Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[TheDeveloperDude]

I have changed the buttons for Steel Breeze Empire as well. I have little time for programming because I have to play the game. Now I am over 2100 battles.

 

[SlightlyRadioactive]

I'm looking for artists/animators/musicians for this little amateur 2D action RPG inspired by VtM:B project I and fellow codexer RaggleFraggle have been working on for a few months already. Anyone interested?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

I'm redoing all of my assets to match with the pixel style of the characters. Everything is still a work in progress. I'm trying to decide what to do about the trees. Here I'm experimenting with two different choices for the leaf bunches. At left each leaf bunch is three intersecting planes. At right the leaf bunches are more of a sphere shape. If you look closely at either one you'll see big chunky texels, 16 colors each I think. Do you have a preference for either one? Why?

 

[Mustawd]

I like the one on the left. The one on the right just looks like balls with leaf textures.

 

[JMab]

The one on the left as it looks more like an actual tree.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the guy who made Dark Disciplies 1 & 2 wrote some interesting articles on cRPG design
https://ancient-architects.com/?page_id=35
+ blog posts e.g.,
https://ancient-architects.com/?p=591
https://ancient-architects.com/?p=610

 

[Tavernking]

Still waiting for this masterpiece from the first post on this thread

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

This is the big problem developing a big crpg. I have been testing+playing more than 10 hours and I have not found one relic yet. I have to find 20 relics. I am in the 3rd dungeon. When will I finish this test? After some hundreds hours?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

When will I finish this test? After some hundreds hours?

When you change the drop rate on the relics.

 

[Tavernking]

Playing around with some roguelike sprites, animations, glow effects. This was very therapeutic. The water might look a bit funny, any advice?

 

[Ysaye]

Playing around with some roguelike sprites, animations, glow effects. This was very therapeutic. The water might look a bit funny, any advice?

My immediate thought was maybe add in some white (very light blue) into the water animation sequence? I notice you have white / close to white specks in other things on the land which means visually the eye would expect to see white where the water was. Funnily enough, it draws your eye to where you seem to have a general green plains thing in the background of a water tile.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

View attachment 27089

I'm redoing all of my assets to match with the pixel style of the characters. Everything is still a work in progress. I'm trying to decide what to do about the trees. Here I'm experimenting with two different choices for the leaf bunches. At left each leaf bunch is three intersecting planes. At right the leaf bunches are more of a sphere shape. If you look closely at either one you'll see big chunky texels, 16 colors each I think. Do you have a preference for either one? Why?

Left looks good. Right looks cutesy. I really hate the cutesy look.

 

[infidel]

Playing around with some roguelike sprites, animations, glow effects. This was very therapeutic. The water might look a bit funny, any advice?

I think you need to make the water colors more subdued, they're too vibrant and the water pops out from the other tiles. Plus, you've drawn big waves but made tiny one-pixel or so animations. Either make animations more pronounced or wave patterns smaller, they don't gel together.

This is the big problem developing a big crpg. I have been testing+playing more than 10 hours and I have not found one relic yet. I have to find 20 relics. I am in the 3rd dungeon. When will I finish this test? After some hundreds hours?

IMHO after you get the initial feel, the better way to spend your time would be doing more actual work. You can't do ten-hour testing sessions all that often unless you're in the polishing phase.

 

[MuffinBun]

Playing around with some roguelike sprites, animations, glow effects. This was very therapeutic. The water might look a bit funny, any advice?

Very evocative. I'm looking forward to this.

 

[CanadianCorndog]

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

View attachment 27089

I'm redoing all of my assets to match with the pixel style of the characters. Everything is still a work in progress. I'm trying to decide what to do about the trees. Here I'm experimenting with two different choices for the leaf bunches. At left each leaf bunch is three intersecting planes. At right the leaf bunches are more of a sphere shape. If you look closely at either one you'll see big chunky texels, 16 colors each I think. Do you have a preference for either one? Why?

If you use baked vertex lighting and a gradient tool to bake in a directional gradient (for example, using vertex color master add-on in Blender) you won't get the cross-quads lit unevenly on the left tree.
You can also fudge the vertex normals so the lighting is more even if you don't want to bake vertex lighting.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

current state of Unity: Unity devs cancel an internal project because they were unable to make a game with their own engine
https://forum.unity.com/threads/int...oming-sample-game.1257135/page-2#post-8278305

Gee, I wonder what could be the reason for a product to go so wrong. I mean, it's just a company devoted to a single piece of software, right?
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/unity-layoffs-game-engine

Unity is laying off hundreds of employees​

Unity employed 5,245 people as of December 31, 2021, indicating the company had nearly doubled its workforce since it went public in 2020.

Yeah, no idea why it's such a mismanaged mess
Going to guess at some point they fired the 3 people capable of actually programming to free up more money to hire Shaneeqa the diversity management specialist.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

current state of Unity: Unity devs cancel an internal project because they were unable to make a game with their own engine
https://forum.unity.com/threads/int...oming-sample-game.1257135/page-2#post-8278305

Gee, I wonder what could be the reason for a product to go so wrong. I mean, it's just a company devoted to a single piece of software, right?
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/unity-layoffs-game-engine

Unity is laying off hundreds of employees​

Unity employed 5,245 people as of December 31, 2021, indicating the company had nearly doubled its workforce since it went public in 2020.

Yeah, no idea why it's such a mismanaged mess
Going to guess at some point they fired the 3 people capable of actually programming to free up more money to hire Shaneeqa the diversity management specialist.

I've never trusted Unity. With all this its become a lot more obvious to everyone now how shady they are.
Unity is a prototyping tool. And for that, it is useful. Nothing more.
I've not looked at UE4 for a while (and briefly the recent UE5 demos). Given how unstable their demos were, looks like Unreal is headed the same way as Unity.

 

[The Avatar]

Unity is a prototyping tool. And for that, it is useful. Nothing more.

How so? There have been many games shipped with Unity. Some of them even turned out good.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Unity is a prototyping tool. And for that, it is useful. Nothing more.

How so? There have been many games shipped with Unity. Some of them even turned out good.

And I wonder how many would do so again? That 99% of anything shipped is shovelware speaks volumes about Unity.

I am referring to PC games. This may not apply to Mobile/Web.
Cities Skylines had to have a special Unity version made especially for it.
I would never willingly hand over control of anything I make to a dodgy 3rd party, whom you have to pay royalties.

 

[d1r]

Playing around with some roguelike sprites, animations, glow effects. This was very therapeutic. The water might look a bit funny, any advice?

Looks kinda comfy, tbh. Why not give the water some slight, subtle light-blue lighting. Kinda like the bonfire.

 

[MF]

Unity is fine. You just need to realize it's just an easily portable rendering engine with an OK-ish physics engine that forces you into a pretty elegant GameObject pattern if you don't abuse it and disregard everything else.

You're right that they suck as a company. Their own instruction material tells you to abuse patterns in ways that cripple the engine. Their 'best practices' defy all logic. They have multiple versions of event systems, the latest of which use delegates in ways that make zero sense. I corresponded with one of their senior programmers and I knew more about their built-in pathfinding system than he did. "Just get A* from the asset store" is what he ended up saying. So, they're applying the Bethesda adagium, 'mods will fix it', to an engine. A* is cool though, so it sort of works? Their split into different rendering pipelines separates it into an engine for mobile games and a semi-high end engine that have increasingly little common ground. That's all true. But it's still a neat and powerful engine.

 

[agentorange]

Unity is a prototyping tool. And for that, it is useful. Nothing more.

How so? There have been many games shipped with Unity. Some of them even turned out good.

And I wonder how many would do so again? That 99% of anything shipped is shovelware speaks volumes about Unity.

It doesn't really say anything. If you made another incredibly easy to use engine that was also nearly perfectly engineered without any of the problems of Unity, with an asset store, you would still end up with 99% of games made with it being shovelware simply because of how easy it would be to pump out a low effort game with said engine. It's just a fact of the matter with a system that has a very low bar for entry and low commitment; on one hand you end up with a ton of shovelware, on the other hand it allows some unique, small-scale projects to get made that might not have gotten off the ground if using a harder to learn engine.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Unity is a prototyping tool. And for that, it is useful. Nothing more.

How so? There have been many games shipped with Unity. Some of them even turned out good.

And I wonder how many would do so again? That 99% of anything shipped is shovelware speaks volumes about Unity.

It doesn't really say anything. If you made another incredibly easy to use engine that was also nearly perfectly engineered without any of the problems of Unity, with an asset store, you would still end up with 99% of games made with it being shovelware simply because of how easy it would be to pump out a low effort game with said engine. It's just a fact of the matter with a system that has a very low bar for entry and low commitment; on one hand you end up with a ton of shovelware, on the other hand it allows some unique, small-scale projects to get made that might not have gotten off the ground if using a harder to learn engine.

It says everything about Unity. Easy to get into and release shovelware. Difficult/impossible to work with on larger projects. I always chuckle thinking about Unity Technologies, that their Unity showcases aren't made with Unity. Shysters.

 

[Ninjerk]

Unity is a prototyping tool. And for that, it is useful. Nothing more.

How so? There have been many games shipped with Unity. Some of them even turned out good.

And I wonder how many would do so again? That 99% of anything shipped is shovelware speaks volumes about Unity.

It doesn't really say anything. If you made another incredibly easy to use engine that was also nearly perfectly engineered without any of the problems of Unity, with an asset store, you would still end up with 99% of games made with it being shovelware simply because of how easy it would be to pump out a low effort game with said engine. It's just a fact of the matter with a system that has a very low bar for entry and low commitment; on one hand you end up with a ton of shovelware, on the other hand it allows some unique, small-scale projects to get made that might not have gotten off the ground if using a harder to learn engine.

It says everything about Unity. Easy to get into and release shovelware. Difficult/impossible to work with on larger projects. I always chuckle thinking about Unity Technologies, that their Unity showcases aren't made with Unity. Shysters.

You sound like a jilted lover.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Unity is a prototyping tool. And for that, it is useful. Nothing more.

How so? There have been many games shipped with Unity. Some of them even turned out good.

And I wonder how many would do so again? That 99% of anything shipped is shovelware speaks volumes about Unity.

It doesn't really say anything. If you made another incredibly easy to use engine that was also nearly perfectly engineered without any of the problems of Unity, with an asset store, you would still end up with 99% of games made with it being shovelware simply because of how easy it would be to pump out a low effort game with said engine. It's just a fact of the matter with a system that has a very low bar for entry and low commitment; on one hand you end up with a ton of shovelware, on the other hand it allows some unique, small-scale projects to get made that might not have gotten off the ground if using a harder to learn engine.

It says everything about Unity. Easy to get into and release shovelware. Difficult/impossible to work with on larger projects. I always chuckle thinking about Unity Technologies, that their Unity showcases aren't made with Unity. Shysters.

You sound like a jilted lover.

Unity has the largest fanboy community of any engine. Say a bad word about it and risk the ilk of the fanboy fanatics.