I'm working on a youtube description for a gameplay video showing off a new update. I'd appreciate if anyone has any feedback on things I should change.
I rewrote large parts of it to remove redundant information and make it flow better (that's my intention at least), but I'm too tired to highlight all the changes, hahah (3 AM here)
An all new campaign is now part of Twisty Puzzle Simulator. Explore a flooded castle in 2D or VR, solving your favorite puzzles like never before. A grand total of 150 stars and countless coins await you in this new mode that allows both beginners and experts alike to progress at their own pace. Even if you're playing the game for the first time, you'll finding your footing with ease and work your way towards puzzle mastery.
The campaign is available today as a free update in North and South America, and will be already included in the European version of the game when it releases in the coming weeks.
Yeah 2.8 seems pretty good. I've started using it and may transition from Modo. The new UI seems really straightforward, easy to find and figure out stuff, and not to cluttered, and that's not mentioning all the other cool stuff.
I rewrote large parts of it to remove redundant information and make it flow better (that's my intention at least), but I'm too tired to highlight all the changes, hahah (3 AM here)
An all new campaign is now part of Twisty Puzzle Simulator. Explore a flooded castle in 2D or VR, solving your favorite puzzles like never before. A grand total of 150 stars and countless coins await you in this new mode that allows both beginners and experts alike to progress at their own pace. Even if you're playing the game for the first time, you'll finding your footing with ease and work your way towards puzzle mastery.
The campaign is available today as a free update in North and South America, and will be already included in the European version of the game when it releases in the coming weeks.
Thank you for the rework. I was running out of time and was also up pretty late working on that.
My update is coming out on Tuesday. This is essentially the game's launch since the first time around I had other things in life happening. I think the best thing I could do right now is improve my "bus factor." My personal life has been all over the place the past few months and I haven't been able to work with any sort of consistency even though I'm full time indie.
Thanks a lot guys! It still needs a lot of work, I want to balance some more weighty movement with responsiveness, while making it easy to use....but not too easy lol. It´s going to take a while to balance everything, but this is a promising start!
The biggest issue I see is the lack of shadows on the ground. I'm assuming it would be computationally expensive to make every tuft of grass cast actual shadows, but if the ground is flat, perhaps you can get away with something simpler like pasting a shadow texture under each one?
Bit curious, is there a reason you aren't using vegetation billboards to do the grass instead of modelling each blade of grass on its own? Obviously transparency and performance is an issue with the billboard approach and it doesn't look nearly as good as having each blade of grass have its own mesh + being able to animate them but I can assume it's a bit time-consuming, no? I'd imagine it'd take a while modelling and texturing different variations of foliage although you get better control over LOD creation and better performance in the end (even with the increase in draw calls). If you're using UE4, check out Pivot Painter, it lets you do some really nice things with foliage.
The biggest issue I see is the lack of shadows on the ground. I'm assuming it would be computationally expensive to make every tuft of grass cast actual shadows, but if the ground is flat, perhaps you can get away with something simpler like pasting a shadow texture under each one?
Bit curious, is there a reason you aren't using vegetation billboards to do the grass instead of modelling each blade of grass on its own? Obviously transparency and performance is an issue with the billboard approach and it doesn't look nearly as good as having each blade of grass have its own mesh + being able to animate them but I can assume it's a bit time-consuming, no? I'd imagine it'd take a while modelling and texturing different variations of foliage although you get better control over LOD creation and better performance in the end (even with the increase in draw calls). If you're using UE4, check out Pivot Painter, it lets you do some really nice things with foliage.
The process doesn't actually take much time, just a lot of duplicating, rotating and scaling a couple of planes with enough subdivision for the curve, then i just uv map to different blades in one texture for even more variation, 10 min aprox for each variation. Like i said just researching and trying out some stuff.
EDIT: Added some wind and set the mood a little, next more vegetation I will need a bunch more variation, some trees and bushes for this to look appealing and I want to learn to do some water, without tanking the framerate, working in a laptop really makes you care about your frame budget.
Is it just a single slider that affects all colors? The solution I went with for Twisty Puzzle Simulator was letting players adjust the rgb values for each color individually. That way it works well for colorblind players and doubles as a fun customization option for non colorblind players.
Currently it's just a single slider that cycles through all, but now that I've got the pattern replacement working I'll probably switch it out for a slider or colour picker per colour (6 in my game). Neat thought that it can be used as a player customisation option though - I'd never really considered that! :)
Oh yeah is all very wip, my biggest gripe actually is the clash of colors between the landscape and the grass.
The process doesn't actually take much time, just a lot of duplicating, rotating and scaling a couple of planes with enough subdivision for the curve, then i just uv map to different blades in one texture for even more variation, 10 min aprox for each variation. Like i said just researching and trying out some stuff.
EDIT: Added some wind and set the mood a little, next more vegetation I will need a bunch more variation, some trees and bushes for this to look appealing and I want to learn to do some water, without tanking the framerate, working in a laptop really makes you care about your frame budget.
I actually think the grass and landscape look fantastic in that first shoot. I don't see anything jarring at all. What's more, the side view makes the lack of shadows much less obvious.
The second video is lovely! The mood reminds me of one of my favorite fighting game stages ever, Moonlit Wilderness.
Oh yeah is all very wip, my biggest gripe actually is the clash of colors between the landscape and the grass.
The process doesn't actually take much time, just a lot of duplicating, rotating and scaling a couple of planes with enough subdivision for the curve, then i just uv map to different blades in one texture for even more variation, 10 min aprox for each variation. Like i said just researching and trying out some stuff.
EDIT: Added some wind and set the mood a little, next more vegetation I will need a bunch more variation, some trees and bushes for this to look appealing and I want to learn to do some water, without tanking the framerate, working in a laptop really makes you care about your frame budget.
I actually think the grass and landscape look fantastic in that first shoot. I don't see anything jarring at all. What's more, the side view makes the lack of shadows much less obvious.
The second video is lovely! The mood reminds me of one of my favorite fighting game stages ever, Moonlit Wilderness.
A bit off topic but one of the original mugen creators is making a much better engine in unreal now so folks can release much more custom stuff and release it commercially. It's one helluva engine so far and it's getting close to completion the way they talk about it. Tons of footage of its features too to customize projectiles, story modes, transitions, shaders for color alts, etc etc. Great 2d engine
It's called unreal fighter 2d. Heres the Twitter feed that updates on it. https://mobile.twitter.com/Achilleon_UE4
Soon all those high quality mugen folks can switch over and build fully featured fighters in this and release them commercially. The creator is goin out of his way to make it as stupid easy to use as possible so if ya wanna fighter may as well just start making your art and wait for the release and put em to work day 1.
No problem on the quote notification. I stealth lurk this thread and am happy if that post made it's way here and brought some attention to that project. The creator is a great guy who seems very dedicated to it and I would love to see it take off once it launches.
Finally haha, the Adventure Update for Twisty Puzzle Simulator is now out.
The two major things I focused on with this update were accessibility and perceived value.
1: Accessibility
In retrospect this is pretty obvious, but people who don't solve twisty puzzles did not know which puzzles were easy. Lots of players incorrectly assumed difficulty scaled with piece count and jumped right in to some of the game's hardest puzzles. Initially I was just going to sort all puzzles in the menu and rank by difficulty, but I did not have the processing power to render all puzzles on screen simultaneously.
Eventually this led into the campaign concept you see in the video. Only ~5 puzzles are shown at a time yet the player feels like they are surrounded by puzzles.
The star rankings also came out of trying to make the game less intimidating. Now a player can play for hours before ever having to solve the full versions of puzzles.
2: Perceived value
I was a twisty puzzle designer before I became an indie dev. The majority of the puzzles in the game are ones I designed myself. I viewed that as a big selling point for the game since lots of my puzzles are fairly expensive to buy but most players never made that connection. Instead some players viewed it as lacking content/originality.
I initially pushed back since I really really disliked the idea of dumbing down the experience with minigames or similar, but I eventually found this campaign structure and figured it could solve this problem too. Essentially the game can now stand on its own even if players don't recognize my name or understand how advanced the puzzle simulations are.
Its not out yet though so take that into account. The launch has not yet been announced but it seems like he's pretty far and that it'll be soon. However since asset creation takes so long this isn't actually a bad thing. I'd say get your frames together on as many things together as you can right now so you can hit the engine running when it launches. Get your timing, your look and your hit sparks setup for now. Just make the animations. I know its exciting to get to the part where you hit the button and they do stuff and you tweak the impact, knockback, damage lift etc etc etc of each move, but for now the animating should be enough to focus on.
I've just stumbled upon this OT and I've been working on a game now for a couple months. Managed to finally hit my stride on it recently as it starts to take shape (mainly just a bunch of cubes at the moment). Liking some of the stuff that's been posted it's really different to the kinds of things I think about making, it's interesting to see.
I've been working on a VR game in Unity. If anybody has any tips about the best things to use It'd be good to know before I get too far into it. I've been using the SteamVR plugin and thats been working well for me. I've used VRTK before but I heard they're reworking it and it's a bit out of date.
In the game the player is a supermarket till cashier (UK Style) and you spend the day scanning items from a conveyor and talking to customers at the till. It's inspired by papers please and has a few of the same story telling mechanics. The overarching story takes place during a referendum with the potential to have massive economic consequences (guess my inspiration) and the player's interactions with customers should give ideas about what both sides of the referendum are running on, what kinds of people vote for what etc.
Here's a gif I made screwing around with AI it's pretty early in development.
Also I would recommend to people if you're getting into game dev using something like hackNplan to keep your thoughts in order. Keeps me working faster and its nice to add to a design document if you're not interested in programming.
Did you ever settle on your controls plug-in? I finally have a VR project I'm super excited about and it's pretty crazy how much the plug-in scene has changed. SteamVR 2.2 is completely foreign to the version I played around with previously. VRTK 4.0 doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon (although I've heard there are forks that incorporate some of these new elements? Or at least make it compatible with SteamVR 2.2.) Newton is abandoned. There really doesn't seem to be a clear cut choice here.
Despite the overwhelming nature of SteamVR 2.2, I love that it should seemlessly handle future controllers. I'm not so thrilled that it would be completely incompatible if I ever decided I wanted to try and get it running on Quest (in the future). I guess it wouldn't be the biggest deal, but it's still a mark in VRTK's favor.
Did you ever settle on your controls plug-in? I finally have a VR project I'm super excited about and it's pretty crazy how much the plug-in scene has changed. SteamVR 2.2 is completely foreign to the version I played around with previously. VRTK 4.0 doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon (although I've heard there are forks that incorporate some of these new elements? Or at least make it compatible with SteamVR 2.2.) Newton is abandoned. There really doesn't seem to be a clear cut choice here.
Despite the overwhelming nature of SteamVR 2.2, I love that it should seemlessly handle future controllers. I'm not so thrilled that it would be completely incompatible if I ever decided I wanted to try and get it running on Quest (in the future). I guess it wouldn't be the biggest deal, but it's still a mark in VRTK's favor.
Yeah at the moment there really isn't many options for plug-ins. There's VRTK and then there's SteamVR which as you say compatibility was the issue I had as well before I eventually went with it.
I've used VRTK 3 for a TCG learning project and I'll tell you what I worked with interactableobject and snapdropzones far more than I could ever want to. VRTK 3 was created in a time where the variety of VR input devices hadn't really been displayed and so it has the issue of not being able to handle radically different controllers particularly well which if you're just targetting the main platforms its not a big deal. Another issue I had with it is that they tried to implement every use-case they could for components which made things just a bit bulky which wasn't nice for one of its major positives which was how easily overridable everything was. There was a few other issues as well that ultimately made me not want to use it for my recent project but that doesn't mean it won't be perfect for your project.
Your message prompted me to read up on where VRTK4 was at so I checked their youtube and I would recommend their most recent video in which they talk about VRTK3 problems and the solutions that the VRTK4 dependencies bring. Apparently VRTK4 beta will be at the end of Feb soooo maybe wait. If you don't mind it's a beta it might be worth using over VRTK3 (As they aren't compatible). They've also made progress on their docs.
SteamVR for me was just an intermediary between VRTK 3 and 4 because I couldn't work in VRTK3 anymore and SteamVR had everything I needed if VRTK4 never happened. It felt cleaner than VRTK at the time however overriding isn't really a thing there, they mostly expect you to copy and paste the class over so I wouldn't recommend it really if you need to modify default functionality (It was a pain for me just to disable the grabbing functionality on objects). Most of my game mechanics aren't dependant on events/components from the VR SDK itself so I went with it knowing it wouldn't be too big a problem to switch over if VRTK4 came out which ultimately I would much prefer to use.
So as far as I know those are your options: VRTK3 or SteamVR now or VRTK4 Beta a little later. If you don't mind sharing what's your project idea?
Edit: Looked up the VRTK3 + SteamVR2
#VRTK v4 naturally supports Steam VR 2. There is a community fork of v3.3 with support for Steam VR 2, if you ask in the #VRTK slack channel then someone can get you the link to it http://invite.vrtk.io
More vegetation, between 200-700 tris, still have to make the variations and the trees are going to take more work but I seem to have the workflow figured out.
Also been experimenting with POM, bad news is my landscape material is maxed out, so no more easy painting, but I think it's worth it, you can't really see the artifacting from the gameplay camera and I can also increase the samples but it's a quality/speed balance.
Yeah at the moment there really isn't many options for plug-ins. There's VRTK and then there's SteamVR which as you say compatibility was the issue I had as well before I eventually went with it.
I've used VRTK 3 for a TCG learning project and I'll tell you what I worked with interactableobject and snapdropzones far more than I could ever want to. VRTK 3 was created in a time where the variety of VR input devices hadn't really been displayed and so it has the issue of not being able to handle radically different controllers particularly well which if you're just targetting the main platforms its not a big deal. Another issue I had with it is that they tried to implement every use-case they could for components which made things just a bit bulky which wasn't nice for one of its major positives which was how easily overridable everything was. There was a few other issues as well that ultimately made me not want to use it for my recent project but that doesn't mean it won't be perfect for your project.
Your message prompted me to read up on where VRTK4 was at so I checked their youtube and I would recommend their most recent video in which they talk about VRTK3 problems and the solutions that the VRTK4 dependencies bring. Apparently VRTK4 beta will be at the end of Feb soooo maybe wait. If you don't mind it's a beta it might be worth using over VRTK3 (As they aren't compatible). They've also made progress on their docs.
SteamVR for me was just an intermediary between VRTK 3 and 4 because I couldn't work in VRTK3 anymore and SteamVR had everything I needed if VRTK4 never happened. It felt cleaner than VRTK at the time however overriding isn't really a thing there, they mostly expect you to copy and paste the class over so I wouldn't recommend it really if you need to modify default functionality (It was a pain for me just to disable the grabbing functionality on objects). Most of my game mechanics aren't dependant on events/components from the VR SDK itself so I went with it knowing it wouldn't be too big a problem to switch over if VRTK4 came out which ultimately I would much prefer to use.
So as far as I know those are your options: VRTK3 or SteamVR now or VRTK4 Beta a little later. If you don't mind sharing what's your project idea?
Edit: Looked up the VRTK3 + SteamVR2
#VRTK v4 naturally supports Steam VR 2. There is a community fork of v3.3 with support for Steam VR 2, if you ask in the #VRTK slack channel then someone can get you the link to it http://invite.vrtk.io
Thanks. Guess I'll just muddle my way through and figure out everything I need to do with Steam 2.2.
Part of the reason I bought my Vive and a new video card 2.5 years ago was I thought it would be cool to do something in VR. Unfortunately, most of the stuff I played kind of bored me (even the stuff that was extremely well done) and I rejected all my ideas for similar reasons. But I finally had a stroke of inspiration for a control mechanic and locomotion aides that allow the game to play really fast (at least the mocks up at this point verify it) and have very old-school gameplay concepts. I haven't completely settled on all of the elements I'm going to include, but I'm just so pumped I finally found something that feels good to play and can allow crazy stuff without making me sick (I'm very prone to motion sickness). I just need to finish with the rest of the boring parts so I can really start prototyping some of these concepts I've been building on the last couple weeks.
Sorry if that's a little vague, but I wanna keep things under wraps for a while because I think I've really stuck something with this concept.
Its not out yet though so take that into account. The launch has not yet been announced but it seems like he's pretty far and that it'll be soon. However since asset creation takes so long this isn't actually a bad thing. I'd say get your frames together on as many things together as you can right now so you can hit the engine running when it launches. Get your timing, your look and your hit sparks setup for now. Just make the animations. I know its exciting to get to the part where you hit the button and they do stuff and you tweak the impact, knockback, damage lift etc etc etc of each move, but for now the animating should be enough to focus on.
The prototype I wanna make is a derivative of SoulCalibur, so I plan to use SCVI character creator with bright colors so I can rip a character directly from screenshots/videos. The frame data should be available online.
I ended up using assets from the marketplace for the lower grass and flowers, they just were already optimized and with a little work on LODs and drawing I can have a pretty lush scene. What's everyone stance on that? I mean I use photoscanned materials for most of my 3d modelling, it just makes sense but drag and dropping finished assets? I feel I've seen negavite comments about making games with the unity store or "asset flipping".
Some more pixel art, the helicopter! Since the rotors are supposed to look like a circle regardless of orientation, they look like they're not moving here.
I'm wondering if anyone can help me with something. I've been struggling with texturing for quite a while, for some reason I cant get very far with it, I have a mental block or something. I can follow tutorials and do basic stuff, but I struggle with style, detailing, I don't know, I just struggle with texturing for some reason. Like I'm struggling with the below robot I made. I dont know what style to use firstly, PBR, or Low poly(I'm not sure that would work that well, no normal map)? Should the materials be plastic or metal? I kind of dont want it to be too detailed(I'm not very good at the details) and it probably in game would not be viewed up very close anyway. I'm looking for any advice or approach anyone can give(I can even give the model to someone if they want to have a go at it).
Production of the demo is approaching its final stage. I will not talk about release date, but we really try to ship ASAP.
There will be 2 full levels and 2 epilogues (the one you'll play depending on a certain choice). Full playthrough (finding and reading all documents / checking and solving everything) goes for 1,5 to 2 hours long.
I made a lowpoly version of my character buddy and I learned that importing Blender models into Unity is pretty wonky, then got him to move without sinking or falling through the ground.
I made a lowpoly version of my character buddy and I learned that importing Blender models into Unity is pretty wonky, then got him to move without sinking or falling through the ground.
It used to be a post process, but now it's a render at 640x360 and upscaled nearest neighbour to whatever resolution you're running. Achieves the aesthetics I desire and keeps performance tight - WIN WIN :)
My new Roobot that I outsourced to Thundercloud studio is allllmost complete and ready for integration!
It's been a many months-long journey, but I've learned a ton throughout the process - first time I've really been on hand to see how an entire (pro) character pipeline can work from concept to finished character. The studio was stellar with communication and responding to feedback. If anyone needs 3d assets outsourced, I highly recommend this team: https://thundercloud-studio.com/
From rough concept:
To final concept:
To the character imported into Unreal 4 with a quick test animation idle I made just to make sure everything comes in correctly.
And for comparison, the Roobot I created like 2 years ago :D
Just wanted to comment that armorpaint is finally working for me, before it would fill the viewport with black spots so it was imposible to work with it. Between this and Quixel Mixel being free (for the beta at least) I think there is finally some competition for Substance, the proccess is not nearly as seamless but is really nice to have an alternative.
My new Roobot that I outsourced to Thundercloud studio is allllmost complete and ready for integration!
It's been a many months-long journey, but I've learned a ton throughout the process - first time I've really been on hand to see how an entire (pro) character pipeline can work from concept to finished character. The studio was stellar with communication and responding to feedback. If anyone needs 3d assets outsourced, I highly recommend this team: https://thundercloud-studio.com/
From rough concept:
To final concept:
To the character imported into Unreal 4 with a quick test animation idle I made just to make sure everything comes in correctly.
And for comparison, the Roobot I created like 2 years ago :D
That's really awesome work, the little guy in the belly is super cute and the whole concept is super appealing, it reminds me of something from megaman. Also seeing the old model and you sticking with the concept until now is super inspirational. Keep it up!.
My new Roobot that I outsourced to Thundercloud studio is allllmost complete and ready for integration!
It's been a many months-long journey, but I've learned a ton throughout the process - first time I've really been on hand to see how an entire (pro) character pipeline can work from concept to finished character. The studio was stellar with communication and responding to feedback. If anyone needs 3d assets outsourced, I highly recommend this team: https://thundercloud-studio.com/
From rough concept:
To final concept:
To the character imported into Unreal 4 with a quick test animation idle I made just to make sure everything comes in correctly.
And for comparison, the Roobot I created like 2 years ago :D
This may be the first time I can record from the start at full screen for a few seconds without placeholder items entering view? Either way, enjoy some newly animated background assets:
This may be the first time I can record from the start at full screen for a few seconds without placeholder items entering view? Either way, enjoy some newly animated background assets:
I know! I should offer the option to pet them. BRB, I'll make a few more anims for the main char :-D
(but seriously, when making the flower growing checkpoint anim, I thought I should add a "interact with flowers anim", then an alarm blared somewhere saying "FEATURE CREEP", so I didn't, but... who knows :-D)
I know! I should offer the option to pet them. BRB, I'll make a few more anims for the main char :-D
(but seriously, when making the flower growing checkpoint anim, I thought I should add a "interact with flowers anim", then an alarm blared somewhere saying "FEATURE CREEP", so I didn't, but... who knows :-D)
My new Roobot that I outsourced to Thundercloud studio is allllmost complete and ready for integration!
It's been a many months-long journey, but I've learned a ton throughout the process - first time I've really been on hand to see how an entire (pro) character pipeline can work from concept to finished character. The studio was stellar with communication and responding to feedback. If anyone needs 3d assets outsourced, I highly recommend this team: https://thundercloud-studio.com/
From rough concept:
To final concept:
To the character imported into Unreal 4 with a quick test animation idle I made just to make sure everything comes in correctly.
And for comparison, the Roobot I created like 2 years ago :D
This may be the first time I can record from the start at full screen for a few seconds without placeholder items entering view? Either way, enjoy some newly animated background assets:
This looks awesome, great work! May I suggest adding the foregorund elements to another layer to add to the parallax effect? I also feel like it´s missing another layer in the background as well. Don´t get me wrong, it looks absolutely stunning but I feel like some more parallax would make it amazing-er :D
I am looking for some advice. I have a lot of programming skills, but I don't have any artistic skills.
I have gotten recommendations to use blender.
But I don't really know how to make anything. I am not sure how realistic it would be for me to learn how to make halfway decent models or textures or anything. With that said, I'd like to learn how to make environments and characters, but I don't really know where to start learning.
This looks awesome, great work! May I suggest adding the foregorund elements to another layer to add to the parallax effect? I also feel like it´s missing another layer in the background as well. Don´t get me wrong, it looks absolutely stunning but I feel like some more parallax would make it amazing-er :D
Let me wholeheartedly second this, and let this also serve as a warning about the diminishing returns of gradually showing your game to the same people: the lack of parallax layers is super obvious to me now that you've mentioned it, but I had completely overlooked it because I've been seeing the game since it had placeholder assets. Seeing the game now makes me think "oh, how much better it looks now" (and truly, it looks breathtaking), which takes my attention away from "now that there's proper backgrounds, there should be more parallax layers".
Happens with my game all the time; friends that have seen it since it was little more than a single screen with placeholder sprites ripped from Rampage, barely criticise anything about it anymore, it's all "wow, how far it has come since then". I need to keep showing it to new people that have never seen its earlier incarnations to get new criticism.
