The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
The Thread of Video Game Making, entropic style
Jasconius
sword criminalmad onlineRegistered User regular
sword criminalmad onlineRegistered User regular
Some of us here are paid money to make games. Some of us used to be paid money to make games. Others went to school for it. Probably most of us just wish we could.
No matter your background, an unavoidable truth is that game making is the easiest it's been ever and it gets easier all the time. You can't swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting some new fangled game engine that is begging people to use it. The hot thing right now is scripting based game engines that export to anything with a battery in it, like Unity.
Personally I hate shit like that, but I guess I understand it.
What kind of game making are you into?
Over the past two years I've been contracted to make three or four mobile games in LUA, which is a hideous language for mutants and degenerates. From there I started exploring PC games with XNA, I made a couple of good demos but now XNA is pretty much dead so yeah. Now I'm breaking out my very rusty C++ abilities and digging in with angel-engine, which is about the best goddamn thing ever for people with 2D experience who aren't great at C++.
Basically it's a collection of a lot of independent C++ libs that all do one thing very well. Physics, AI, UI, blah blah blah... all tied together with the most basic elements of building a 2D game... scenes, actors, bounding boxes, sprites, render loop, and the like. The best part is it all comes right out of the box with it, so there's almost no dependency management. Download and start building. Builds to Mac, PC, Linux, and in theory: iPhone. This removes all of my excuses for not building.
I had to beat myself into submission with finally choosing C++ over Python or something similar. The basic evidence suggests to me that C++ simply continues to receive active support from the community, whereas shit like Pygame seems dated and stagnant, and in some cases even minimally supported. (how many additional C libraries do you need to bind to Python before the point of using Python loses all meaning???)
I like 2D games. Which is another way of saying I don't have the patience or the money to make 3D games. 2D artists are cheap, 2D dynamics programming is easy, and 2D or at least 2D inspired games have made a real come back over the past couple of years.
I've been keen to build my own Diablo clone for years, and after a couple of stalled attempts with XNA, I am saddling up for the New Year to try and get something playable built.
What are you building, what have you built?
What do you want to build? What is your excuse for reading this thread instead of doing it?
Question plaguing me today: what's a smart way to handle tile collision maps as opposed to just tile maps themselves. For example, in an SNES zelda game, the tiles may be 32x32, but each individual tile has a subsectioned collision map with 8x8 resolution. What's a smart way to archive that data and coordinate it with your tileset data, when popular tile editors don't support such a feature?
No matter your background, an unavoidable truth is that game making is the easiest it's been ever and it gets easier all the time. You can't swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting some new fangled game engine that is begging people to use it. The hot thing right now is scripting based game engines that export to anything with a battery in it, like Unity.
Personally I hate shit like that, but I guess I understand it.
What kind of game making are you into?
Over the past two years I've been contracted to make three or four mobile games in LUA, which is a hideous language for mutants and degenerates. From there I started exploring PC games with XNA, I made a couple of good demos but now XNA is pretty much dead so yeah. Now I'm breaking out my very rusty C++ abilities and digging in with angel-engine, which is about the best goddamn thing ever for people with 2D experience who aren't great at C++.
Basically it's a collection of a lot of independent C++ libs that all do one thing very well. Physics, AI, UI, blah blah blah... all tied together with the most basic elements of building a 2D game... scenes, actors, bounding boxes, sprites, render loop, and the like. The best part is it all comes right out of the box with it, so there's almost no dependency management. Download and start building. Builds to Mac, PC, Linux, and in theory: iPhone. This removes all of my excuses for not building.
I had to beat myself into submission with finally choosing C++ over Python or something similar. The basic evidence suggests to me that C++ simply continues to receive active support from the community, whereas shit like Pygame seems dated and stagnant, and in some cases even minimally supported. (how many additional C libraries do you need to bind to Python before the point of using Python loses all meaning???)
I like 2D games. Which is another way of saying I don't have the patience or the money to make 3D games. 2D artists are cheap, 2D dynamics programming is easy, and 2D or at least 2D inspired games have made a real come back over the past couple of years.
I've been keen to build my own Diablo clone for years, and after a couple of stalled attempts with XNA, I am saddling up for the New Year to try and get something playable built.
What are you building, what have you built?
What do you want to build? What is your excuse for reading this thread instead of doing it?
Question plaguing me today: what's a smart way to handle tile collision maps as opposed to just tile maps themselves. For example, in an SNES zelda game, the tiles may be 32x32, but each individual tile has a subsectioned collision map with 8x8 resolution. What's a smart way to archive that data and coordinate it with your tileset data, when popular tile editors don't support such a feature?
this is a discord of mostly PA people interested in fighting games: https://discord.gg/DZWa97d5rz
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Jasconius on
0
Posts
First project is a match 3 game written in LibGDX/Java for all of the sweet, sweet portability (and the fact that a lot of the vanilla match 3 games on Android currently are rubbish).
I used to do a lot of the "Program X in Y time" competitions. I started out with a little thing called Megazeux, and participated in the Day of Zeux competitions (24 hours, make a game start to finish). After that, I did PyWeek for three competitions (only finished two of them, the third was a group project and that scope went way out of control). I took first place in one of the PyWeek competitions with a game called "invention"! Which was sort of a one-lemming Lemmings game. Think Weekend at Bernie's, but with robots.
I have...a stupid disgusting amount of game engines and barely started prototypes that I would get working and then immediately lose interest in. I'm hoping the OGAM stuff will force me to actually finish something of substance and get back into the swing of things.
Eventually, my plan is to work on a grid-based card battle game. I have the ideas, groundwork, and game details fleshed out, but I actually need to...you know, make it. A Diablo clone is also in the works.
I tried using Unity but I'm not 100% sold on it yet; I really like just getting right in there and coding. 3D development is a lot rougher than 2D and at this point, I think I just need to shut up and finish something before taking on some large grandiose project.
It's STEAMPUNK WITH DINOSAURS!
Over winter break, I downloaded Unity and taught myself some javascript to get started on building a little game. Unfortunately, I did everything with touch controls in mind BEFORE I found out that a mobile license of unity is 400 dollars, so that shit's getting the kibosh for now.
Fortunately, I found out that scripting ain't terribly hard to pick up, and I'm looking for experience so if somebody needs an extra guy on a team for something, feel free to talk to me!
My biggest obstacle is usually something like GUI, which is one of those things that SDL is not exactly meant to do? You know, with SDL you can make certain times of menus and such within reason... because ultimately you're just building custom controls from barebones no matter what (it's not like QT has a pre-built Inventory grid control!)
But doing things like a text field and input with something like XNA... proved to be absolute hell. Or a scrollable list of inventory items? Madness. That's something I am hoping GWEN lib will help solve this time around.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
I have a lot to say about this particular topic, but it probably isn't best for me to do so right at this very moment because of reasons.
Maybe not now that you can be an indie developer and pick up a lot of off the shelf IDEs and opensource/pleasetrymeout engines but I fear I just don't have the patience for it anymore. Which is kinda sad.
Doing 2D really isn't that hard in unity; you just set up an orthographic camera and ignore the Z-axis in all your code. Emulating the pixelation of sprites is as simple as flipping a switch or two in your shaders. Tile-based stuff is nasty in the sense that it runs better if you consolidate tiles into large objects, but the benefit is that you CAN choose to do stuff in 3D space, paper mario-style.
YEAH!!!
I don't like these preloaded tilesets though. I will definitely add my own.
those are pre-loaded tile sets?
are those sets available for download somewhere? I need all the placeholder art I can get
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
ooo that stuff is great. That's really what I was looking for
I started thinking through my collision maps last night
and then got stuck when I remembered that I DON'T remember how to deal with 2D arrays in C++
everything in C++ is exactly different enough to force me to have to google things rather than fumble around with syntax for a bit
While this is probably an excessively detailed discussion on collision mapping, the basic premises were sufficient to get me started:
http://www.metanetsoftware.com/technique/tutorialB.html
The notion of marking edges as "interesting" before concerning himself with pixel based collision is pretty clever. I need nothing nearly as detailed, fortunately
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
there we go
http://pixelpaton.com/?p=5591
uhhh
almost everything uses the GPU
you have to try really really hard to not use the GPU
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Somebody said XNA is dead? That's a shame, I quite liked that environment. This angel-engine framework looks interesting though, perhaps it's about time I learned some C++.
The XNA community seems split between two camps
Camp #1 says that XNA is done based on the fact MS employees formally on the XNA team recommend that you just switch to Direct3D (which is another way of saying "you're on your own")
Camp #2 thinks that XNA will make a comeback when the next-gen Xbox is released, since XBLA has been such a success, it makes sense for Microsoft to continue outreach to the indy community by sustaining XNA or something like it
Personally I think XNA is great for many things, but has many crucial shortfalls that are only addressed by a very limited community
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
I will join your team. (There will be no productivity compensation).
8-)
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Yeah, I was always a little disappointed in the XNA community, every time I'd go back to it I'd fine they'd added stuff to XNA, but googling just gave me all the same old articles and tutorials. It was nice to be able to compile my beat 'em up game prototype onto the Xbox 360 and jump around that one time though.
Unity intrigues me, I'm sure I could work in 3D but the programmer art become an order of magnitude more difficult to create, and I don't have any 3D artists to work with. I know it can be used for 2D stuff too, but if I'm prototyping I don't want to have to figure out all the workarounds to make that happen, I just want to start poking pixels onto the screen.
The community solutions for GUI are... average at best, and a pain in the ass to integrate. Oh you've been programming your graphics for the last two months? Sorry you have to change it all now because our GUI only works if you draw to your canvas in the way we demand.
My thoughts on Unity:
I hate asset motivated programming. Even when I was a Flash programmer, dragging things to the stage and imbuing them with magic never sat right with me. I was the guy who would force my artists to work with an empty stage. If you're a pureblooded programmer, I don't see how you can use Unity with a straight face
Unity does a great job at showing you how to get things ON the screen, but I think it does a much poorer job of helping you understand how to get them to move and interact. Their system of drag-and-drop script widgets is TOO Opaque, and I find myself with more questions regarding how to script within their environment than had I just written it all to begin with... again speaking in terms of 2D. 3D, i understand. That's how 3D games are made. I don't like to make 3D games.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
you just pretend the Z-axis isn't there, or use it as an easy way to layer textures. Like, set your main stuff to Z=0, and never include it in calculations. Pretty sure there's easy ways to constrain objects to the axis so that you don't need to worry about physics objects randomly bouncing out of alignment.
BEHOLD
http://fearghaill.sandwich.net/projectiletest/
left-click to fire, Q to target one of the blocks, and hold E to make projectiles seek the targetted block
I've now forgotten everything I knew about UDK, but it was a neat system to get to know. I hope someday my dream of incredibly buff shirtless wizards blasting the shit out of each other is fulfilled.
A game where you arrange flowers all pretty-like
No penalties, just flowers. And as you keep playing you unlock more and more flowers and colors and fancy vases. And OMG you've unlocked the Bridal Bouquet Challenge!!! Holy shit you get to design a Christmas themed centerpiece for the Mayor's dinner!!!
A lot of those kinds of games are pretty bad, and the experiences aren't as deep as what you could get from other games. But there is no reason they can't be made well. I'd have no idea how to start even for a simple game like that though.
is this your game, princess
If this was done well you could probably make some good money in the casual market - there'd have to be some sort of simple puzzle aspect to it rather than just placing flowers, but that wouldn't be too difficult to come up with.
You should check out Puzzle Craft for iOS. It might have a lot of things that could inspire more ideas about how you could do something like this.
Started out making text adventures in QBASIC, and even finished one! Unfortunately it's been lost to time.
Then at some point I came across an old copy of ZZT, and played around making puzzle games for me and my little brother in the editor using ZZT-OOP.
When I got to high school I had a copy of game maker and did a bunch of stuff, and got a bit into Java programming too.
Then I stopped for a bit because I was busy being a complete fuck up in University. I still regret being such a shitty human being back then.
After dropping out I eventually started doing stuff in Unreal Editor, learned a bit of C and C++, then some C# when XNA was a thing.
Nowadays I plink around in Unity, and I have a couple projects that are semi-active. I'm extraordinarily bad at actually finishing things though, so I'm uncertain whether anything will ever come out of my lifelong obsession with making games.
3DS: 1289-8447-4695
That looks interesting. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!