Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Infinitron]

Should we post various development updates in this thread or should we make our own thread?

Yes, make a thread.

Do you plan to add a new trailer to the game's Steam page?

 

[AllvisSTHLM]

Should we post various development updates in this thread or should we make our own thread?

Yes, make a thread.

Do you plan to add a new trailer to the game's Steam page?

Right, thanks!
Yes we are working on adding more content to the steam page, more images and trailers!

 

[Habichtswalder]

Hi again!
We now have a steam page for our RPG - "The Royal Office of Magick Affairs"
Steam Page << Whislist here it will help us!

Here is another, pretty rough gameplay trailer:


The Royal Office of Magick Affairs is planned for Early Access in 2025

A dark, tactical RPG, set in a Victorian London filled with arcane mysteries to solve, artefacts to recover and beasts to defeat.
Guide your team of exorcists and inventors through the darkest corners of Victorian London and try not to lose your mind!

• Recruit agents and learn their traumas and strengths
• Take on tasks to earn political favour
• Manage and expand your home base
• Keep magic and technology apart or risk disaster

Control an organization, tasked with investigating and combating supernatural events.
The Royal Office of Magick Affairs features a unique and branching story where the obvious path might not always be the best one.

• Stay hidden in shadows but pay for it in stress
• Use action points to navigate tense turn-based combat
• Advance any character along any skill tree
• Master Victorian weapons and magical artefacts

As a government representative you should try to solve conflict without the use of excessive force. Find other ways of obtaining your objective through diplomacy, authority and subterfuge.

Should we post various development updates in this thread or should we make our own thread?

/Harald JOAT @ AllvisSTHLM

Are we going to see memorable real world buildings and landmarks? I think that is the of charm of real world locations.

Game looks solid, good work.

 

[AllvisSTHLM]

Thank you!

At this stage we only have back alleys, slums and docks - there is also a part of the game where maps are generated, similar to what they do in XCOM2 type games and these maps use these same area/biome/assets.
We do plan on including more prominent landmarks (you control a government agency, after all) on the non-generated parts of the London map.

 

[what am i doing]

Started transferring drafted default cultures (they're currently basically just a colour, a category identifier string, and anywhere from a vague to a specific idea in my head of who they are and what they're about - actually naming them some day is going to be a massive workload in itself) into the game. Pretty much immediately I found my existing implementation of the editor very clunky to work with. I switched from assigning specific channels to just selecting an arbitrary number of cultures and a "prevalence strength" of 0 to 100, and then having the editor normalize them and come up with a "best fit" from percentages to channels. I also added a deque of 20 recently used cultures to make it a bit easier to work with. And I ditched the assimilation setting for now - not sure how it'll be implemented eventually but for the time being I'm skipping it.

This solution isn't perfect, but it's a lot easier to use than the previous implementation I had.
Edit 2: filled in the rest of the cultures and now beginning to soften the borders between them:

Eventually the softened borders will be altered further - once I have a better idea which states will exist, these will somewhat distort the borders of different populations' presence depending on who held which territory and for how long, rather than broad gradients. But I want a general idea of culture placement first; plus, states aren't implemented and won't be for some time.

Similar hues indicate that they're part of the same ethnolinguistic group (in the identifier code, that's the number; the first capital letter is their race, and the second, lower case letter is their nation, or spoken language). Eventually cultures within a nation can be differentiated, but would be mostly for flavour or aligning a given sub-portion of a nation with a particular profession or set of professions - to use a real-life example, Volga Germans would be a culture belonging to the German nation, but with their alignment specialized towards urban professions such as Craftsmen when being generated to reflect their general societal niche within Russia, historically. For now I'm just using the auto-generated default culture for each nation, which shares its name and colour.

Edit: I also added a bit of power-saving mode mainly so that my poor Thinkpad P51 isn't killing itself trying to render everything when I'm sitting tabbed out (despite the massive amount of optimization I've done, the scene simply contains too much geometry even with aggressive culling for a Quadro M1200 to handle easily); when out of focus, rendering is skipped, and the main thread is throttled to 100ms/frame. When I eventually get around to adding configurable settings, this'll be toggleable behaviour.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Are there any rules for "easy on eye" colors? I am using random colors in my games, and I always get the critics for the "hard on eyes" colors.

 

[Odoryuk]

Are there any rules for "easy on eye" colors? I am using random colors in my games, and I always get the critics for the "hard on eyes" colors.

 

[beardalaxy]

Hey guys, been a bit! I've been doing a lot of work with some testers who were already involved with the project behind the scenes. For the most part, the bugs have been pretty minimal and the main thing I've had to do some reworking with is the combat, which has been a little hard for me to balance. I'm sure there is a way to go on that front, and I'm sure there are more bugs within quests that people just haven't been able to test or take the exact path to have bugs crop up. It's more or less an open world game, so it can be hard to nail down that stuff with such a limited testing group. I wanted to make sure it was at least somewhat solid before pushing it out to even more people though, since I know first impressions still matter even though it's a beta!

Speaking of which, the beta is actually fully complete now! If any of you are interested, more details will be in the dedicated thread I'll be posting soon but feel free to send me a message in the meantime if you'd like to participate

I also took the criticisms of my first trailer being too long in stride and made a shorter, 1 minute version. There are no text overlays and I try to just let the game speak for itself. I think I'll have to make another trailer that shows off the world and the quests a bit more since that's a huge part of the game and I don't think it is adequately shown in this trailer, but I do think it is at least better than the last one I made in terms of being quick and showing potential players what they're in for!

 

[Tavernking]

I wanted to share the new water shader since it got so much advice here a few weeks ago

Are there any rules for "easy on eye" colors? I am using random colors in my games, and I always get the critics for the "hard on eyes" colors.

You could try to find a palette you like from this website and restrict yourself to it: https://lospec.com/palette-list
I also like this tool for finding visually distinct colors https://mokole.com/palette.html

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I wanted to share the new water shader

> wants to share the shader
> doesn't share it

 

[shihonage]

So... how terrible would it be if a 2D isometric game renders internally at 1600x900 and then scales the end image to your screen resolution? It would allow me fine control over presentation and UI. But... there would be blur.

I guess I better do it the way Underrail did it... 100-300% zoom in 25% increments, but keep UI of consistent scale...

 

[RobotSquirrel]

But... there would be blur.

Not if you turn your filtering off. Its only blurry if you use a form of texture filtering/anti-aliasing , the downside to this method though is that you'll be reducing/merging pixels which will make sprites look deformed. On the art end if you were to make the pixels much higher resolution than the output then when they're scaled down they'll look really good. Scaling up is usually when things go bad (or rather it used to before AI upscaling became a thing).

I guess I better do it the way Underrail did it... 100-300% zoom in 25% increments, but keep UI of consistent scale...

Probably a good idea.

 

[beardalaxy]

So... how terrible would it be if a 2D isometric game renders internally at 1600x900 and then scales the end image to your screen resolution? It would allow me fine control over presentation and UI. But... there would be blur.

I guess I better do it the way Underrail did it... 100-300% zoom in 25% increments, but keep UI of consistent scale...

Choosing a resolution for your pixel art game is actually way harder than anyone originally anticipates due to scaling. It really depends on the type of game you're going for and such, but the theoretical best option would be one that will scale with a clean integer to both 1080p and 2160p since those are going to be your two most common resolutions. 1080p itself will scale to 2160p just fine.
If you do what I did and make your game 720p, you're in for a rough time because you'll actually end up skipping 1080p and going to 1440p. However, 2160p is also a scaled integer of 720p so that'll still work.
If it's not a scaled integer, then you will either get really oddly sized pixels with nearest neighbor scaling or a little bit of blur with something like bilinear. However, the higher the base resolution is, the less pronounced that blur will be. It's why I ultimately decided to stick to that instead of nearest neighbor, because nearest neighbor just looked strange in some scenarios... characters would have one eye bigger than the other and such. Bilinear upscaling looks a lot cleaner in this scenario.

You can also always give your players the option to play the game at the correct scale. You can render the game at 900p and then add some borders around it. If the player is running on a 4K monitor, just scale it up by 2x. Lots of games that have collections of retro titles will do things like this, since a lot of those older games used some really strange resolutions. Emulators too... a lot of them have options for integer scaling to make sure you're getting a clean image.

I think there is a resolution that scales to 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p but it's pretty low and probably only useful for smaller, simpler games.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Are there any rules for "easy on eye" colors? I am using random colors in my games, and I always get the critics for the "hard on eyes" colors.

You could pick a premade palette. https://lospec.com/palette-list/tag/rpg

But its total nonsense that colours too bright or dull on the edge of the triangle ought not to be used.

Building a palette takes some time and discernment. To begin with start out with less colours, not more colours.
Pick your primary colours, and then 2 or 3 more related to those colours. In total just have say 6 to 16 to begin with and see what you can do with that.

A lot depends on what look you are going for. Try to think of it this way, primary or direct lights, secondary lights, form of structure and surface materials.

So if you world is stone, with a snowy ambience setting you want to design your material which has a behaviour of how it reflects light. Stone can be pretty smooth so that means shiny spots, less bouncing of light, intense primary lights on hard edges. Then the ambience of the environment shines secondary weaker low lights which would be whiteish, greyish in a snow environment (and of course time of day, is it cloudy, colour of sky etc). The more intense light you would probably choose a more intense colour, (though not necessarily). Secondary light you may choose less intense colours.

Mud or wood behaves differently. Less intense light reflection more absorption and scatter.

In practice its not just about picking the colours but about texturing the colour, i.e. how you paint the colour, what kind of brush you use.

 

[ds]

If it's not a scaled integer, then you will either get really oddly sized pixels with nearest neighbor scaling or a little bit of blur with something like bilinear.

Those two filters are not the only options though. In particular a sharp bilinear filter will be less blurry but still produce evenly sized pixels - conceptually you first scale to a higher resolution using integer scaling then scale back down to the target resolution. I still prefer integer scaling with black borders for games that were designed for LCD pixels but it's infinitely better than normal bilinear scaling or nearest neighbor with non-integer scaling factors if you must avoid black borders.

And for retro games with a scaling factor ≥ 3, CRT emulation or something that approximates it is a good option.

I think there is a resolution that scales to 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p but it's pretty low and probably only useful for smaller, simpler games.

Greatest common denominator of 720 and 1080 is 360 pixels tall.

 

[Justinian]

Missed the press deadline for my game demo, I really wanted to publish at least a basic version before the next fest press preview starts, but I got put on some meds and felt shit all week. Not really happy about that but what can you do. Hopefully I can catch up this weekend, I'd really like to get some people playing it before Next Fest actually starts.

Anyone else got a Next Fest demo coming up?

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Do you use checksum for your save files?
In Dark Heart of Uukrul I wanted to modify the quantity of food in the save game file. It turned out it has a checksum. Why is it needed?

 

[Hag]

Do you use checksum for your save files?
In Dark Heart of Uukrul I wanted to modify the quantity of food in the save game file. It turned out it has a checksum. Why is it needed?

Maybe to check whether it has been tampered with, to prevent cheating by save modification.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Do you use checksum for your save files?
In Dark Heart of Uukrul I wanted to modify the quantity of food in the save game file. It turned out it has a checksum. Why is it needed?

Maybe to check whether it has been tampered with, to prevent cheating by save modification.

But why on earth the developer cares about what the player is doing with his game? This is very stupid. Usually the good developers are leaving the cheat codes in their games. I remember playing Civilization on the hardest difficulties with infinite gold cheat. That was great fun.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Do you use checksum for your save files?
In Dark Heart of Uukrul I wanted to modify the quantity of food in the save game file. It turned out it has a checksum. Why is it needed?

Maybe to check whether it has been tampered with, to prevent cheating by save modification.

But why on earth the developer cares about what the player is doing with his game? This is very stupid. Usually the good developers are leaving the cheat codes in their games. I remember playing Civilization on the hardest difficulties with infinite gold cheat. That was great fun.

Maybe something to do with cracking, or preventing mods. I never understood why either, and its a bit of an asshole move.

 

[ds]

I can see adding a checksum after getting tired of players reporting save issues caused by disk/memory corruption. But going that far just to prevent cheating is lame.

I don't think it's that uncommon though. Arx Fatalis even goes as far as adding "encryption" on top of an uncommon compression format.

 

[shihonage]

Save files should be editable without repercussions. And if you're making an MMO, don't trust the client, and when you do trust, verify.

 

[Hag]

But why on earth the developer cares about what the player is doing with his game? This is very stupid. Usually the good developers are leaving the cheat codes in their games. I remember playing Civilization on the hardest difficulties with infinite gold cheat. That was great fun.

Some old games had a scoring system and asked players to send their scores to the developers to have some kind of pre-internet competition. In this case an anti-tempering system would make sense.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Do you use checksum for your save files?
In Dark Heart of Uukrul I wanted to modify the quantity of food in the save game file. It turned out it has a checksum. Why is it needed?

Maybe to check whether it has been tampered with, to prevent cheating by save modification.

But why on earth the developer cares about what the player is doing with his game? This is very stupid. Usually the good developers are leaving the cheat codes in their games. I remember playing Civilization on the hardest difficulties with infinite gold cheat. That was great fun.

Now that I remember. Some of the football "soccer" sims would lock the datafiles due to fear of losing out on expansion packs and so on. Also they never had the rights to players names or teams name so maybe that was another concern.

https://www.newstargames.com/servlet/Content/en/text/releases/Releases

 

[Hobknobling]

One additional reason I can think of, albeit very much a corner case, is a game demo or shareware version that is actually just a gated version of a full game. Tampering with the save file could theoretically allow you to escape the demo zone depending on the implementation of the gating without actually cracking the game.