1) Android audio support can be terrible and stupid at times for no reason. You have been warned.
2) Narrow down the resolution range and minimal specs you want to support and focus on that. There are a billion devices for Android and that one guy with a touch screen built into his beeper will download your game and bitch because it didn't work. This is also useful because once you compile a list you can easily limit what models you want it available for. You have over 6,000 devices on Google Play. That's an insane amount of varied hardware and resolution configurations. Fragmentation is the side effect of the best parts of what make Android awesome.
3) Do not ever ever ever ever ever lose your keystore. Ever. Make infinite backups and hide them everywhere. Behind the fridge, in your shoes - wallpaper your house in USB drives that have it backed up. Losing your keystore effectively locks you out of any game it has been assigned to and you won't be able to do shit anymore. They are impossible to replace once generated.
I have a few games on Android so I am no expert, but I have seen people burn themselves hard because they aren't taking the time to handle Android correctly. Hopefully some of this helps.
hey, just outta curiosity with the programmer types here. how feasible is it to add models and such to ARMA3?
would it be possible to make something like this?
and vehicle UIs like
I'm not asking about the feasibility of VTs fighting in an environment with tanks and AT troopers, just is it possible to build out some models and skins and code this into ARMA3?
Are we basically going to be building an entire new thing, or would it be possible to co-opt and crib some of the features from tanks to get it working?
I have a feeling this could be big. Not DayZ big, but I think it could be big and worthwhile...
(I made this exact post in the Arma3 thread because maybe some of those guys are savvy with that engine. My knowledge of programming and bringing this all together basically equates into not putting a square peg in a round hole. I could probably produce concepts and 3d assets if I had the 3d program that ArmA uses for its models, but that's as far as I know about this stuff)
That looks pretty awesome, Joe! Most original style I've seen in UE4 yet for sure, loving it. And the trailer has me intrigued as well, so that definitely works
So a few friends of mine said I had to get started with more work on my game because they were pretty sure they were "at the point where getting more prominent clients doesn't matter".
The twine game is literally 3 maybe 10-second loops of placeholder dialog, guys! I think the fact that people were engaged for like an hour by something this sparse means that the concept has some legs.
Anyone have any experience making physics objects in Game Maker Studio?
I'm making the entrails, and while I can make some nice draggable gross bits, the thing I thought would be neatest was having a big pile of intestines. Unfortunately, all the "rope" tutorials I figured would help depend on using a collection of individual rope-segment objects that just do not work the way I'd like. They split apart, they bounce around weirdly... I'd really just like a single functional object that people can manipulate and squish about.
Anyone have any experience making physics objects in Game Maker Studio?
I'm making the entrails, and while I can make some nice draggable gross bits, the thing I thought would be neatest was having a big pile of intestines. Unfortunately, all the "rope" tutorials I figured would help depend on using a collection of individual rope-segment objects that just do not work the way I'd like. They split apart, they bounce around weirdly... I'd really just like a single functional object that people can manipulate and squish about.
Soft body physics is your best bet with the built in engine.
The poor man solution for having your game playtested by lots of people that doesn't involve releasing a demo is having your game playtested by a few people.
Having just three people knock on prototypes of the game I'm working on turned up five times as many bugs as I would have uncovered on my own.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
Yeah, I let my friends try the game I've been working on and while they didn't find any bugs, they had trouble with stuff that I didn't even think about.
I came away from it realizing that playtesting is pretty much invaluable.
Taking it to indie developer meetups is a good way to playtest for free in exchange for playtesting other people's stuff.
Also, apply to every Gaming expo/Gaming event that has an indie section to try and showcase your game there (for free of course). There is nothing that quite matches watching a constant stream of people with no bias sit down and try it.
Anyone have any experience making physics objects in Game Maker Studio?
I'm making the entrails, and while I can make some nice draggable gross bits, the thing I thought would be neatest was having a big pile of intestines. Unfortunately, all the "rope" tutorials I figured would help depend on using a collection of individual rope-segment objects that just do not work the way I'd like. They split apart, they bounce around weirdly... I'd really just like a single functional object that people can manipulate and squish about.
Soft body physics is your best bet with the built in engine.
I was under the impression that the built-in engine only just got soft body physics capability.
I've only found methods of making particle groups with the new LiquidFun stuff as a way of producing soft-body objects. And weirdly they have what appear to be restrictions on size and shape that are not mentioned anywhere in any documentation.
Like I can make a width 150, length 600 box, but I can't make a width 140 length 600 box. It makes it hard to make thinner tube objects.
For now my "guts" are just a big spray of random boxes/rectangles/circles that have red particles, so that's working okay enough that I'm not going to obsess over it. But seriously, how come I can make width 150, length 620, but not width 150, length 330 boxes?
Now of course the issue is that I have no idea how to implement a grab on this sort of object.
Today I finally fixed an issue that I discovered a few weeks ago.
When far away enough from the zero-coordinate, the player would sometimes move up and down 45-degree slopes slowly and get stuck on the edges of platforms.
I can't really explain what was causing it, but only counting collisions when the objects overlap by more than 0.01 seems to have fixed it.
Its probably to do with floating point precision, terrible things happen to the accuracy of floating point numbers when they get big enough. Ideally if you are using floating point numbers, you want to stop them getting too big.
I remember discovering this making a space sim. When the ships travelled far enough velocity and position became super glitchy. I ended up splitting space into small sectors to handle it, and transitioning between co-ordinate systems in between.
I think this is also why the minecraft world used to get messed up when you travelled too far in one direction. I'm sure there are other examples where it manifests in other games too.
Here's a video of me putting together a ship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c11K_IF1EbA&feature=youtu.be
Next I'll probably do doors opening by proximity, rooms of variable size (probably just the current rooms joined together), and multiple levels of rooms (this already works, just there's no way to move between floors. Alien style ceiling/floor hatches I reckon).
Edit: Not sure what the mechanic would be, thinking on it. Fire + Werewolf is more of an incentive.
Eh, that worked because of the narrative more than the mechanic itself. Which in itself perhaps shows that even a questionable mechanic can work well given the right context.
The game lulls you into the typical gaming mindset of "I started out as a weakling, but after all this time my stats are really good! I'm finally able to kick some ass!", before reminding you in an incredibly visceral way that, no, you are nothing. You will always be nothing, even after the game is over. You're just a small fry in a world of ancient beings and unknowable powers.
I'm having a hard time thinking of specific games, but something like there's a boss that is really tough and the player barely manages to defeat it, and then five more show up. Whatever it is it has to be communicated clearly that this is not a situation where they can stand and fight.
Players can be inherently pretty contrary so it has to be done carefully. There's little things worse than accidentally discovering that a fight or situation is meant to be unwinnable and must be escaped from, which usually happens after a long period of frustration trying to figure out how to win.
I'm having a hard time thinking of specific games, but something like there's a boss that is really tough and the player barely manages to defeat it, and then five more show up. Whatever it is it has to be communicated clearly that this is not a situation where they can stand and fight.
Players can be inherently pretty contrary so it has to be done carefully. There's little things worse than accidentally discovering that a fight or situation is meant to be unwinnable and must be escaped from, which usually happens after a long period of frustration trying to figure out how to win.
Clarity isn't as much a problem; i'm more concerned with making it fun & tense rather than just something frustrating.
The Bloodlines segment was interesting, but i'm hoping to avoid a straight-up timer mechanic (if there is a timer, I'd like it to be player-controlled in some way).
...What is anyone's favorite example of a 'Player! You must now RUN AWAY!' mechanic in a game? Video game, card game, board game, whatever.
I can think of quite a few poor examples, but not any that struck me as being really good.
In 3rd person games the old "run into the camera" technique works pretty well (Beyond Good&Evil and many other games. Likely inspired by the Indiana Jones scene). You just need to make sure the player sees enough of incoming crap to be able to avoid it.
I'm having a hard time thinking of specific games, but something like there's a boss that is really tough and the player barely manages to defeat it, and then five more show up. Whatever it is it has to be communicated clearly that this is not a situation where they can stand and fight.
Players can be inherently pretty contrary so it has to be done carefully. There's little things worse than accidentally discovering that a fight or situation is meant to be unwinnable and must be escaped from, which usually happens after a long period of frustration trying to figure out how to win.
Clarity isn't as much a problem; i'm more concerned with making it fun & tense rather than just something frustrating.
The Bloodlines segment was interesting, but i'm hoping to avoid a straight-up timer mechanic (if there is a timer, I'd like it to be player-controlled in some way).
I'm pretty loath to use a WoW instance as an example, but within the significant limitations imposed upon it by being a WoW instance I always thought the Halls of Reflection in Wrath of the Lich King did a good job of having a "he's too strong, run away!" encounter that was still fairly satisfying and did a good job of communicating how imposing the villain was supposed to be.
If you're not familiar with it: basically the Lich King, the big bad, is your failure timer. He slowly walks towards you the entire encounter while you're trying to flee his fortress, and if he catches up with you he pretty immediately kills you. The tension comes from him periodically raising walls in front of you as you try to escape, and in order to take down the walls you have to defeat a wave of mooks before the Lich King reaches you. With an ideally paced group of players, the tension continually builds with each wall you encounter as he ends up closer and closer to you each time as you finish clearing the wave, with you just barely squeaking by the last wall in time and escaping to freedom.
I'm not sure what kind of game you're making, but there's a lot of ways to translate that same basic concept into different game mechanics. Essentially you just represent the thing that the player is running away from by either some form of failure timer or a direct impediment on the player while they fulfill another objective or series of objectives in order to successfully escape. Like in a board game maybe you have a certain number of turns to complete an objective or you'll fail, succeeding in doing so buys you just a few more turns but gives you another objective to complete, etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be as artificial as an instant failure timer, of course; you could have the big bad continually taking swipes at the player while they're trying to escape, so the timer here is the player's health and they need to escape before it reaches zero. That has the added benefit of communicating how strong the big bad is even more directly; if you squeak by with just a sliver of health you're going to feel like you just got the shit kicked out of you. Or, of course, you could represent the force you're fleeing from however you want; it just has to be a driving motivation on the player.
The jeep chase at the very end of Metal Gear Solid is my favourite, because as a reward for beating the final boss the game goes "here's a massive machine gun, lets go on an explosion rollercoaster wheeeee!".
I think one of the key things I like about it is that while it feels exciting I've never failed it. If you are doing a run away sequence as part of a narrative, I think having the player die and have to try it again straight away completely breaks the flow. You should either engineer it so that its harder to fail than it looks, or have some other consequence for messing it up than "you failed: retry the chase sequence?"
I haven't been able to find much time to work on my stuff, I'm also procrastinating since I need to create my main character models and all the animations before moving forward with the gameplay. So instead, last night I went back to working on my water. Now its all parameterized and both material and class that gives the the wave height at point are wrapped in a single blueprint and kept in sync.
I was then randomly changing wave size and a little boat does not fare well against 10 meter waves that have their crests separated by only 1 meter. I could also see my buoys getting launched in the air in the background.
Oh man. This just keeps looking better and better. I'm really hoping you do some "Gravity"-esque space horror with this. I'm sure whatever you come up with will be rad considering how it's looking though.
...What is anyone's favorite example of a 'Player! You must now RUN AWAY!' mechanic in a game?
The only particularly great one I can think of was in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Even after experimenting and finding you can go almost as slow as you want without failure, it's still really tense and fun.
0
Options
joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
For a run away and chase scenario without having an NPC literally yell "run away" you need a wait to convey futility to the player. So showing that all his attacks are being blocked or have no effect is very important.
Also as it was said earlier killing the player unless they do something like run into the monster directly, will get very frustrating as they will try to attack over and over thinking that they are just doing it wrong. Making the fight proportional to the rate of escape like amnesiasoft said or if they get too close a huge attack causes massive knockback is probably a good way to go.
Having the monster rip apart the environment forcing the player back works well too.
Definitely avoid scenarios like the fight with Seath the Scaleless in the Duke's Archive in DarkSouls. You are suppose to die in that fight to move forward but if you are powerful enough you can survive a long time in that room and do a lot of damage eventhough the boss just keeps regenerating. The feel of hopelessness was not well set up since you've already fought tons of bosses that were much harder.
KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
I'd also recommend looking at Amnesia for run away moments. There's really nothing like seeing one of those monsters for the first time and just shitting your pants after being tensed up from all the atmosphere. Specifically the water monster section is pretty great, there's a lot of conveyance from the monster in the water that just helps the player feel helpless and want to run away/escape.
So I now have basically reproduced my little Twine demo in Game Maker. Except in Game Maker you can bat around little soft-body organs to oracleize. I'm going to have to play around a bunch before I get that bit to where I want it, but I'm going to table it for now because it could conceivably take infinite time, and I want a full client that makes sense and is enjoyable first. I can just write a physical set of interpretation rules and randomize organ generation a bit after that.
MachwingIt looks like a harmless old computer, doesn't it?Left in this cave to rot ... or to flower!Registered Userregular
I got my cel shader into UE4! Learned a lot about working with Blueprint in the process.
However, it currently only works with one directional light. I can find all the lights in my scene easily, but I can only pass a finite number of light vectors as individual material parameters. As far as I know, there's no way to do something like pass my light array in and do a for-each inside the material.
This isn't a huge problem--hardcoding it to only "see" the nearest, say, 3 lights would suffice in most situations--but I wish there was a workaround. Anybody know any?
Some awesome crazy stuff coming out of UE4. Lot of neat looking environments. I can't wait play some of this stuff.
So, I like building puzzle prototypes, and I found built one that I got super inspired by, so I worked on some art, and one thing became another and in order to reduce my sleep schedule even MORE, I am spending my nights working on this new project I plan on releasing in December. I want to polish the crap out of it.
Posts
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
1) Android audio support can be terrible and stupid at times for no reason. You have been warned.
2) Narrow down the resolution range and minimal specs you want to support and focus on that. There are a billion devices for Android and that one guy with a touch screen built into his beeper will download your game and bitch because it didn't work. This is also useful because once you compile a list you can easily limit what models you want it available for. You have over 6,000 devices on Google Play. That's an insane amount of varied hardware and resolution configurations. Fragmentation is the side effect of the best parts of what make Android awesome.
3) Do not ever ever ever ever ever lose your keystore. Ever. Make infinite backups and hide them everywhere. Behind the fridge, in your shoes - wallpaper your house in USB drives that have it backed up. Losing your keystore effectively locks you out of any game it has been assigned to and you won't be able to do shit anymore. They are impossible to replace once generated.
On that subject matter, I highly suggest reading over this blog post as it can be a life saver at the end of the day.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/06/things-that-cannot-change.html
I have a few games on Android so I am no expert, but I have seen people burn themselves hard because they aren't taking the time to handle Android correctly. Hopefully some of this helps.
would it be possible to make something like this?
and vehicle UIs like
I'm not asking about the feasibility of VTs fighting in an environment with tanks and AT troopers, just is it possible to build out some models and skins and code this into ARMA3?
Are we basically going to be building an entire new thing, or would it be possible to co-opt and crib some of the features from tanks to get it working?
I have a feeling this could be big. Not DayZ big, but I think it could be big and worthwhile...
(I made this exact post in the Arma3 thread because maybe some of those guys are savvy with that engine. My knowledge of programming and bringing this all together basically equates into not putting a square peg in a round hole. I could probably produce concepts and 3d assets if I had the 3d program that ArmA uses for its models, but that's as far as I know about this stuff)
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
But more importantly I put THIS video on the internet:
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
The twine game is literally 3 maybe 10-second loops of placeholder dialog, guys! I think the fact that people were engaged for like an hour by something this sparse means that the concept has some legs.
I'm making the entrails, and while I can make some nice draggable gross bits, the thing I thought would be neatest was having a big pile of intestines. Unfortunately, all the "rope" tutorials I figured would help depend on using a collection of individual rope-segment objects that just do not work the way I'd like. They split apart, they bounce around weirdly... I'd really just like a single functional object that people can manipulate and squish about.
Soft body physics is your best bet with the built in engine.
Having just three people knock on prototypes of the game I'm working on turned up five times as many bugs as I would have uncovered on my own.
I came away from it realizing that playtesting is pretty much invaluable.
Also, apply to every Gaming expo/Gaming event that has an indie section to try and showcase your game there (for free of course). There is nothing that quite matches watching a constant stream of people with no bias sit down and try it.
I was under the impression that the built-in engine only just got soft body physics capability.
I've only found methods of making particle groups with the new LiquidFun stuff as a way of producing soft-body objects. And weirdly they have what appear to be restrictions on size and shape that are not mentioned anywhere in any documentation.
Like I can make a width 150, length 600 box, but I can't make a width 140 length 600 box. It makes it hard to make thinner tube objects.
For now my "guts" are just a big spray of random boxes/rectangles/circles that have red particles, so that's working okay enough that I'm not going to obsess over it. But seriously, how come I can make width 150, length 620, but not width 150, length 330 boxes?
Now of course the issue is that I have no idea how to implement a grab on this sort of object.
When far away enough from the zero-coordinate, the player would sometimes move up and down 45-degree slopes slowly and get stuck on the edges of platforms.
I can't really explain what was causing it, but only counting collisions when the objects overlap by more than 0.01 seems to have fixed it.
I remember discovering this making a space sim. When the ships travelled far enough velocity and position became super glitchy. I ended up splitting space into small sectors to handle it, and transitioning between co-ordinate systems in between.
I think this is also why the minecraft world used to get messed up when you travelled too far in one direction. I'm sure there are other examples where it manifests in other games too.
I did at one point think about replacing floats with doubles to see if it would help, but that would have required rewriting the vectors in Monogame.
Here's a video of me putting together a ship:
Next I'll probably do doors opening by proximity, rooms of variable size (probably just the current rooms joined together), and multiple levels of rooms (this already works, just there's no way to move between floors. Alien style ceiling/floor hatches I reckon).
I can think of quite a few poor examples, but not any that struck me as being really good.
Griffith Park.
Edit: Not sure what the mechanic would be, thinking on it. Fire + Werewolf is more of an incentive.
Eh, that worked because of the narrative more than the mechanic itself. Which in itself perhaps shows that even a questionable mechanic can work well given the right context.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
Players can be inherently pretty contrary so it has to be done carefully. There's little things worse than accidentally discovering that a fight or situation is meant to be unwinnable and must be escaped from, which usually happens after a long period of frustration trying to figure out how to win.
Clarity isn't as much a problem; i'm more concerned with making it fun & tense rather than just something frustrating.
The Bloodlines segment was interesting, but i'm hoping to avoid a straight-up timer mechanic (if there is a timer, I'd like it to be player-controlled in some way).
I'm pretty loath to use a WoW instance as an example, but within the significant limitations imposed upon it by being a WoW instance I always thought the Halls of Reflection in Wrath of the Lich King did a good job of having a "he's too strong, run away!" encounter that was still fairly satisfying and did a good job of communicating how imposing the villain was supposed to be.
If you're not familiar with it: basically the Lich King, the big bad, is your failure timer. He slowly walks towards you the entire encounter while you're trying to flee his fortress, and if he catches up with you he pretty immediately kills you. The tension comes from him periodically raising walls in front of you as you try to escape, and in order to take down the walls you have to defeat a wave of mooks before the Lich King reaches you. With an ideally paced group of players, the tension continually builds with each wall you encounter as he ends up closer and closer to you each time as you finish clearing the wave, with you just barely squeaking by the last wall in time and escaping to freedom.
I'm not sure what kind of game you're making, but there's a lot of ways to translate that same basic concept into different game mechanics. Essentially you just represent the thing that the player is running away from by either some form of failure timer or a direct impediment on the player while they fulfill another objective or series of objectives in order to successfully escape. Like in a board game maybe you have a certain number of turns to complete an objective or you'll fail, succeeding in doing so buys you just a few more turns but gives you another objective to complete, etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be as artificial as an instant failure timer, of course; you could have the big bad continually taking swipes at the player while they're trying to escape, so the timer here is the player's health and they need to escape before it reaches zero. That has the added benefit of communicating how strong the big bad is even more directly; if you squeak by with just a sliver of health you're going to feel like you just got the shit kicked out of you. Or, of course, you could represent the force you're fleeing from however you want; it just has to be a driving motivation on the player.
I think one of the key things I like about it is that while it feels exciting I've never failed it. If you are doing a run away sequence as part of a narrative, I think having the player die and have to try it again straight away completely breaks the flow. You should either engineer it so that its harder to fail than it looks, or have some other consequence for messing it up than "you failed: retry the chase sequence?"
-big wide hallways:
-doors now open and close for you:
-ship can be multistorey with hatches in floor/ceiling:
-rooms can be procedurally furnished
I haven't been able to find much time to work on my stuff, I'm also procrastinating since I need to create my main character models and all the animations before moving forward with the gameplay. So instead, last night I went back to working on my water. Now its all parameterized and both material and class that gives the the wave height at point are wrapped in a single blueprint and kept in sync.
I was then randomly changing wave size and a little boat does not fare well against 10 meter waves that have their crests separated by only 1 meter. I could also see my buoys getting launched in the air in the background.
Oh man. This just keeps looking better and better. I'm really hoping you do some "Gravity"-esque space horror with this. I'm sure whatever you come up with will be rad considering how it's looking though.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Also as it was said earlier killing the player unless they do something like run into the monster directly, will get very frustrating as they will try to attack over and over thinking that they are just doing it wrong. Making the fight proportional to the rate of escape like amnesiasoft said or if they get too close a huge attack causes massive knockback is probably a good way to go.
Having the monster rip apart the environment forcing the player back works well too.
Definitely avoid scenarios like the fight with Seath the Scaleless in the Duke's Archive in DarkSouls. You are suppose to die in that fight to move forward but if you are powerful enough you can survive a long time in that room and do a lot of damage eventhough the boss just keeps regenerating. The feel of hopelessness was not well set up since you've already fought tons of bosses that were much harder.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
However, it currently only works with one directional light. I can find all the lights in my scene easily, but I can only pass a finite number of light vectors as individual material parameters. As far as I know, there's no way to do something like pass my light array in and do a for-each inside the material.
This isn't a huge problem--hardcoding it to only "see" the nearest, say, 3 lights would suffice in most situations--but I wish there was a workaround. Anybody know any?
So, I like building puzzle prototypes, and I found built one that I got super inspired by, so I worked on some art, and one thing became another and in order to reduce my sleep schedule even MORE, I am spending my nights working on this new project I plan on releasing in December. I want to polish the crap out of it.
I present, Dreamcakes.