    The higher resolution font is Arial which is the gamemaker default. I'm pretty happy with the look of press start 2p, if you are able to download the game you will better see how it looks on the start page and the instructions page. I could potentially change the hud line to press start but that might make it too wide and I don't think it should be more than one line. There may be a more "organic" way to having a gravity timer, don't see it right now but ill keep looking.

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    urahonkyurahonky Registered User regular
    I messed around with Unity over the weekend. I love it to death.

    My coworker, however, is still not convinced by it and still would rather use Eclipse and do things by hand.

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    FawstFawst The road to awe.Registered User regular
    Tell them they can start working on an engine and you'll go ahead and start things in Unity. See who has a finished game first.

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    HallowedFaithHallowedFaith Call me Cloud. Registered User regular
    Just a heads up...
    Ludum Dare 28 voting has begun, details here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

    I'll be participating in this one, hope to see some of you!

    I'm making video games. DesignBy.Cloud
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    FawstFawst The road to awe.Registered User regular
    I actually have plans for two of the three days this weekend so I wouldn't be able to, but I'll have to keep an eye on that for next year!

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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    Just a heads up...
    Ludum Dare 28 voting has begun, details here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

    I'll be participating in this one, hope to see some of you!

    I'm actually free this weekend and might want to give it a go. I think my skillz are up to the task of making something playable in 48 hours.

    From what i can tell reading the rules I can use all of the tools and resources I'm familiar with:
    Gamemaker
    Mspaint
    Inkscape
    Goldwave
    Opengameart.org
    Freesound.org

    I'm not sure about the resources though, the opengameart and freesound stuff is mostly cc0 and cc-attribution.

    Is there anything in that set that looks like it would violate the contest rules? (I know I can go Jam to play more fast and loose). Also Gamemaker HTML5 export appears to either be really crappy or I'm using something that is making it bog down because Valance slows to a crawl when I compile to HTML5.

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    HallowedFaithHallowedFaith Call me Cloud. Registered User regular
    Ludum Dare is not very strict, it's mostly about challenging yourself, feeling the pressure of time, and actually finishing something.

    As long as you're not stealing graphics from other games, you're fine. :)

    I'm making video games. DesignBy.Cloud
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    darleysamdarleysam On my way to UKRegistered User regular
    Echo wrote: »
    Did someone post a link to a Youtube channel with Gamemaker tutorials, or did I just imagine that? Think I'll take Gamemaker for a spin this weekend.

    It may have been this one, if you're still looking: http://www.youtube.com/user/999Greyfox/videos

    forumsig.png
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    EchoEcho ski-bap ba-dapModerator mod
    That's the one! Thanks a bunch.

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    surrealitychecksurrealitycheck lonely, but not unloved dreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
    a new item has joined the to do list as we are working out a grappling hook system

    built in unity physics weren't quite right for it

    8) PHysc - fuk neuwton.

    obF2Wuw.png
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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    here is a little proof of concept I've been thinking about

    the classic snake game, but not on a grid

    screenshot.png

    click to set a destination, if there is no destination set (the snake head ran over the old one) you will keep going

    run over the yellow dots to add a new tail section, you lose when you run into the wall or a tail section (tail sections have a 5 second "grace period" because they tend to run through the head when they first spawn)

    the control scheme of "click for destination marker" seems to be really elegant and would work perfectly on a touch screen

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    rembrandtqeinsteinrembrandtqeinstein Registered User regular
    According to a friend running into the wall and dying is too harsh for snake. So I'm attempting to let the snake wrap the screen.

    The problem: each snake section is actually an independent object which follows the object that came before it (called a "leader" variable with the id of the object the tail is supposed to follow).
    Result: When the head of the snake wraps to the other edge of the screen the tail is "chopped off" and runs careening toward the head usually triggering the "run into tail" event which loses the game.
    My theorycraft solution:
    1. make the tail sections wrap the screen themselves
    2. at each game step for each tail don't take the coordinates of the leader as the point to follow, instead create 4 "phantom" leaders positioned at leader +room width, leader -room width, leader +room height, leader -room height. Check the distance between the tail section, the real leader, and all 4 phantom leaders. Whichever leader is closer (real or phantom) is the leader toward which the tail section will move.

    Example: the head of the snake wraps the screen from left to right. The first tail section now calculates the distance to "phantom left" leader is shorter than the distance to real leader. Then the first tail section moves toward the phantom left leader which is positioned off of the left edge of the screen. The first tail section eventually wraps the screen and appears on the right side. Now the real leader is the closest and follows that.

    So far it appears to work https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/221516245/snake/snakePOC1-Default-1.0.0.2.exe

    When the snake gets really long there are weird roller coaster effects that make portions of the tail meander across the screen, i think i can fix that by making the tail's max speed only slightly faster than the head, of course that would lead to more situations where the head fakes out the tail.

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    ThendashThendash Registered User regular
    Crashing into the wall has always killed you in Snake if I recall correctly. That's the biggest challenge, once you get to a certain length you have to start being very strategic with how you move or you'll box yourself in.

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    KyanbuKyanbu Digital Artist Registered User regular
    Yes, a new Unity update that supports 2D projects! X3 I was hoping for something like this to come out. And now I have one less reason to stick with stencyl.

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