Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Zed]

I ran into two problems today:
I can't compile the portrait maker for some reason. This, I have yet to solve.
My JRPG combat demo got stuck when enemies tried to target an already dead dude. This, I solved!

Wolfe is the JRPG spelling for Wolf. Just like fire is Fira, lightning is Thundara, and earthquake is Quaga or something. These are important things to keep in mind while developing a JRPG.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Doge is dog.

 

[Zed]

I need to find a smaller font (while at the same time being thicker, if possible). I'm thinking NES/gameboy-style fonts, perhaps. Anyone got any good ones?

 

[r3jonwah85]

So a new feature has found its way into the game, the grappling hook. Not sure if it make the final cut though since it can easily become too powerful compared to the rest of the equipment, but with some proper balancing I think it will be fine. I really love the sense of freedom and the possibilities for exploring it gives.

The bow has now been improved with a zoomed mode while aiming, makes it look and feel better as well as functioning better, all in my opinion of course. But before it just kind of hanged in front of the player, now it feels more intimate and realistic.
You can now also see that the arrows are possible to pick up after being shot into a wall or other stuff except enemies.
I also show of the grappling hook and use it while climbing/jumping between parts of a lava pit. And as a reminder, this is in no way a final implementation, just a quick and rough test of the concept.



Feedback goes here:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...a-design-discussion-and-feedback.86069/page-5

 

[Zed]

CAN YOU FITE THE WOLFES AND WIN?
http://absum.se/CodexGame/fitefantasie.zip
(any virus warnings are bullshit)

 

[Niektory]

D is winner.

 

[Zed]

trick is to kill alpha wolfe first

oops spoilers

I should add skills.
and add dude portraits.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Starting to set up a 3d scene.

 

[Broseph]

Just uploaded a new alpha build of my RPG Maker game Relas: Chaos of the Realms. It's a JRPG with blobber combat and a similar level of humor and pop culture references to Fallout or Arcanum. Also, better C&C than Wasteland 2.

If that interests you, you can download it here. Feedback goes in this thread.

 

[Zed]

SNESified
and also animated but you can't see that

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

'Turn' here sounds wrong. Replace it with 'türen'.
Also, replace 'get' with 'git' plox.
If you're going JRPG, go full JRPG.

 

[r3jonwah85]

I have done some tinkering lately to improve a lot of stuff, been working on attributes and skills and the effects of those. Since that work is not completely done, I give you a video of some other stuff meanwhile.

In the video you see:
- Improved graphics settings, a lot of Unity games just use the default quality settings but I think it is important to add as much as possible, so I have added most of what Unity offer.
- FOV settings works for those who like to tinker with that, I just think it looks weird
- Just demonstrating the new stuff on the character, if you are close to a wall the weapons/hands will move back a bit to make it more realistic, since I use 2 cameras to avoid clipping you got some scale issues before and the weapons looked tiny since they were actually far through the wall...
- The player can now lean slightly around corners just to peek before entering a room or whatever.
- Like mentioned before you cannot climb while having your hands equipped, to solve that I added holstering/sheathing of weapons.
- Some results of the attributes and skills are shown, in this case reflexes and luck that is used for the calculation of avoiding enemy attacks, this is still being tuned and my stats are maxed out as always, but you can see that you sometimes will evade the enemy attack even if you stand still.
- Now to get some sleep, we fin a cozy little shelter where we can rest our eyes a bit, the problem is that its location is unsafe... There will be 5 different states the sleeping place can have; dangerous, unsafe, uncertain, safe, secure. All have different percentages per hour of you being discovered, so a longer nap at a unsafe or dangerous place will probably end in an encounter with a enemy. A secure place will be just that, so sleep tight in those places.
- You get woken up by a enemy that passed by and made some noise, time to fight for your life.
- Since you were still tired, you take another 1 hour nap, this time nobody finds you. (If it looks edited, that is because it is. Those damn just kept popping up... Need to pick a better place to sleep next time.)
- Some floating platforms that are static, while jumping on stuff like that you can use the shadow as reference on where to land.
- Some new arrows, one for each magical element. All enemies have different resistance/weakness to different elements, this can be used to your advantage if the player knows those weaknesses.
- A little refinement to the aiming, looks a bit better in my opinion.
- Again, pick up arrows that weren't shot at a enemy. Had to fix some bugs with that but now it seems to work dandy.

- And lastly something a bit different, the generation of the dungeon. I have now made it possible to input words (strings) instead of integers which can be way more fun. As you will notice there is not much variation (except the width and length of the floor that is shown) since there is only one tile to draw when the algorithm is taking a random tile, this will of course be changed once the work with adding content begins.




And I would also like to ask the codex of their opinion on something. Perception in the game is supposed to determine is enemies and hidden stuff is nearby and tell the player, but I am not sure which way is the best to go.

1. The first option is system where all hidden objects/enemies get a rating from 1-10 (the same as all skills), if the player perception level is higher or equal to the object/enemy, the player will be prompted everytime, that is 100% discover rate if equal to or above in level..
2. Option number two is to have no ratings, only set a object/enemy to discoverable. Then the player perception skill level determines a chance between 0-100 % chance (0 skillpoints give 0%, 10 points give 100%) to discover this object every time the player is close to the object/enemy. The potential downside to this is that the player can "spam" the skill by going back and forth in a area hoping to discover anythings that might be there. But on the other hand it is more like throwing a dice than the first option.

So what do you say? How does other games do it (both pen and paper games and computer games)?

Feedback goes here: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...a-design-discussion-and-feedback.86069/page-5

 

[eric__s]

I forgot this weekend was the Global Game Jam, working on a boss rush space shooter game with some friends. I've made two songs so far, one of them is pretty good -

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2957395/somalia.mp3

I'll keep working on it tomorrow. The other one is awful. I want to try to get two more songs complete, but it will probably only be one because the contest ends kind of early.

 

[Mastermind]

somalia.mp3

Do the ships fire machetes?

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Try my little mole shooting game: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...unding-mouldywarp-thumping-contraption.88845/ (Windows installer download)

 

[muds_animal_friend]

So finally decided kick off work on my vaporware medieval folklorish RPG. Unfortunately, I possess no skills directly related to game development, but that's what game engines are for and how difficult can this shit be anyway? “Monkey see; monkey do for” the win.


I started with a typical medieval (I'm not sue it's actually medieval iconography) personification of the sun because it appeared an easy subject to learn 3D modelling, e.g.

Tried my hand at modelling, uv unwrapping, normal/texture mapping, armature/shape key animation, and shaders. Stopped at some point during shaders as calculus is a bridge too far for me at the moment.



Screens of the process


Here's what I referencing while my monkey paws fumbled with the mouse:

Getting started in Modeling with Blender
Modeling the Human Head Made Easy (I found these ones clearer but I only found them after I 'finished' the mesh:
Character Head Modeling in Blender: Part 1,
Blender Edge Loops for Head Modeling)
introduction to uv unwrapping 1280x720
Blender Tutorial - Sculpting in Blender Part 1 of 2
Baking normal maps in blender
Noob to Pro Shader writing for Unity 4 – Beginner
Introduction to Surface Shaders in Unity
Cg Programming/Unity
Noobs Guide To Shaders

 

[Kaucukovnik]

Finally some creative use of shaders.
The plan is that the entire game would look like a medieval engraving coming to life? If so, I applaud enormously.

 

[Abelian]

I thought you were going for a 2D look, like illuminated medieval manuscripts, such as this:

 

[muds_animal_friend]

I'm going to use shaders to make the 3D look as 2D as possible. In an ideal world all the art assets would be 2D (like The Banner Saga) but 2D animation is just too labour intensive and 3D also brings a lot more to the table than just animation. I'm planning three distinct graphical styles:

The exploration map entirely in 2D with sprite sheet based animation.
The text adventures in illuminated manuscript style, but with more readable base text, also in 2D.
Other environments, including the combat, in 3D going for a woodcut look with textures/shaders.

Here's a rough ballpark example of world map style on the left and manuscript style on the right from medieval era art:

 

[muds_animal_friend]

Edging a little closer to the woodcut look with shaders below but I've had to move on to animation because attempting to learn modeling, uv unwrapping, normal map baking, texture painting, shaders, rigging, skin weight painting, and animation within two weeks is proving a tall order. Still, the sooner I get it done the sooner I can move onto more interesting 2D work like the world map.



Here's the reference material I've being using:

Modeling The Human Figure Template
Ancient-Pig’s basic deformation [around joints] tutorial
Bending a Tube Using Bone Envelopes, Vertex Groups and Weight Painting
Basics of Character Rigging (short)
Introduction to Character Rigging (long)
Constraining Knee and Elbow Joints (starts about 9:00 mins in)
What Is Normal Range of Motion In a Joint?
Blender Tutorial: Basic Walk Cycle

Decided to try modeling and building a conventional goat-legged demon without using rigify as I need to learn how rigging works on a more atomic level:

 

[Zed]

I assume that's a goat-legged demon moving backwards.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

Moonwalking backwards at that. It doesn't have a heel to make contact with the ground and I'm unsure how hooves work in that context. I had problems with the IKs when pulling the limbs backwards so I ended up animating it in reverse to pinpoint the issues. As it turns out, all the joints should have had slight bends in them at rest position to avoid IK problems.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Not sure if this is going to be anything, I just felt like making something space-ish:

 

[r3jonwah85]

Game thread: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...a-design-discussion-and-feedback.86069/page-5

 

[r3jonwah85]

In order of appearance:
- Picking up some items that will be used later (placeholder graphics in many cases in case you wonder what the white blocks are, the same goes for icons in the inventory)
- New menu/options for opening doors. All doors that are locked by a lock (can also be locked by a trigger/latch, remote trigger or puzzle) can either be opened with the correct key type (iron, bronze, silver and gold keys) or be lockpicked (if the player is skilled enough).
- First door is lockpicked.
- Second door is opened with key.
-We find a water source. Here you can take a sip or use the water for various things. In this case we just fill up a empty bottle, but yiu will also have to rinse/clean eatable plants/vegetables. If you do not clean your vegetables you might catch a disease such as hepatitis (working on diseases at the moment).
- Take note that water sources can be clean sources or contaminated sources. The player does not now if the source is clean or contaminated, so to be sure you must boil the water. The same goes for meat in the game where Trichinella and other stuff might be present. Bur the player will at least know if the meat is rotten.
- Equipping a rock (use your imagination on the visuals).
- Picking up lost of other equipment.
- Throw the rocks, this will be useful for tricking enemies to check out movement/sound and thereby luring them away from their position if the guard something. It is implemented but not working 100% all the time so some more work is needed.
- Equipping a weapon and a shield, picking up arrows and move stuff around in the inventory.
- Equipping torch and light it up to demonstrate a critical function, swapping weapons between hands. This is very important since once you unequip a torch that is burning it will have to be ignited again, now the player can move it to another hand without having the need for igniting it again. Might sound like a minor thing but is crucial for immersion and realism.
- Find a fire source check out the possibilities. You can cook/craft items but also close wounds if you have no bandages to fix them. This will close the wound but also inflict some health on the player.
- Combine some water and salvia just to demonstrate how to make potions, in this case we create a minor healing potion. Recipes use a base ingredient at the top and then one or several other components to make something new. The recipe is sensitive to the order which ingredients is added, this makes it possible to make more complex recipes (and lessen abuse or trial and error, the combinations simply become to hard to find).
- Demonstrate the new way items are consumed, they have to be dragged and dropped at the use "button". This lessens the chance of accidental use of stuff.
- Just random messing around in the inventory.
- Video ends.

And one issue I want some input on, do you think that a failed attempt of crafting something always (or with chance) destroy the ingredients? Or should the ingredients only be consumed/used with a successful attempt? I am leaning on the first one because it seems appropriately punishing, but it might be pain in the ass to implement since not all ingredients should be spoiled, for example containers such as bottles, that means some property has to be added. Might be worth it though...