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Game Dev - Unreal 4.13 Out Now!
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It's too brutal, I cannot
I love the bee. And the dead bee.
I actually uploaded to the jam with an update now: http://autumnguy.itch.io/beebox
High scores, faster bee, more boxes. (I know, I am an asshole)
So if you get a chance, I would love a rating/comment. I am testing out this new indie portal service. (www.itch.io) - They don't take any money, have a pretty nice admin area, don't claim rights to your game, etc. Seems to be on the up and up!
Well, looks like you're not the only one who took "it's hard" as an approach: http://donswelt.itch.io/hit-space-to-flap
Ahaha, that is... something else.
Well yesterday anyway... I have not been to sleep in a few... time...blocks of time.. something something... COFFEEEEEEEE!
Anyway, so I ported over my crappy Beebox game to Android for the hell of it. Tossed up a new website update FINALLY. Gotta get some work done on that tomorrow.
I started digging around and cleaning up things, and I found this prototype that I was working on, and I really want to finish it. So, all of April I am going to re-design Fusecube from the ground up.
Fusecube Prototype: http://lostautumn.net/dev/fusecube/ (Best with Chrome)
I am really starting to enjoy doing this every day. For the first time in a long time I am quite happy and challenged. I don't care if my games suck, I am really enjoying this.
Yay Game Development!
Speaking of tutorials, today I finally got around to making a quick writeup on my grid-based Fog of War algorithm: http://toasticusprime.tumblr.com/post/76866153394/hey-i-saw-your-unit-fog-of-war-algorithm-on-youtube
So, I am working on my next Android game. This one will be Android and HTML5, as will probably be the "usual" way of releasing my games.
I call this game Drop Digger, and it's an infinite scroller, that goes down. I just finished the core engine last night, and now I am working on art. Lots of different style blocks to break, items to collect, and things to do. It's designed to be very simple to use on the phone. Someone linked me to Mr. Driller after I was getting some help with the art, and while my game isn't exactly that, the speed and the downward concept is similar. Also.. how awesome is Mr. Driller? I gotta play that some time. The youtube videos make it look amazing.
Here is a quick promo graphic I made using some of the art I am working on. (P.S. I suck at art, and making a little animated dude to run around... oi. I almost made the damn main character a marshmallow because I can't draw lol)
P.S. If there are any game jam events coming up that you guys are attending, let me know! I use http://compohub.net/ for the big ones, but there are a lot of random little ones that pop up and it's a great time, but I crave more jams! I love watching other developers work and chatting it up with folks about game design.
But great job - it's a tileset that makes me actually want to play it. Let us know what you come up with for a player avatar!
Yeah the grass sucks, it's just there as a placement. I want to actually animate it so the 'wind' blows through it. The starting scene kinda need a little love before the chaos ensues. Moving clouds, birds, blowing grass, etc.
The two ideas I had for what is 'chasing' you would be either acid rain leaking through, or the moon has crashed into earth and is pushing down on you. I'm still tinkering with that idea, but i'll be focusing on that portion on tuesday. Whatever happens it will take place at the top and then you choose where to start and work your way down.
I also have enemies that attack the player, so that is one step closer to being a proper game.
Agreed. And if you change the environment tiles so the pixel density matches, that will go a long way towards making the game look less prototypey!
I'm aware of the pixel size mismatch. The character is really low resolution and scaled up, while the blocks are just drawn 1:1.
Keep posting those updates!
Spoilered to reduce 'spamming' of images.
So today I added the ability for an object to have multiple hitboxes and made slope objects with appropriate hitboxes.
I also added a slight snap to ground so the player doesn't constantly switch between falling and walking when going down slopes. At first I had some weird bugs with it, like if the player was attacked during slomotion, they would warp through the ground. I came up with a better way of doing it that didn't have that problem.
It also fixed another bug I had previously, where downward speed from gravity just kept increasing while walking on a slope, so if you walked off you'd instantly go down at max speed.
Music not part of the game.
How are you doing the drawing line effect? I know a lot of people do it different ways, one guy stores all the X/Y coords for a single pixel location in an array and then uses a first-in-last-out delay to clean up the line.
If you need help with sound effects, I have a huge library at my disposal. When I decided "I am gonna do this." I invested all the money I had into software and audio packs. So if you need anything, maybe I can help. Also don't forget http://www.opengameart.org - an AMAZING site that I contribute to and love to see grow.
I started a blog for my dev stuff, not much there yet but I plan on adding some stuff over the weekend.
http://blog.lostautumn.net/
I'll just leave this here:
I haven't made many considerations towards sounds yet. What's in there was sort of chosen at random.
I'll probably go have a look at OpenGameArt.
So every dot has its own timer/loop running?
What are you creating your game with?
Yeah. When you say it like that, it does sound a little inefficient.
I'm using XNA.
I would look into the array option for drawing right to the screen and removing one entry at a time so you don't have instances everywhere and only one "line timer" to worry about. A first in last out method will leave you with more performance room to use for other things like air and effects.
Yeah. When you say it like that, it does sound a little inefficient.
I'm using XNA.[/quote]
An efficient way to do this would be to store the dots in a linked list and each one stores the elapsed milliseconds it was created at. Then each frame, start at the front of the linked list, removing dots until you find one where current time minus timestamp is less than the time to live, then immediately break the loop.
More efficient, if the original description is correct, is to just create all the dots you need at the player's position at the start of the level, in a linked list. Each frame, the first element is moved to the player's position and becomes the last element (with the previously-second element becoming the new first element). The LinkedList generic class should work fine for this and saves you the annoyance of implementing a linked list again.
Also make sure Dot is a class, not a struct, otherwise you'd be creating a new one (and thus destroying the old one, when the method finishes) when it's passed as an argument.
An array would not be a bad option in this case, but arrays have the problem that they have to know their own size, you could use a ring buffer style array but that might be more work, and it either uses extra memory or overflows. Memory tends to be a pretty trivial concern when dealing with small objects, but hey, I like to be efficient
A linked list gives you instantaneous insertion and removal with no need to worry about state of the data set. For a first in first out situation where you have no need for random or search access to the data, a linked list is pretty much ideal!
Assuming you know at most how many dots you'll need, I agree 100%.
I always store the array size in the [0] spot, and any changes, I make I adjust the value accordingly. I've not used a linked list before, I don't use XNA. It sounds like a Data Structure in GameMaker (I use GML mostly) - which is (DS_STACK/DS_QUEUE).
It's basically an engine level array that has a push/pull mechanism for first-in-last-out/last-in-first-out value storage. (Forgive me, I am a novice).
With the linked list in XNA, are you actually drawing sprites to the screen or are these "dots" considered an instance? I guess "creating all the dots you need at the start of the level" seems confusing to me because you're creating a resource to house all the potential dots, rather than drawing them to the screen when needed... maybe I don't get XNA.
I was concerned that it would be restrictive compared to XNA or the like, but it seems like you can dig into C# when you need to customise it beyond what's in the interface, so I don't think I need to worry about it. I might actually finish a full game this time!
Now it's just the 6 reaction skills and 6 discipline passives. Then there's a handful of cleanup work and the prototype will be ready for balance testing.
Linked lists and arrays are common alternatives for grouping together sets of data or objects. A linked list (at its simplest -- there's lots of variations) is basically a series of nodes, where each node contains an object or primitive and also a pointer ("link") to the next node. You keep a pointer to the first node, and iterate through the links whenever you want later items.
As a result, random access (hey, I want item 10 but don't care about items 1-9 right now) can be slower than in an array (where you can just request array[9]) -- but adding, removing, and resizing are often a lot faster, since instead of moving all the items around in memory you just have to change one or two links for any operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_list -- "tradeoffs" especially explains it better than I can.
going to try the star fighter tutorial from unity first, but does anyone have any suggested tutorials for 2d games?