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[Game Dev] I don't have a publisher. What I do have are a very particular set of skills.
Delzhand
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Previous thread at http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/185346/game-dev-unreal-4-13-out-now/p1
It's probably time for a new and updated OP.
The hot news this week is that you can get GameMaker Pro for like $15 bucks for the next 11 days: https://www.humblebundle.com/gamemaker-bundle
It's probably time for a new and updated OP.
The hot news this week is that you can get GameMaker Pro for like $15 bucks for the next 11 days: https://www.humblebundle.com/gamemaker-bundle
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Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
For 2D gaming, gamemaker is user friendly and welcoming to anyone coming from other software and a lot of skills and technique translate to it. Asset organization and management has so far been as easy as uploading pictures to facebook. However, do not expect to design the entire game in their software as their sprite design tool falls short of gimp and paint.net. Error reporting could be a lot more informative and I have no fuxking clue how to use the debug tool. I've no experience with sound yet.
Still, it's help system is diverse and it's community active, so there's going to be a solution or near solution to your problem, somewhere online. There are a lot of tutorials on YouTube and yoyo games recently hired one of their bigger teachers, Shaun Spaulding, as their community lead. He actually responded to my comment on his melee combat videos.
So, in the end, like cooking, the only real limits are your abilities and your ingredients, not these tools.
Seriously, though. Be prepared to watch a lot of YouTube on 1.5 speed.
Edit: you can make everything in your game using gamemakers drag-and-drop system
Anything you can make with the drag and drop system you can mange by using their simple code editor
Everything you can write in code can be saved as scripts and timelines and inserted into code
There's also a yuge marketplace letting you buy things for you game like menus, and dialog setups.
5 gemstones for $2.99
10 gemstones for $4.99
15 gemstones for $15.99 (BEST DEAL!)
OP Expansion Gacha: 5 gemstones
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I started with Game Maker something like 10 years ago, I didn't know how to code so I used the drag and drop system and made some neat little games for my friends and I. Then I learned GML(Game Maker's scripting language) and did some more complex things, released a few small games to the internet, got some downloads, it was a really cool experience. It's a really great tool to get started in game dev, and you definitely can make and sell games with it so it's decently powerful, but if you know how to program then it's probably not worth it to use GM over something like Unity or Unreal.
... I don't get it.
I'm "kupiyupaekio" on Discord.
Rooms cannot really use timelines
make sure you remember that timelines should be written as timlinename not timelinename()
invisible control objects spawning and dying make for an interesting level
focusing on the code and movement, rather than the art is much more cathartic
high school calculus as a movement pattern makes you giggle. I'm sure my high school and college teachers are giggling as I try to manipulate the wavelength and amplitude of these dudes
Edit: I have come to the conclusIon that a master timeline spawning everything would work best for a shmump level set in space or very high in the sky, whereas one set on the ground requires scenery and specific set pieces floating into view.
Or I could clamp it's movement values to a specific range from the control object by setting that in the middle...still the view....
Edit: It works, kind of. I can't really film it as it only makes sense to my eyes and I haven't drawn good backgrounds yet.
For anyone who wants to make a shmup in gamemaker.
Sorry for the lingo but Shaun Spaulding's tutorials would be a great resource to learn all this.
I need the player to move along the room (level) and be limited to the range of the screen.
So I turned on views and had one track the invisible control object which I moved to the center of the room (might need to change the grid snapping for this)
Then I set a step even for the control object x += movespeed; I set movespeed to 1, just for a test (for pacing and other larger levels, this might need to change)
That set the view and the moving control, so then I went to my player movement scripts and changed it from to This moves the player along the room and limits them to the view. Actually........hold on......... That limits it to the view port, so it mostly works. Everything is still a little offset, but that's just some tweaking here and there. I should honestly spawn the control object with instance_create((view_wview[0]/2), (view_hview[0]/2), obj_playercontrol); But I'm not sure if I can set a view to follow an object that ......well......
room creation code:
instance_create(50,50, obj_player); instance_create((view_wview[0]/2), (view_hview[0]/2), obj_playercontrol); if instance_exists(obj_playercontrol) { view_object[0] = obj_playercontrol; }Okay, it works, however, it is tracking the control object as it reaches the edge of the view, which drags the player halfway across the screen, so that requires...a border of half the view....she disappears of the left side ]x = clamp(x, (obj_playercontrol.x + 50 - (view_wview[0]/2)), (obj_playercontrol.x + (view_wview[0]/2)));
I don't do a lot of public speaking and I've basically been a mole man for the last 4 months when I developed my game. So let's assume I survive the first step of emerging from my hole into a sunlight world, does anyone here who has played around with ECS (or have a passing interest in it) have any specific things they would like answered / covered?
Also anyone here ever do a talk like this? Any tips for keeping it entertaining / informative?
I have my game, which is about 20k LOC and honestly got a bit sloppy towards the end because I wanted to get it done. I also have a ECS sample project up at https://github.com/JamesMcMahon/entitas-2d-roguelike. Unfortunately it was one of the first things I wrote in ECS so I've being going through the process of cleaning it up.
I'm hoping to get some good concrete examples going of how ECS can make a codebase a lot more manageable.
My big take away is the Wow has 5 million lines of code. Just staggering to think about. I believe they are using a ECS architecture.
I'm honestly curious how they came to some of these totals. I feel like a few are far more accurate than others, or they include library use as "own-code" in some places and not others.
...It means videos, obviously.
WIP of our new title screen :-)
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Reminds me of the design work for retro parody site Everything Is Terrible.
doo doo doo
weeeeee weweeee weweeee
Switch: nin.codes/roldford
Does anyone have any experience and care to share?
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
somebody bound UE4 to Python. YES, YES, THIS IS WHAT I WANT
Haha Lugg all this time I had no idea you were even on Penny Arcade forums.
Q: are you guys planning to make those clouds dynamic?
Paul, is that you?
A: Somewhat. For our October trade show demo probably not, but I am planning to go a bit crazy with the tech art in this project once we finally have some time without having to worry about the next deadline.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
So I really focus on KISS.
However, to me, this also means the whole thing could quickly be duplicated by anyone putting in less effort and using off the shelf assets. I don't want my game to drown among a dozen knockoffs à là 'The Asylum'.
This fixation means I'm not very keen on pushing screenshots out there, giving access to builds, etc.
How founded is that paranoia? How damaging would a knockoff be?
I don't plan to push my way up past more experienced (and perhaps deserving) developers on gamedev fora, but I target a specific hobbyist demographic and now would be the time to start posting on those fora... Can I stop worrying and learn to love the reveal?
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Also I can't splurge on PC hardware like you guys
I guess you're right, but I think to really be at ease I need to grok what separates the good games from the chaff. Google Play is a nightmare of knockoffs. edit: clarification: I'm not accepting that people will simply flock to the better game. There should be a less haphazard process than that. Reviews?
re: Floppy. "go a bit crazy with the tech art" that sounds crazy hardcore. Looking forward to that. But much concur: for a demo you need game play. The times when people used to get knocked over by graphics are past.
BTW: If you have an android phone I can hit you up with a build.
Realistically anything a single person builds in less then 2 years is going to be easy to clone by a larger team that is just copying your design. Your advantages are going to be, you actually give a shit and understand your design and execute on the finer details, you are going to be first to market and if you marketing is good enough to be get you noticed by clone developers then you should have s decent number of users.
Also the big thing about mobile games is that making a good fun game is often antithetical to making money in the mobile space. It's sad but true. So unless you get incredibly lucky and go viral or have an established connection to the circle of game reviews (think Super Hexagon) be prepared to put things in your game that will drive actual "gamers" away. Things like microtransactions and timers.
I don't have a lot of experience, so I am not speaking from a position of authority. But before I did my mobile game I did work on the outskirts of mobile gaming and got exposed to the surprisingly large world of large well resourced companies trying to make it big in the mobile space and largely failing.
It's no surprise people try kick starters.
I'm not far from saying 'screw the conventional logic, I'm just going to charge 3$ up front and see where it gets me.' It's supposedly suicide, but then this is an initial game I can almost write off for experience.
From March to early August, so about 5 months. Not just dev work in there, I worked with a contractor for the art, did my own marketing, did a lot of learning while doing, and there was also time in there that I was super burnt out and didn't get much done vs weeks of being hyper productive.
Here is a really good talk on it if anyone is interested, http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023533/Polishing-the-Boots-Designing-Downwell.
You know...
Just your average Thursday.
Now, granted, it's not a very high-concept game. You fly a seaplane to pick up packets, drop them of for credits, spend the credits to upgrade your plane. No insane new hook. My modelling is all I've got going for me.
For meshes all I have to do is save into the Unity project folder from Blender and drag 'n drop materials on them. The engine below took me about 4 hours. I'll need 12 more engines, and more fuselages, floats, and islands though not all at the same detail level I hope (5000 faces for the engine is really overkill, on my phone I don't even see the wiring).
However adding assets is pretty much the bulk of the to do list. There's some minor things that need to be added which only need a few more nights. Early next week the coding should be done.
I also don't stop much to polish; if code works I copy paste the hell out of it. One of my scripts is up to 1000 lines, and I'm sure a coder could cut into that a lot- but I'm not a coder and I don't have the time.
If that were to cut into my framerates I'd have stopped to fix it- but it doesn't really. If I ever get solid revenue I'll probably pay a guy to look at it.