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.
Game Dev - Unreal 4.13 Out Now!
Delzhand
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Registered User, Transition Team regular
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
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
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=4qE8cuHI93csurrealitycheck wrote: »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=SkEQtMP2CuAJust 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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Posts
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.
Where's the information on the free upgrade?
I've messed around with Studio on Steam.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
also
i have made some bugs 2 beautiful 2 live...
kill all codes
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.
so far:
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
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.
burgernetta
or the nebula background of ftl:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My coworker, however, is still not convinced by it and still would rather use Eclipse and do things by hand.
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.
As long as you're not stealing graphics from other games, you're fine.
It may have been this one, if you're still looking: http://www.youtube.com/user/999Greyfox/videos
built in unity physics weren't quite right for it
8) PHysc - fuk neuwton.
the classic snake game, but not on a grid
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
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.
Current Story:
D-Universe, Mischief Knights [PG-13]
Avalice Assassin concepts