Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Tavernking]

Every year I play around with retro pixel art game ideas for a day and then give up because nobody buys them.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Holy fuck, this actually works.

View attachment 50622

Naturally you can have several holes affecting a single AABB, overlapping holes, and so on.

View attachment 50623

What am I looking at here?

 

[Twiglard]

Holy fuck, this actually works.

View attachment 50622

Naturally you can have several holes affecting a single AABB, overlapping holes, and so on.

View attachment 50623

What am I looking at here?

Hole objects are visible in light gray and are difficult to spot on the screenshot. Blue boxes are collision AABB's that exist after applying holes to them. Normally a pillar's bounding boxes look like this

(click to enlarge), not having any holes.

On the first image you have a single collision box affecting the pillar's bounding box. On the second image you see three overlapping holes (one wide on the X axis, another wide on the Y axis, one very small (2x2 pixels)). That area where there's a lot of blue lines in a small square is becauses the small 2x2 hole is made in the middle

(the hole is in red) of a small rectangle already resulting from an application of two holes (thus 3 holes in total).

Edit: here's a better example.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Holy fuck, this actually works.

View attachment 50622

Naturally you can have several holes affecting a single AABB, overlapping holes, and so on.

View attachment 50623

What am I looking at here?

Hole objects are visible in light gray and are difficult to spot on the screenshot. Blue boxes are collision AABB's that exist after applying holes to them. Normally a pillar's bounding boxes look like this View attachment 50648 (click to enlarge), not having any holes.

On the first image you have a single collision box affecting the pillar's bounding box. On the second image you see three overlapping holes (one wide on the X axis, another wide on the Y axis, one very small (2x2 pixels)). That area where there's a lot of blue lines in a small square is becauses the small 2x2 hole is made in the middle

(the hole is in red) of a small rectangle already resulting from an application of two holes (thus 3 holes in total).

Oh its for collisions. I thought it was for drawing.

 

[ciox]

Every year I play around with retro pixel art game ideas for a day and then give up because nobody buys them.

I dunno about zoomers but I would buy a 80s "Gollop-like".

 

[beardalaxy]

After a long 9 years of development, I am so happy I can finally share a trailer for my game. We're really in the home stretch! I grinded this out over the course of the last 10 hours because I'm way too excited about it lol.

 

[Justinian]

Every year I play around with retro pixel art game ideas for a day and then give up because nobody buys them.

Boneraiser Minions says otherwise.

 

[GoblinGrotto]

Got some more character customization in. They can now have "hair" (or just weird shit on their heads) and they wear what they have equipped. Also made a bunch of base animation that I can use to draw the art for all the gear. All the gear can have a main and secondary color palette on them as well.

 

[Justinian]

After working 14 hour days all week on my VS clone, I decided to wind down and spend my saturday playing holocure. I feel like I've become this meme:

 

[Ysaye]

Random question - if someone was going to try and make a modern imitation/clone of the Apple Mac version of Might and Magic 1 and 2 (with all the windows and dialogue boxes etc.) which language / tool would be best for that? Would it be:

• Visual Basic;
• Gambas;
• Linux using a GUI library like Qt or Tinkter; or
• Something else?

 

[Hag]

Random question - if someone was going to try and make a modern imitation/clone of the Apple Mac version of Might and Magic 1 and 2 (with all the windows and dialogue boxes etc.) which language / tool would be best for that? Would it be:

• Visual Basic;
• Gambas;
• Linux using a GUI library like Qt or Tinkter; or
• Something else?

For such a simple game with no advanced 3D you can use whatever you're comfortable with. Maybe better use a framework that'll give you easy access to images, sound and input so you can focus on the game. Gambas looks ok.

 

[Zeusington]

Random question - if someone was going to try and make a modern imitation/clone of the Apple Mac version of Might and Magic 1 and 2 (with all the windows and dialogue boxes etc.) which language / tool would be best for that? Would it be:

• Visual Basic;
• Gambas;
• Linux using a GUI library like Qt or Tinkter; or
• Something else?

Literally any language / engine / framework that can do 2D will work. You probably don't even need to limit yourself to that.

 

[Ysaye]

Random question - if someone was going to try and make a modern imitation/clone of the Apple Mac version of Might and Magic 1 and 2 (with all the windows and dialogue boxes etc.) which language / tool would be best for that? Would it be:

• Visual Basic;
• Gambas;
• Linux using a GUI library like Qt or Tinkter; or
• Something else?

Literally any language / engine / framework that can do 2D will work. You probably don't even need to limit yourself to that.

I know that - more concerned with the efficiency of effort and I was just thinking of using something that has the inbuilt windows/apple mac interface feel was inherent in that version of the game - eg. I could create fake windows, window menus, dialogue and drop down boxes etc. in Godot, but I can't imagine it to be anywhere as efficient as something like Visual Basic which has directly comparable objects for each of those things. I haven't used proper VB in almost 20 years and I had heard that it was getting more and more microsoft specific, hence why I was wondering about those other options.

 

[Bad Sector]

I could create fake windows, window menus, dialogue and drop down boxes etc. in Godot, but I can't imagine it to be anywhere as efficient as something like Visual Basic which has directly comparable objects for each of those things.

Judging from screenshots, something like VB (or if you want a free cross-platform alternative with a much more capable language, Lazarus) wouldn't really help much - especially if you wanted to avoid whatever native theme the underlying OS uses and had to make your own themes and controls anyway (and different desktop resolutions and DPI would be a bitch).

And really the "behind the scenes" stuff (e.g. inventory management) would still be something to take into account: do not take only surface-level aspects of a game like how the UI looks. Sure a game might feel "simple" because it is only a bunch of 2D blitted images and a few lists and checkboxes, but the important bit is where these images are coming from, what is in these list boxes (you certainly wouldn't use the listbox itself to hold a character's inventory), etc.

So what to use? Assuming you don't want to make everything from scratch, use whichever language you are comfortable working with that doesn't have too many limits in what data structures you can create with (from a higher level perspective - e.g. some scripting languages strictly speaking have a single data structure but it is a generic one - like a dictionary - that can be made to represent other structures if needed) and has some usable GUI libraries for games (preferably with support for themeing).

 

[d1nolore]

Random question - if someone was going to try and make a modern imitation/clone of the Apple Mac version of Might and Magic 1 and 2 (with all the windows and dialogue boxes etc.) which language / tool would be best for that? Would it be:

• Visual Basic;
• Gambas;
• Linux using a GUI library like Qt or Tinkter; or
• Something else?

Literally any language / engine / framework that can do 2D will work. You probably don't even need to limit yourself to that.

I know that - more concerned with the efficiency of effort and I was just thinking of using something that has the inbuilt windows/apple mac interface feel was inherent in that version of the game - eg. I could create fake windows, window menus, dialogue and drop down boxes etc. in Godot, but I can't imagine it to be anywhere as efficient as something like Visual Basic which has directly comparable objects for each of those things. I haven't used proper VB in almost 20 years and I had heard that it was getting more and more microsoft specific, hence why I was wondering about those other options.

I experimented with this sort of idea a few years ago but for android. The point you will struggle with is when you start to try implementing game type mechanics or features and realise they are not supported or require lengthy work arounds. Where as using a game engine it’s either supported, or not hard to implement.

 

[CryptRat]

We made something for the NES Jam :

It was the first time I had to make the music myself especially.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Every year I play around with retro pixel art game ideas for a day and then give up because nobody buys them.

You learned something, you shipped a game. Good job. If someone buys it that's a bonus. Reframe success and failure, keep going you're doing well. Ultima with guns looks cool.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

After a long 9 years of development, I am so happy I can finally share a trailer for my game. We're really in the home stretch! I grinded this out over the course of the last 10 hours because I'm way too excited about it lol.

Congratulations. Releasing a game is a big deal. Especially after nine years, you must really feel a sense of accomplishment.

Don't let what I'm about to say make you feel bad about all that you've done: I strongly recommend you work on it some more, especially if you want others to play and enjoy it. And you also need to work on the trailer.

The trailer has an easy fix. Don't try to make a cinematic trailer. Slow-burn cinematic trailers work well at the start of a movie where the audience isn't going anywhere. For people watching your trailer on Steam or YouTube, you need to grab their attention and tell them what your game is about immediately. You have about 5 seconds before they stop watching. That 5 seconds needs to grab them and make them want to watch the rest of the trailer. Focus on the gameplay. Don't focus on story or features. Hint at story and features. Cut the trailer to 60 seconds and show only the most exciting stuff with frequent cuts.

As for the game itself, do you want to tell us more about your inspirations? Price point? Themes or feelings you're going to evoke? Which game's fans will your game appeal to?

 

[Zanzoken]

I unexpectedly changed jobs last month so just getting back into dev work. Mostly still screwing around with store-bought assets and trying to get better at fitting them to my character + figuring out a good art direction, since I feel pretty confident that will be the most difficult part of the project from an asset perspective.

Here's another helmet asset and a shoulder harness + pauldron I picked up for a few bucks. These are from two separate packs and are shown with the textures they shipped with.

Spoiler

I think the key to making this work efficiently will be to modify the original meshes as little as possible so I can still use the normal maps, but then make my own color palettes, roughness maps, etc so that the materials look cohesive. For example in the model above, you can probably tell that the helmet and pauldron are using different materials, and I think little inconsistencies like that are what give games "asset flip" vibes and make them feel unpolished and cheap.

I bought a subscription to Substance Painter and luckily it seems pretty easy to get good results without having to do a bunch of stuff freehand.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Just an observation, if you don't need all the newest features of the future versions of substance painter or designer, you can buy a lifetime license at Steam sales for -50%. It will get the latest updates til the end of purchase year.
In cash, that's like half a year's subscription.

 

[Zanzoken]

Interesting, I didn't know that. I think the summer sale will be kicking off soon so I'll be sure to grab a copy of Painter. This will save me a lot of cash in the long run, so thank you for the tip!

 

[Kev Inkline]

No prob! But just a caveat, I think they might not be on every sale, I remember getting my licenses for painter and designer in November 2022 for 125 eur for each, it was like -40% or something.

 

[Bad Sector]

My back was killing me again so i barely did any programming (or really used my computer) in recent weeks. However i finally managed to finish the first iteration of "entity molds" (here "mold" is used like in casting, e.g. "cast in the same mold"). An entity mold is an asset that contains information (currently only elements) for creating ("casting") an entity and entities cast from the same entity mold keep their association with it (actually the mold can change at runtime, causing entities to assume completely different identities, though at that point the whole "casting entities from molds" allegory breaks down :-P).

Entity molds can be created by selecting a bunch of elements in the world editor and having them be stored in an entity mold asset (the editor for the entity mold must be open). The elements can also be edited in an entity mold editor (shown in the left above) but currently there is very little editor functionality (the 3D view is only for previewing, no editing is possible and you really can only edit the properties of elements from the sidebar as well as add or remove elements to the mold). An entity that was cast from a mold can be detached from it, thus becoming editable (entities that are cast from mold cannot be modified - aside from the entities' own properties like position, rotation, etc - because their elements are stored in their mold) and existing mold-less entities can become attached to a mold (any existing elements in the entity will be replaced by those in the mold).

Later i plan on adding more stuff in the molds so that they can be used to define various types of objects (e.g. molds could define weapons including any specs or other shared data for those weapons) but at this point they're basically little more than prefabs that keep track of the prefab they came from (and only work with individual entities - proper prefabs would work with multiple entities).

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Bad Sector is that kind of like an archetype in Unreal parlance?

In Unreal, you have the class actor, and anything that you place in the game world is a child of class actor and you can place an instance of that class using the editor or spawn an instance of that class into the world at runtime. Then using archetypes, you can change the properties of an instance of that class, and then spawn an instance of that class, using the archetype's properties. So let's say you have an enemy class, and the boss and the minions are the same class but with different properties. You can spawn a boss using the boss archetype or a minion using the minion archetype without having to make them different classes.

Edit: does the Codex not do inline code?

 

[Bad Sector]

Nathaniel3W is this a UDK/UE3 thing? I've only used UE4 (and TBH not much) and i don't really remember archetypes, though AFAICT from your description it sounds like the "classes" you make as assets which are basically subclasses of classes you defined either in C++ or via another asset (pretty much always as a blueprint).

In Little Immersive Engine you can only place "entities" in the world and there are no entity subclasses, instead the entities can have "elements" and those elements are what provide the actual functionality: lightsources, static meshes, brushes, sectors, environment areas, etc. These are subclasses of a base "element" class. For example a "TV set" entity could be made up of a mesh element for the TV set itself, a light source element for the screen's glow and a sound emitter element for the audio the TV makes.

In general the world in Little Immersive Engine is made up of "layers" with a root layer right under the world instance itself. The layers can have other sublayers as well as entities and the entities can have elements. Layers and entities are not subclassed whereas elements are. These are all serializable objects whose properties can be edited, usually via a property editing panel (the one under "Properties" in the right sidebar).

An entity mold actually contains element instances (i.e. they are serialized instances of element subclasses), for example the entity mold shown at the left side/window of the image i posted has 10 elements: 9 brush elements (brushes are used for simple geometry ala Quake 1) and one light source element. Since each element is an object instance, their properties can be edited too - in the left side/window in the image the properties of the light source element are edited.

From your description (and assuming my understanding is correct) it'd be possible to do something similar to archetypes by creating a new entity mold asset per "archetype" and specifying different values for the properties for the elements that make up the entity's element.