Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Mr. Pink hey, this you by any chance? https://store.steampowered.com/developer/MrPink

If so, then I'm super impressed by your work on Golden Light. Totally out-prospered Prosper. And what kind of deal did you get from Epic for making your game free for a week?

IIRC I asked him about it a while back and he said he had nothing to do with this game.

 

[what am i doing]

Adjusted some of the mode selector buttons and happy with their appearances so far.
Regarding adjacency, some further benchmarking indicates the coarse quad check was largely redundant with the bounding box check and not checking quads added a one- or two-second speedup at best and did not add time at worst (although assessing whether each tile is in a left or right edge quad is still necessary, because those have to be checked with a world width offset for wrapping adjacency).
Uncovered a bug in the tile selection function which would cause tiles right at the edge of the world to not be selected if the user's camera was on the wrong side of the edge; corrected.

Ran into an odd Vulkan validation error asserting that I'm asking for more memory than is available on the heap it's requested on. I say this is odd because:
(A) the amount of memory being requested didn't change and I've never gotten this happening before, and
(B) it only happens on some requests - and not the largest ones. But, this is happening with the same VMA usage settings and flags.

I might have to start subdividing each cartographic layer somewhat into more but smaller batches (and this might be better for certain performance elements, especially areas where some map geometry changes but we don't want to rebuild the entire layer) but it is somewhat annoying (will require revisiting and thinking about code I haven't touched in quite a while), and also the above characteristics make me suspicious that it's not just a matter of trying to allocate buffers that are too large.

You only need to do that once per map, right?

Yes. Only on initial SVG import, or if tiles are modified. Basically it's done in the campaign editing process and then retained.

 

[what am i doing]

Working on city integration. Separate render handle for tiles for the tile itself vs the city. Tested rendering different city icons depending on what type it is. Added support for turning them on or off depending on whether the tile should have a city, and for forcing them on with a minimal icon so that city placement can be set in the editor (adding city placement to the editor is next up...).

The Vulkan validation error was solved by getting rid of the temporary LOD indices system which wasn't in use. I'm not sure why exactly it happened - suspect too many uploads in close proximity - but since I'm currently not using any LOD generation or switch-over to LOD (simply disabling unnecessary borders such as individual zone and tile borders when the user zooms out to certain thresholds already gains substantial frames per second, and looks better visually) it's just left out. I do still want to do the batch subdivision thing at some point because map geometry changes currently inflict a hefty delay.

 

[beardalaxy]

Just posted an update to the itch.io page about the progress I've made this year as well as what I expect the progress to be like next year, in case anyone is interested! It's a bit of a long read and it contains mostly stuff I've already talked about here. Long story short, I've rekindled my motivation to work on the game tenfold and have been beating my goals, and I expect to keep that rolling enough to the point where I can get the game into a beta state by the end of 2024 and have a final release in 2025.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Released a small DLC for Demon Lord Reincarnation.



I'm embracing that CEO mindset everyone's talking about.

 

[Tweed]

Wallpaper! Wowee-zowee!

 

[Eisen]

I'm not sure if this thread is only about RPGs, but here is my shooter in progress

 

[Tweed]

I'm not sure if this thread is only about RPGs, but here is my shooter in progress

Kill Pill 2000.

They pushed one too many pills and now he's out for REVENGE.

 

[Tavernking]

I'm not sure if this thread is only about RPGs, but here is my shooter in progress

Nice to see some Godot in here

 

[A-Minish]

Hello. I have been more and more bored with playing cRPGs after 15 years. I have only been a dungeon master(WFRP2) for a few times and got the taste of the freedom of it. I am still play 2 or 3 cRPGs on the side but it not same anymore since this TTRPG experience.

I do not know a single coding language, I only heard about engines and dev tools like Unity, Gamebryo, Unreal, the different version RPGmakers, Godot, etc. So outside of this I am complete néophyte. I am doing some research but I am a very much lost, not knowing where to start.

To give you an idea : I would use flat 2D tokens(token tools are plenty and minecraft level of texture not so hard to make), having an overworld map like the first Fallouts/Vagrus or like BG2, many texted-based events, grid combats.

May be it is not the good place to ask and I am sure other sites can give plenty of answer but what tools and languages would you codexers recommand me to create a cRPGs ?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

A-Minish Normally I would have recommended Unity. Personally I don't use Unity. And their recent shenanigans with the royalties makes me want to tell everyone to never trust Unity again. But Unity is very beginner-friendly and the Unity Asset Store is much, much better than the Unreal Marketplace.

The most important thing though is that you should just pick a direction and start running. Pick an engine, and start with the most basic tutorials: how to download, how to use the editor, how to create a test level, how to load different game templates. Do at least a dozen tutorials before you even consider starting your own game.

 

[Hobknobling]

Hello. I have been more and more bored with playing cRPGs after 15 years. I have only been a dungeon master(WFRP2) for a few times and got the taste of the freedom of it. I am still play 2 or 3 cRPGs on the side but it not same anymore since this TTRPG experience.

I do not know a single coding language, I only heard about engines and dev tools like Unity, Gamebryo, Unreal, the different version RPGmakers, Godot, etc. So outside of this I am complete néophyte. I am doing some research but I am a very much lost, not knowing where to start.

To give you an idea : I would use flat 2D tokens(token tools are plenty and minecraft level of texture not so hard to make), having an overworld map like the first Fallouts/Vagrus or like BG2, many texted-based events, grid combats.

May be it is not the good place to ask and I am sure other sites can give plenty of answer but what tools and languages would you codexers recommand me to create a cRPGs ?

Just start messing around in Godot and see where that goes.

 

[Butter]

Godot is more beginner-friendly than Unity.

 

[Zanzoken]

Hello. I have been more and more bored with playing cRPGs after 15 years. I have only been a dungeon master(WFRP2) for a few times and got the taste of the freedom of it. I am still play 2 or 3 cRPGs on the side but it not same anymore since this TTRPG experience.

I do not know a single coding language, I only heard about engines and dev tools like Unity, Gamebryo, Unreal, the different version RPGmakers, Godot, etc. So outside of this I am complete néophyte. I am doing some research but I am a very much lost, not knowing where to start.

To give you an idea : I would use flat 2D tokens(token tools are plenty and minecraft level of texture not so hard to make), having an overworld map like the first Fallouts/Vagrus or like BG2, many texted-based events, grid combats.

May be it is not the good place to ask and I am sure other sites can give plenty of answer but what tools and languages would you codexers recommand me to create a cRPGs ?

You'll get a wide variety of responses on this, and you should read them all. Personally I have been trying to learn for a few years now, making progress at a very slow pace in what little free time I have. And after a lot of confusion and failed attempts, here is what allowed it to finally start to make sense.

1) Before you can start making games, you need to have some fundamentals of programming and computer science. If you don't, start with CS50X from Harvard. It's a free offering that allows you to follow along with CS50, Harvard's Intro to Computer Science course. Don't bother with the certificate and all that, just watch the lectures on Youtube and work through the problem sets if you have the time and inclination. Completing the whole course is not mandatory, but you should at least finish up through the Python lecture.

2) Now that you have some programming basics, you can move on to CS50G, which is Harvard's Intro to Game Development course. The course starts by making simple games in Love2D, a framework that uses Lua as its scripting language, then eventually switches over to create a few small 3D games in Unity.

The above represents around 25 to 30 hours of content that is targeted at absolute beginners, and the best part is it's absolutely free. So you can get started with zero investment and see if this is something that you enjoy. And if you want to keep going, it should allow you to have scratched the surface enough to figure out what's next.

Lastly, the important thing to know going in is that making a cRPG is an effort that's measured in the thousands of hours / years of your life, especially if you are working by yourself. The good news is, with all the tools and assets and stuff that are out there nowadays, gamedev is more accessible than it ever has been. Good luck!

 

[A-Minish]

Thank you very much for the answers folks. I installed Godot and will start fooling around it. I am definitely going to follow your advices to follow tutorials though. If Godot does not work for me i will try something else, so on and so forth. Thank you again, this already clear the field of possibilities for me.

Lastly, the important thing to know going in is that making a cRPG is an effort that's measured in the thousands of hours / years of your life, especially if you are working by yourself. The good news is, with all the tools and assets and stuff that are out there nowadays, gamedev is more accessible than it ever has been. Good luck!

First, thanks for the sources.

Second. Yap I am expecting it to be years in the making. I have been slowly creating my own fantasy setting for 2 years now and I dont think I will completly finish it before many years. Computer work combined with lore/ruleset creation will make it even longer. But I have to try.

Thanks again

 

[what am i doing]

Fixed a small bug in the renderer related to mesh usage counting. Hadn't shown up until a specific circumstance. Cleaned up more UI code. Brushing and clicking is now handled in a better manner: mouse motion over the same tile won't trigger an edit repeatedly, but a deliberate click on the same tile will.
Fixed a synchronization error between render passes (some passes used the previous passes' render images as samplers but had no explicit barrier). Hadn't caused visible issues on my development laptop, but when I ran the game on my main PC (which has more robust hardware and runs it at around 730 FPS vs the laptop's 70) there was an odd flickering bug with Dear ImGui. Fixing the synchronization error fixed the flickering issue. There are still some write-after-write complaints from the synchronization validation layer when importing tiles, related to copyBuffer, but it doesn't seem to have an actual impact and while I will clean it up "some day" for now I'm leaving that be.

I also sorted out static linking for basically everything except vulkan-1.dll. Vulkan I've left dynamic because any computer with a modern GPU driver will have it installed, but a lot of other stuff would need bundled dlls, and I'm not a fan of that.

 

[Egosphere]

I'm not sure if this thread is only about RPGs, but here is my shooter in progress

Can't see the vid unfortunately

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I'm not sure if this thread is only about RPGs, but here is my shooter in progress

Can't see the vid unfortunately

Must be a stealth game

 

[Tavernking]

The reason so many RPGs have bad block paragraphs of terrible overly descriptive writing is because the writer they hired is totally ignorant of the the flow and feeling of the game. Good writing takes into account the music and how the game 'feels' when you begin that conversation. What I'm learning is that you can't write an entire game's story/dialogue before you make the rest of the game. They need to be done simultaneously and meticulously self-criticized. If people consider my future games to have great writing then this is why!

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Tavernking nearly every writer has heard the advice that they need to kill their darlings. And they're still not doing it. They need to produce 6000 words of dialog, they're on a schedule, and they don't want to lose the progress they've made. Games like Stardew Valley worked because there was one person iterating over and over and over until he got it right. Just like we iterate with code, we need to iterate with story and dialog.

 

[what am i doing]

Fixed the other sync errors (mesh condense function had no barriers at all when copying the staging buffers to the vertex/index buffers). Starting to get the hang of both interpreting sync error messages and how barriers actually work, though hopefully that's the last of them for now.

Somehow this also fixed the framerate drops when doing geometry-altering operations such as modifying borders, at least when last I tested.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

The reason so many RPGs have bad block paragraphs of terrible overly descriptive writing is because the writer they hired is totally ignorant of the the flow and feeling of the game. Good writing takes into account the music and how the game 'feels' when you begin that conversation. What I'm learning is that you can't write an entire game's story/dialogue before you make the rest of the game. They need to be done simultaneously and meticulously self-criticized. If people consider my future games to have great writing then this is why!

Tavernking nearly every writer has heard the advice that they need to kill their darlings. And they're still not doing it. They need to produce 6000 words of dialog, they're on a schedule, and they don't want to lose the progress they've made. Games like Stardew Valley worked because there was one person iterating over and over and over until he got it right. Just like we iterate with code, we need to iterate with story and dialog.

Oh totally. I’m lucky that I figured that out even before any of the actual quest writing started. Unfortunately, it also puts a bottleneck on the writing because you have to wait until the programming side can support it and make sure your writing fits what is feasible to program.

Speaking of, I’m looking for a new programmer.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Speaking of, I’m looking for a new programmer.

What do you offer?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Speaking of, I’m looking for a new programmer.

What do you offer?

What’s your going rate?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Speaking of, I’m looking for a new programmer.

What do you offer?

What’s your going rate?

Ah, I thought you were looking for a partner, and I wanted to know what would you be offering in terms of skills.

I don't freelance.