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Game Dev - Unreal 4.13 Out Now!
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Source code: https://github.com/jericho89/square-color-tic-tac-toe
Download for Windows: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8788328/grid-lock.zip
I'll do a portfolio website maybe after my next project, which is a cave flier / flappy bird business with a similar flat, color-shifting vibe. Then maybe I'll pick up one of them big toolkits and do something more ambitious. :P
Been watching some videos on Blueprint. Looks pretty awesome, next payday I think I will throw $19 at Epic to get my hands on that.
Edit: Okay, my top priority is actually that I need to be able to easily get the data into C#.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Edit: YAML's definitely easier to write.
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Incidentally, and I understand that this is very mildly off-topic (though associated by means of discussion of general game design), I'd like to say that if you are designing a platform game, do not build your levels such that the player has to exploit the hitboxes or the "mercy input frame" to make jumps. By this I mean: if the player has to jump at the very last instant where the player character's hitbox is overlapping the platform's hitbox so that they can land on the target platform with the very first available pixel's worth of overlap, and anything else results in falling off the world, you've designed your levels wrong. Electronic Super Joy makes use of this at times and it is infuriating. So, platform game developers! Don't do that! It's annoying!
I'm "kupiyupaekio" on Discord.
Not having to define your own escape characters and such.
XML has a well defined standard and there are well defined standard parsers for it that are robust and cover all the corner cases.
If your config data is simple then there's absolutely no need to go beyond simple text files, but - for me - the tipping point where using XML, YAML, JSON etc instead of a basic line oriented config file comes fairly rapidly as you ramp up the complexity. Which of, say, YAML or XML is most appropriate to use is a question guided by what exact data you writing config for.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Spent most of last night and today on it and finally put in GUI stuff (I hate Unity's GUI, but waiting to get some money to purchase EZGUI for myself) added an HP Counter, Shield, Score and Power Ups. I like the collection system for points and things. Although some objects set their points to fly straight to the player (things you don't usually fly through, like bosses and some turrets).
You still can't die, but your health goes negative - waiting on some death animations and a design discussions before I really go at it.
I tossed in an FPS counter, I'm not really able to get the FPS to drop very much on my machine, I'm curious if others find it lags? (Particularly in level 2 - Press 'Q' to get here - when you're in the turret hallway and other cluttered areas where draw calls increase quite a bit)
Art is a bit slow to come by, so I made some of my own power ups (if you look closely at them... they're awful lol)
Speaking of new builds, I am finished with the Android build of Cheer Cubes, and am working on finalizing the web demo, which is designed to give a small taste of the overall game. It's a stripped down version, but it displays the game mechanic. I am still making some tweaks to make it playable for everyone, and I am using shaders and webgl, so any feedback on the FPS/bugs that occur would be great help!
http://lostautumn.net/cheercubes/
Just found out last night that the artist is finally working on some level stuff. So hopefully in a few days I'll have an actual map to throw into the game (or start throwing in). The level pieces are chunk based, so he's giving me a bunch of random shapes and things then I build prefabs out of them. Trying to keep everything Atlased as much as possible (to keep material use down). Should let us throw in a lot more random effects and shiny things as long as we keep the draw calls down as much as possible (I don't like it when they jump above 40, but below 80 doesn't usually hurt too much, in my experience at least).
The game looks great HallowedFaith, definitely a puzzle game I could see myself wasting a few hours on without realizing it.
I got a full screen clear on my second play through, which I'm pretty happy with lol.
Edit:
I added Object Pooling to my last build, I found the FPS dropped a little on my end, but it's much more consistent now.
The first time something is created it ould possibly lag as it introduces it's prefabs to the pool (searching for empty space and instantiating what it needs etc). But anytime after that there's no more instantiations, so it seems smoother overall (in my opinion at least).
Enemies are still instantiated and so are level pieces. The way these are done aren't exactly final, so it seemed unecessary to start pooling them right now until their creation and things are in a near finalized state.
Nice! This is really a great core concept, and it's well executed. Satisfying to play! My high score after 2 rounds is 8990, and if I didn't have to get back to work I'd put a few more rounds into it.
Edit: Had to get one more round. Pushed it to 9965 because I scored a full board clear. My wife is going to love this.
Edit2: Played a few more rounds. You've ruined me! I did find one bug, but it should only affect the web version - if you click and drag and your cursor goes outside the game window, there's no mouseup recorded. Maybe auto-release the click/touch event when the cursor leaves the playable zone?
Edit: 14110! Daaaamn youuuuu
I really want to release the full version to the web, but I need to focus on Android/Windows mobile first, so I don't dilute my market potential. The full version has a lot more going on, including a ton more special effects, challenges, special cube items, etc.
The challenge modes are no joke though, some of them get pretty mean lol. 14,110 is a crazy score! Good job!
It's a pretty fun game! Nice work
As a point of criticism, I feel like sometimes you get really lucky and there are many possible combinations, and sometimes there just aren't, and you have to make do with smaller rectangles - which then don't really mix up the field very well, because they only replace much fewer squares. If the full version has some means to mix it up more, and make the final score more dependent on pattern recognition skill than chance, it might be "fairer"? But it's a fun game
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
The puzzle mode is where it is at. The challenges rely on pattern recognition more on top of the specific goal of that, which is where the diversity comes into play. There currently is a system in place that tries to keep at least 7 moves available on the board at all times, this isn't always possible, my algorithms are still pretty rusty and I am still new to game design, so there is some left to be made. The balance is hard to strike without specifically designing each level by hand. The randomization is a bit of the flavor, ideally I hope it would keep people coming back. Get a bit lucky and have a bit of skill, I think makes for a winning combination. Like, at the casino, people think they have a 'system' figured out. It's a psychological trick.
Delzhand: That's actually something I have done on purpose. I might tweak the background colors a bit still, but the idea was to have one 'floating' color that makes you shift your focus on the grid. Also, in conjunction, each color represents a color of the 'world' that contains each pack of 90 levels. You'll notice the difficulty says 4 colors when you start, pink is the last color, so a lower tier difficulty with just 3 colors is without it. If that makes sense. Basically the difficulty of the levels last color cube represents the same color as the world.... I don't know if I am explaining it very well, but it all makes sense in my head lol.
That being said, I am still new to this game design thing, so I am always learning. I take all feedback seriously, so please don't think I am ignoring anything you guys might say. I am totally all about making a game everyone enjoys!
I've been thinking about this some more... Maybe it's not the number of possible moves you should be watching, but the size of possible fields? That way there might be several small moves leading to the same amount of mix-through as few big moves, keeping the playing field fresh and challenging the player's pattern recognition to reassess. Does that make sense?
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
I don't know how well low level questions are received, so I'll just spoiler it. If anyone knows of a place where I can ask my noob questions I wouldn't mind a link. The unity forum dwellers seem to be operating on a much higher level and I imagine would rather I just go to google . And trust me I have, I just haven't parsed a solution and my frustration has surpassed my pride
Right now I am just trying to make a public array of strings that other scripts can access. The problem I am running into is that, while other scrips have no problem referencing a public Vector3, they cannot read/write my string array (which is a public variable alongside the Vector3 in the same script). Instead it gets a null reference exception.
Related, I can't figure out how I am getting some public variables to be accessed via the inspector, and some not. Sometimes I'll restart unity and some values will have shown up there, but not all of them.
Should post the code where the string array is declared and initialized along with the code that's throwing the null reference exception. Maybe even pastebin up full files.
Also, one reason a public variable might not show up in the inspector right away is if the script it's in hasn't been compiled yet. Usually selecting the Unity editor window will get it to automatically compile your scripts in a second or two, as long as there aren't any errors preventing compilation.
public class CreateGridArray : MonoBehaviour { public Vector3 FloorSize; public string[,] stringCellArray; // Use this for initialization void Start () { int sizeX = Mathf.RoundToInt(FloorSize.x); int sizeY = Mathf.RoundToInt(FloorSize.y); stringCellArray = new string[sizeX,sizeY]; //Initialize array with values for(int x =0; x<FloorSize.x; x++){ for(int y=0; y<FloorSize.y; y++){ stringCellArray[x,y]="floor"; } } } }edit: That did not format as expected
As in, Instantiate? That is probably my problem.
[ /code] blocks
You declare FloorSize, but it looks like you call RoundToInt on it before you initialize it? That would make your sizeX and sizeY turn out wrong.
Thanks for the [/code]!
The FloorSize is initialized by the unity inspector tab. In my case, 15 on both. Testing with print(sizeX), looks like its working fine
Ah OK. Delzhand must have it, then -- you can access the Vector3 because it's initialized by unity inspector, but you can't access the string[,] because you're trying to reach it before Start() has run and inititialized it.
Always feel free to ask questions here. The unity forums, yeah, tend to be very polar - people asking very low level stuff that's answered by the documentation, and very high level stuff that's not helpful in a broad scope. I enjoy helping in that middle range.
Makehuman is free and I think it can work with Blender/Unity.
Sweet, I'll have to check that out.
I've never really worked on my own project that didn't have client providing some sort of Audio list, and currently my personal budget won't allow me to purchase things. So I was just wondering what you do for sound? (Even temp stuff would work right now for me)
I know you said your personal budget won't let you purchase anything but when I made Penny and Paul's Adventures I used http://www.indiesfx.co.uk/ for the bulk of my sound effects. I think I got the Match-3 pack. For a puzzle game the match 3 pack had a superb collection of sounds and for 40 quid it was an absolute steal.
Also, as a bonus once you buy one of their packs you'll suddenly start hearing their sound effects everywhere.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
Awesome, thanks for the info. I should be able to make purchases shortly, I was just hoping to get some stuff in now (I'm impatient).
But I think my first purchase will be EZGUI (I can't get over how great this is for UI Development, and miss it every day I don't have access to it). Unfortunately, that paired with Sprite Manager 2 (they work together) is about $350.
I'll definitely take a look at this for sure. Thanks.
A friend who does audio for some shows and promotions linked me to these (if anyone else is looking for similar):
http://www.freesfx.co.uk/ (requires credit somewhere for free use) - Also only allows 2 sound downloads every 3 minutes. Time consuming lol.
http://www.soundjay.com/tos.html
Unreal 4! The Blueprint system lets you prototype game logic so damn fast, it's unbelievably cool. This is a prototype what I made in less than a week, starting from almost 0 knowledge, just for practice and figuring out all the systems, game framework, editor tools and so on:
By now it even looks a bit pretty, and has fancy cloth physics. I'm planning to finish that up somewhat (still haven't messed with UI much yet, that'll be a bit of a challenge), package it, and release it for free for other people in the UE community to learn from. Then I'll think about starting a real project
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Feedback:
- The suggestion mechanic is great if someone gets stuck. Doesn't happen too quickly or too slowly.
- Too much screen shake (I don't know if it is just me or not, but screen shake in excess is genuinely unpleasant for me).
- Music and art are top notch. Works perfectly for this game type and is both accessible and well executed.
- FPS was good for small matches, seemed a bit slow for larger ones on Firefox 27.0.1 on an i7, 12 GB RAM with Nvidia 4000 (uses Optimus, but wasn't using main card).
- The "change the entire line" item could use a sparkle effect on all affected blocks for, say, 3 seconds. It took me until the second game until I exactly understood the mechanic.
Really love how this game is coming together.
High score: 22970 on my second game.
Edit: Hope you don't mind me going beyond the purely FPS scope.