Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[rusty_shackleford]

Product is popular, product is profitable, but it doesn't have many new things to give, so it starts making filler trash. Same thing for GDC talks as for books, games, TV shows, etc.

There's definitely a tendency to have indies give talks now. If you see someone who made a literally-who game giving a talk, almost guaranteed they're a friend of someone organizing the event.
Far less technical talks now, which were the interesting ones for me. Used to get a lot of more obscure programmers giving talks on very specific subjects that were fun to watch. Not so much anymore.

 

[Kev Inkline]

After the huge success of Steel Breeze Empire and Masters of the Unknown Worlds I have decided to make a Football Manager clone game.
Here is a pre-gameplay video.

Here's an idea: make it so that the players are 6 year olds, and you are a Dad managing and coaching the team. Then you don't have fix the bad AI, and the bad AI contributes to the charm. It also gives you a unique selling point, so you're not like all the other football manager clones.

This rings true. The real managing part of the game would then be managing the players' parents expectations.

The game then enters into the storymode between games: "Why aren't our little Messi playing in the first team?!! Waaagh!"

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

When one can have too much of a good thing?
I wanted to make a bigger map, but this is more than enough.

 

[Bad Sector]

I extracted the engine from Post Apocalyptic Petra into its own thing:

http://runtimeterror.com/tech/petra/

There is a new DOS game jam for the entire August so i might try to use it for that, assuming i have the time and energy (day job eats most of it, which is also why i barely work on any of my own projects :-/).

 

[thesecret1]

When one can have too much of a good thing?
I wanted to make a bigger map, but this is more than enough.

Nobody's going to play your game while it looks like broghtly colored vomit, and has shit UI. Why don't the buttons have a hovered state, for example? Why don't they give visual and audio feedback when clicked? Why aren't they consistent in height and especially width? Why is there no real feedback to anything the user does, for that matter? Why are selected things not highlighted, etc.? This is all shit you could fix in a couple afternoons that would improve the appeal of your game many times over.

 

[Bad Sector]

Nobody's going to play your game while it looks like broghtly colored vomit, and has shit UI.

*cough*

Spoiler

on one hand, you are not wrong in general, on the other hand that game had $1m in sales in just two months :-P

 

[thesecret1]

Nobody's going to play your game while it looks like broghtly colored vomit, and has shit UI.

*cough*

Spoiler

on one hand, you are not wrong in general, on the other hand that game had $1m in sales in just two months :-P

I played Cruelty Squad, and its UI was fine – it reacted to user input, wasn't misaligned, always made clear what it relates to, etc. As for the color palette, note that it isn't flat, eye-stabbing colors everywhere, but that everything is textured, and that the textures themselves are usually non-trivial. The game is ugly on purpose, and uniform in style – it's not ugly because untextured placeholders rear their heads at your at every corner. While making a game ugly on purpose is questionable, it clearly works as a sort of style, and is miles away from these prototype-tier graphics.

 

[Bad Sector]

I played Cruelty Squad, and its UI was fine – it reacted to user input, wasn't misaligned, always made clear what it relates to, etc. As for the color palette, note that it isn't flat, eye-stabbing colors everywhere, but that everything is textured, and that the textures themselves are usually non-trivial. The game is ugly on purpose, and uniform in style – it's not ugly because untextured placeholders rear their heads at your at every corner. While making a game ugly on purpose is questionable, it clearly works as a sort of style, and is miles away from these prototype-tier graphics.

I was clearly joking for the "broghtly colored vomit, and has shit UI" part. Regardless of the reasons of why it looks as it does, the first thing that came to my mind with "colored vomit" was that game - it even has a throbbing vomit splotch as a health indicator :-P.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

oh man I can't wait to read some articles about video game development
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/op-ed-roe-v-wade-reversal-hurts-game-developers

 

[Bad Sector]

Game Developer / Gamasutra has been little more than a blog site with a game development flair for a very long time, it has been more than a couple decades where you'd consistently find good articles on making games. I think finding that surprising nowadays is finding surprising that Yahoo isn't widely used to search the web anymore. It does sometimes have an interesting article or two, but so does Kotaku.

Sadly unlike Yahoo, there haven't been many alternatives. The closest i know is Jendrik Illner's Graphics Programming Weekly newsletter, though that is obviously focused on graphics programming (and not necessarily about game graphics, though most are) - and they are really links to other places. However it is the closest to what i know of based on old gamasutra based on how interesting i found the articles.

There used to be AltDevBlog/AltDevBlogADay which was basically kinda Gamasutra of the old, maintained/edited by Mike Acton (he even got John Carmack to write a couple of articles there) but for some reason that died 7-8 years ago.

It seems being lucky on Twitter (and following the right people) is the way to find interesting stuff nowadays but obviously that lacks any way of keeping everything together.

 

[Bad Sector]

Quick test for animated entities in the Petra Engine. In Post Apocalyptic Petra there was only one animated entity (the player character) so animation support was put directly on that, but now i added a new entity class that can use and play animated models.

EDIT: also...



...added palette-based tinting for the world and per-grid tint overrides with smooth transitions.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I'm working on my next game. Following the Spiderweb Software school of game development, I'm reusing lots of assets from my previous game to speed development of my next game. But I think that my next game may benefit from a more unified style, with pixellated Minecraft-like surfaces on the 3D meshes. I think this would make my game look more HD-2D, like Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, and the Dragon Quest III remake. In a quick test, I downscaled some textures in Photoshop and loaded them back into my game. At left is the result of the downscaling. At right is the original.

If I had any kind of budget, I would make all new assets from scratch. But I don't have a budget and I don't want to spend the next year creating custom 2D and 3D assets for a game that in all likelihood isn't going to make lots of money. So I'm wondering if the downscaling looks good enough. Should I stick with that approach? I can see some problems with it. The inconsistent texel density on the meshes becomes a lot more obvious when pixelated. And the downscaling needs some manual intervention to avoid artifacts like that red square at the bottom of the door. Maybe if the downscaling doesn't look good, I should just stick with the original textures.

 

[Ysaye]

I'm working on my next game. Following the Spiderweb Software school of game development, I'm reusing lots of assets from my previous game to speed development of my next game. But I think that my next game may benefit from a more unified style, with pixellated Minecraft-like surfaces on the 3D meshes. I think this would make my game look more HD-2D, like Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, and the Dragon Quest III remake. In a quick test, I downscaled some textures in Photoshop and loaded them back into my game. At left is the result of the downscaling. At right is the original.

View attachment 26650


If I had any kind of budget, I would make all new assets from scratch. But I don't have a budget and I don't want to spend the next year creating custom 2D and 3D assets for a game that in all likelihood isn't going to make lots of money. So I'm wondering if the downscaling looks good enough. Should I stick with that approach? I can see some problems with it. The inconsistent texel density on the meshes becomes a lot more obvious when pixelated. And the downscaling needs some manual intervention to avoid artifacts like that red square at the bottom of the door. Maybe if the downscaling doesn't look good, I should just stick with the original textures.

Just my opinion, but I like the downscaling look on the left.

 

[Bad Sector]

Personally i like the bilinear filtered polys/textures on the right however i think the pixelart character looks better with the more pixellated art at the left side. If the characters were a bit higher res it might be better (see e.g. Chantelise as an example of that).

Btw i noticed that you also did lower the color count on the left side but there are some weird pixeled colors - you may get a better result while still giving the impression of a limited palette (without actually having one) by using GIMP's (or some other similar tool) conversion to indexed mode with "generate optimum palette" with a limited number of colors (16, 20, 32, etc - the number really depends on how much "noise" you want). Also regular/positioned dithering can often look better for textures than error diffusion which makes things a bit too noisy. ImageMagick also has some very extensive options for that (and more dithering algorithms) but you'd most likely want to make some quick tool as a front end to use that in an optimal way :-P.

 

[Zed]

I'm working on my next game. Following the Spiderweb Software school of game development, I'm reusing lots of assets from my previous game to speed development of my next game. But I think that my next game may benefit from a more unified style, with pixellated Minecraft-like surfaces on the 3D meshes. I think this would make my game look more HD-2D, like Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, and the Dragon Quest III remake. In a quick test, I downscaled some textures in Photoshop and loaded them back into my game. At left is the result of the downscaling. At right is the original.

View attachment 26650


If I had any kind of budget, I would make all new assets from scratch. But I don't have a budget and I don't want to spend the next year creating custom 2D and 3D assets for a game that in all likelihood isn't going to make lots of money. So I'm wondering if the downscaling looks good enough. Should I stick with that approach? I can see some problems with it. The inconsistent texel density on the meshes becomes a lot more obvious when pixelated. And the downscaling needs some manual intervention to avoid artifacts like that red square at the bottom of the door. Maybe if the downscaling doesn't look good, I should just stick with the original textures.

looks good. just want to add that you *could* add mouths to the sprites -- not saying you should but the faces have enough pixel-room for it for sure. it could add a little more character/expression to the characters, at least if you intend to do close-ups of them

(ok right may not look as good, it was a quick edit :D)

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Zed thanks for the suggestion. I actually do have mouths on my zombie sprites and teeth on the skeleton sprites. I might be able to add mouths to the humans, but on the right, that looks a little too much like a furry's nose. I'll play around with it and see what I can do.

 

[Mustawd]

but on the right, that looks a little too much like a furry's nose.

Think that’s supposed to be a mouth.

 

[Bad Sector]

looks a little too much like a furry's nose

Until the moment i read those words i was only able to see a mouth. Now i can't unsee the snout and nose :-P.

 

[Ninjerk]

Well, every good sutori needs a neko-chan.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

but on the right, that looks a little too much like a furry's nose

I can't unsee it now, he turned your character into a furry with a handful of pixels

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

When one can have too much of a good thing?
I wanted to make a bigger map, but this is more than enough.

Nobody's going to play your game while it looks like broghtly colored vomit, and has shit UI. Why don't the buttons have a hovered state, for example? Why don't they give visual and audio feedback when clicked? Why aren't they consistent in height and especially width? Why is there no real feedback to anything the user does, for that matter? Why are selected things not highlighted, etc.? This is all shit you could fix in a couple afternoons that would improve the appeal of your game many times over.

I tried to improve the UI. Hovered state, click sounds.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I made some kitbash assets with pixellated textures and indexed color palettes that hopefully will match my pixel characters better. These are some of the buildings I've made so far with a few digital Lego blocks. I can quickly swap out the walls with wood or stone to make some new variations, and I can move around the windows--including the dormer windows--and chimneys to make more variations. I think these are enough variations to populate some towns and villages. I might need to work on the lightmaps for a few of the meshes. After that I'll make some crates, barrels, walls, fences, stairs, and bridges using the same textures.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Why don't the buttons ... Why aren't they consistent in height and especially width?

Do all buttons have to be the same height and width? Or only in the same menu, etc?

 

[thesecret1]

Why don't the buttons ... Why aren't they consistent in height and especially width?

Do all buttons have to be the same height and width? Or only in the same menu, etc?

Only in the same menu, naturally.

 

[MuffinBun]

Why don't the buttons ... Why aren't they consistent in height and especially width?

Do all buttons have to be the same height and width? Or only in the same menu, etc?

you should make a template for menu generation. Set width and height for the button, set a starting position, and then place them using a loop. Each run of that loop adds the width/height of a single button to the starting placement position + a small gap, for between the buttons. You can run it horizontally or vertically, in accordance with your needs. You can have different templates.