Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[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.

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.

Well this is sort of just semantics, but, my point is that, say if you did make an engine that was as easy to get into as Unity, but one that was also very good for working on larger projects, what would stop people from producing massive amounts of shovelware with that engine? It's like the PS2, it was very to easy to make games for it, and there were plenty of larger scale great games made with it, but also infinite amounts of shovelware. Only way to stop shovelware is to make the bar of entry so high that it's unappealing to try and make a quick buck using it.

 

[Bad Sector]

It's like the PS2, it was very to easy to make games for it, and there were plenty of larger scale great games made with it, but also infinite amounts of shovelware.

Nitpick but PS2 was actually hard to make games for it. The reason it had so many games it was because it was by far the most popular console of its generation so developers had to target it. AFAIK Dreamcast was much easier to program, but not as popular with gamers so it wasn't targeted much.

Though i agree with the rest of your message.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Over 3000 battles. Slowly I am finishing the test process of the 64x32 map. It has been going on for four months so far.

 

[infidel]

Very important thing for any JRPG:

 

[Tavernking]

Very important thing for any JRPG:
View attachment 27998

I bet these are all performed by men.

 

[Zed]

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

Lovely. As for the water, I'd go for something brighter and less royal blue. Light blue, something with more white in it. More akin to Ultima. It may look wrong with a night scene in mind, but it will look better.
Depending on what complexity you'll allow in the style, maybe leave the water pretty much black/blank and focus more on the river outline, whether its sand or rocks. That approach might be more convincing for a night color palette, though it may break the tiling conventions you want to follow.

 

[Zed]

Played around with a sort of fog of war of the exploration/talking to NPC/walking sim phase of my gay little project. I kind of like it, it's pretty blotchy and crude. It's intended to see over walls so you still have an idea of where to explore; the whole effect would only be used in dark cellars and mostly for effect. Though maybe I could work out some way for it to interact with puzzles, ambushing enemies or whatever.



Everything is placeholder and so on, though I did spend more time than I'd like to admit tonight working out the rough walk cycle animation in 9 frames, and I don't want to touch that shit again.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Played around with a sort of fog of war of the exploration/talking to NPC/walking sim phase of my gay little project. I kind of like it, it's pretty blotchy and crude. It's intended to see over walls so you still have an idea of where to explore; the whole effect would only be used in dark cellars and mostly for effect. Though maybe I could work out some way for it to interact with puzzles, ambushing enemies or whatever.



Everything is placeholder and so on, though I did spend more time than I'd like to admit tonight working out the rough walk cycle animation in 9 frames, and I don't want to touch that shit again.

Shouldn't explored regions FOW get cleared?

 

[Zed]

Played around with a sort of fog of war of the exploration/talking to NPC/walking sim phase of my gay little project. I kind of like it, it's pretty blotchy and crude. It's intended to see over walls so you still have an idea of where to explore; the whole effect would only be used in dark cellars and mostly for effect. Though maybe I could work out some way for it to interact with puzzles, ambushing enemies or whatever.



Everything is placeholder and so on, though I did spend more time than I'd like to admit tonight working out the rough walk cycle animation in 9 frames, and I don't want to touch that shit again.

Shouldn't explored regions FOW get cleared?

FOW is the wrong term, I guess. LOS? If you're in a dark place and can only see so far ahead.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Played around with a sort of fog of war of the exploration/talking to NPC/walking sim phase of my gay little project. I kind of like it, it's pretty blotchy and crude. It's intended to see over walls so you still have an idea of where to explore; the whole effect would only be used in dark cellars and mostly for effect. Though maybe I could work out some way for it to interact with puzzles, ambushing enemies or whatever.



Everything is placeholder and so on, though I did spend more time than I'd like to admit tonight working out the rough walk cycle animation in 9 frames, and I don't want to touch that shit again.

Shouldn't explored regions FOW get cleared?

FOW is the wrong term, I guess. LOS? If you're in a dark place and can only see so far ahead.

Like roguelike LOS? If so I think theres some standard algorithms for calculating these LOS.

 

[Zed]

Played around with a sort of fog of war of the exploration/talking to NPC/walking sim phase of my gay little project. I kind of like it, it's pretty blotchy and crude. It's intended to see over walls so you still have an idea of where to explore; the whole effect would only be used in dark cellars and mostly for effect. Though maybe I could work out some way for it to interact with puzzles, ambushing enemies or whatever.



Everything is placeholder and so on, though I did spend more time than I'd like to admit tonight working out the rough walk cycle animation in 9 frames, and I don't want to touch that shit again.

Shouldn't explored regions FOW get cleared?

FOW is the wrong term, I guess. LOS? If you're in a dark place and can only see so far ahead.

Like roguelike LOS? If so I think theres some standard algorithms for calculating these LOS.

Sure, there are standard algorithms for generating mazes, calculating pathfinding and all sorts of things.

 

[infidel]

https://deepnight.itch.io/dungeon-crawler
Neat tech. I wonder how he made the walls feel 3D, just loaded the wall textures in some 3D package and generated low-poly side views from it?

 

[Bad Sector]

Neat tech. I wonder how he made the walls feel 3D, just loaded the wall textures in some 3D package and generated low-poly side views from it?

They have height maps that define how deep each pixel is - you can see it in the curved parts where they have "pixellization". This can be preprocessed (probably what it does since the description mentions that they are generated at startup) or it can be done in realtime akin to parallax mapping (which really is just adding a heightmap to a texture and adjusting the sampling positions based on the view vector).

 

[infidel]

They have height maps that define how deep each pixel is - you can see it in the curved parts where they have "pixellization". This can be preprocessed (probably what it does since the description mentions that they are generated at startup) or it can be done in realtime akin to parallax mapping (which really is just adding a heightmap to a texture and adjusting the sampling positions based on the view vector).

Every time I start it, it shows a progress bar that does something with a png file so probably done on startup. But yeah, hand-made (or brightness-based) heightmaps sound like a reasonable idea to start with.

 

[Bad Sector]

But yeah, hand-made (or brightness-based) heightmaps sound like a reasonable idea to start with.

Brightness-based wouldn't work, those highlight at the edges would go "outwards" if that was the case. It does work a bit with more "chaotic" textures for higher resolutions when used to add a bit of bumpyness, but it wouldn't work for low res pixel art.

However if you notice there are only 3-4 "levels" for the heights, meaning that it should be trivial to draw them by hand by simply following the existing contours in the texture and floodfilling their insides.

 

[Ysaye]

Pretty sure the code that is used for the pre-rendering is this one (though not the lighting - that is something they have obviously been working on):
https://dungeoncrawlers.org/tools/dungeonrenderer/

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Restocking shops idea?
1. at every enter the store (do not have to save the stock of the shops)
2. at every loading the game/city (no save)
3. at every day - save
4. at every week - save
5. other?

I cannot finish the test, after playing 42 hours I have to find 18 relics yet (out of 20).
Masters of the Unknown Worlds gameplay video

 

[Tavernking]

Restocking shops idea?
1. at every enter the store (do not have to save the stock of the shops)
2. at every loading the game/city (no save)
3. at every day - save
4. at every week - save
5. other?

I cannot finish the test, after playing 42 hours I have to find 18 relics yet (out of 20).
Masters of the Unknown Worlds gameplay video

1 is terrible, the player would quickly learn and abuse it. Don't do that.

5. at every level up - would be a very easy way to balance the game if you have level ups. Divinity OS2 did this

 

[Butter]

Doing it at every level-up is another way of saying level scaling. Logically it should be done by the passage of time. If your game doesn't have a time system, it could be based on the player moving an arbitrarily large distance/number of tiles. Movement-based is subtle enough that the player probably wouldn't deduce what's causing it, and so wouldn't try to exploit it.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I've found that the biggest pain is saving every shop's inventory.

If you want to be really simulationist, you restock the stores' inventories when a trader/caravan/shipment arrives. Check out how Mount & Blade's economy works. There are probably a bunch space-trader games that work the same way too.

 

[Modron]

Whatever you do, don't do it the Underail way of shops refreshing based on time spent playing the game.

 

[Tavernking]

Just spent the weekend porting my game from Godot 3.4 to the Godot 4 Beta. Everything works as intended, now is a great time to get into Godot if you can. In a few years lots of gamedev teams will be asking themselves why they're using Unity when Godot is free and is just as good.

If you're trying to learn Godot and want to refer to the documentation, keep in mind that the you want to change the 'stable' in https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/index.html url to 'latest'. Otherwise you'll get the 3.5 documentation instead of Godot 4 Beta.

 

[The Avatar]

In a few years lots of gamedev teams will be asking themselves why they're using Unity when Godot is free and is just as good.

Did C# support make it into Godot 4? My problem with GDScript is that it is incredibly slow.

 

[Tavernking]

In a few years lots of gamedev teams will be asking themselves why they're using Unity when Godot is free and is just as good.

Did C# support make it into Godot 4? My problem with GDScript is that it is incredibly slow.

Yep C# support has improved and GDScript is faster now (it's now properly called GDScript 2.0).

There's a section in this article about how C# support has improved.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Restocking shops idea?
1. at every enter the store (do not have to save the stock of the shops)
2. at every loading the game/city (no save)
3. at every day - save
4. at every week - save
5. other?

I cannot finish the test, after playing 42 hours I have to find 18 relics yet (out of 20).
Masters of the Unknown Worlds gameplay video

6. when the store receives its supplies from its supplier

this doesn't imply simulationist and could equally be part of a completely linear game