Yes, you should feel bad. How dare you use tutorials for their intended purpose?
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Yes, you should feel bad. How dare you use tutorials for their intended purpose?
Thinking of making a smaller game, how this look for a test of style
Wow, this looks seriously amazing; I'm so envious of people that can casually pull off stuff like this! That said, a sprite of that size is a huge amount of work to animate, so you may want to factor that in; that doesn't exactly scream "smaller game" to me.
I think that, as long as you're actually understanding and interiorizing what the tutorial does (as opposed to just following the steps and copying the code without understanding it), following tutorials may be less fun than implementing your own solutions, but is overall much more efficient in terms of learning and improving on a specific topic.
Implementing things on your own can build your general confidence as a developer, and develops a different set of skills for solving problems that are too specific to have a tutorialized solution, but you're going to face these "unique" problems sooner or later anyway, so you might as well follow tutorials for those that you can.
I err on the "do things myself" side too much because I find doing that far more fun than following tutorials, and I often lack the discipline to do the latter. This often bites me in the ass due to reinventing an inferior wheel; e.g. I regret going with my own, adhoc, simple AI solution rather than using a proper, modular AI system.
I wasn't really getting at that. Mostly the idea of: "Did you know how to do it or did the person who made the tutorial?"
Yeah this was more of what I was getting at. Thanks for the input.
Currently taking a mini-break from my now released (Wii U & Android) game to finally begin work on a new Tower Defense game I've been wanting to make. I originally made one for the Wii U back mid 2014 (crazy it's been 6 years) called ZaciSa's Last Stand (changed the name to sillier ZaciSa: Defense of the Crayon Dimenison! for the EU release a year later). Currently cleaning up that initial code to make it ready. Don't even have to worry about music & graphics this time, as the guy who I teamed up with for my puzzle game is helping me here too. I just need to worry about the code. Currently going the 20,000+ lines of code and clean it up as well as remove the "TV Screen" rendering. This might take a little bit. lol
If they one thing i love doing is animation and it not as big as it look that was 2X pixels
Still got the inbetween's to do so smooth it out more
If they one thing i love doing is animation and it not as big as it look that was 2X pixels
Still got the inbetween's to do so smooth it out more
Again, this looks fantastic! If you believe you can keep up this quality for the whole game, go for it!
That's a shame. :( Feel free to share any details so that we may learn from the experience and know what to expect.
a) gorgeousThinking of making a smaller game, how this look for a test of style
b) smaller compared to what?!?!?!?!?
man it might be time to get back in on this lol. at least my breaks between working on game is smaller... maybe i've forgotten less stuff this time around
god if i could just solve the fucking slopes problem when using tilesets as blockers that would help so much
god if i could just solve the fucking slopes problem when using tilesets as blockers that would help so much
That was my plan to give some insight but I am still waiting for more sales data.
My main help would be BUILD WISHLIST. Everything else is comes after.
What an amazing find, thanks for sharing! It looks specially great in the idle animations or for "flowing" animations like the sea waves or the hair of the girl. However I would be careful in using this for quick actions like attacks and such, as smoothing those can make them lose all their punch. Look at the ghost screaming, the flow at the beginning is just mesmerizing, however the scream itself is much better in the original, the smoothed version has no strength at all. If it was an action game and the player had to dodge that it would be very difficult to determine the exact moment when the attack becomes active. Using it for the recovery frames of the attack or even some of the preparation ones could work though. This can save a lot of work and make the result look awesome. Thanks again!
Looking nice. Is your text rendered out in Blender as well or can it be changed for translations?
OP
OP
Wow, that's incredibly impressive. I wonder what sort of work went into building something like that.
I know some people find lower frame rate animations charming so this isn't for them, but it looks like a cool tool for everyone else.
Thanks! It is currently baked into the texture. I'm going to leave it that way unless somebody wants to pay me to work on this full time :D
My wife wrote the letters. I am going to create a proper font set though with the new letters.
"Honey, will you write 'A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog house' for me please?"
My artist recently finished the last piece of artwork for my game's playable characters. I was aiming for a healthy mix of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, since I am thoroughly bored of the traditional cast structure of RPGs. Here are all of my babies:
My artist recently finished the last piece of artwork for my game's playable characters. I was aiming for a healthy mix of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, since I am thoroughly bored of the traditional cast structure of RPGs. Here are all of my babies:
They all look great, congrats! I especially love the last girl's design, seems like such a fun character. Getting heavy Fire Emblem vibes from that dude on the left too haha. I also think it's great that you made the characters with diversity in mind, it's something that I've been thinking about recently and have been applying to my turn-based RPG cast as well.
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They all look nice! Is that (a boy?) Bernadette right there though? :DMy artist recently finished the last piece of artwork for my game's playable characters. I was aiming for a healthy mix of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, since I am thoroughly bored of the traditional cast structure of RPGs. Here are all of my babies:
Lately I've noticed that a lot of dark skinned anime characters ten to have white hair. I'm doing it too because the contrast looks nice.
Took the new Frame design from the other day and wanted to show off a 360 view of it. Can't wait to get it moving.
I made my first playable build for Cosmopolis Inc. It's just a prototype so don't expect anything special or complex yet but at the moment you can build some stuff and have a small working economy by extracting, manufacturing and exporting resources (as long as your mines and factories have workers). There's some instructions about how to play in the main menu but if you have played a game like Tropico then you should get the general idea.
Also your colony willl be visited regularly by cargo and passenger ships so your population should increase slowly but if you want to test the limits of the build I added the option to spawn extra citizens by pressing F1.
Also your colony willl be visited regularly by cargo and passenger ships so your population should increase slowly but if you want to test the limits of the build I added the option to spawn extra citizens by pressing F1.
Thanks for the kind words, guys!
As a member of the RPGMaker community, I have come to be really disappointed by the lack of people of color and queer characters in a lot of projects. Their being that isn't at all a focus in my game, but is acknowledged where it makes sense. The Fire Emblem-esque guy, Marlon, for example, is openly gay and goes on the game's quest to save his named boyfriend, Keegan. I named his class the 'Hero', which typically is reserved for main characters. As for the black man, Forest, his class is the 'Leader', a name I chose to portray competence and importance within the group. Then there is the non-binary Faeris, who is perfectly comfortable being just who they are.
There is more queer characters as well, including the woman I currently use as my display picture, but you get the idea. It's been a great decision to be more inclusive, and I've really come to love these characters.
I think it looks nice as well, but also regret not having a black character with natural hair in retrospect. That's something I would like to do better in the next project if it comes to pass. And that 'boy Bernadette' is kind of similar to her, huh. I guess purple hair is a natural fit for the 'adorably sad' trope!
From the game's itch.io page:
As a member of the RPGMaker community, I have come to be really disappointed by the lack of people of color and queer characters in a lot of projects. Their being that isn't at all a focus in my game, but is acknowledged where it makes sense. The Fire Emblem-esque guy, Marlon, for example, is openly gay and goes on the game's quest to save his named boyfriend, Keegan. I named his class the 'Hero', which typically is reserved for main characters. As for the black man, Forest, his class is the 'Leader', a name I chose to portray competence and importance within the group. Then there is the non-binary Faeris, who is perfectly comfortable being just who they are.
There is more queer characters as well, including the woman I currently use as my display picture, but you get the idea. It's been a great decision to be more inclusive, and I've really come to love these characters.
I think it looks nice as well, but also regret not having a black character with natural hair in retrospect. That's something I would like to do better in the next project if it comes to pass. And that 'boy Bernadette' is kind of similar to her, huh. I guess purple hair is a natural fit for the 'adorably sad' trope!
From the game's itch.io page:
My artist recently finished the last piece of artwork for my game's playable characters. I was aiming for a healthy mix of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, since I am thoroughly bored of the traditional cast structure of RPGs. Here are all of my babies:
Didn't comment before and now I feel bad lol.
I love the designs. Is there a story synopsis? :D
I have a somewhat general question about costs/time for some backgrounds on a personal project I'm working on if any pixel artists/programmers have a minute to let me pick their brain. I can always take it to reddit or something if this isn't the place, but since we have an indie dev thread right here I thought I'd try.
Thanks, Hanuli! For the project, it's super basic. Just a concept test, really, but I'll need pixel art and some basic programming done, so I'm trying to set the budget.
It's a simple, 2-D pixel, point and click game with only 3 'rooms' that are just one area (a library).
1 - [left side of library, with a door]
2 - [center of library with a fireplace bookended by two leather chairs]
3 - [right side of library with a near-duplicate door of the one on the left side]
This look:
In something like this style:
To start, I'm just looking to commission the backgrounds (3 screens) so that I have a visual for the design doc and can potentially use it for the game itself. Eventually it would be nice to have the fireplace animated as well as some minor objects, but that'll be at a later date.
What do you think this kind of work would entail? Time-wise, cost-wise, etc. Any thoughts (or recommendations!) very welcome. Cheers for the help!
Thanks, Hanuli! For the project, it's super basic. Just a concept test, really, but I'll need pixel art and some basic programming done, so I'm trying to set the budget.
It's a simple, 2-D pixel, point and click game with only 3 'rooms' that are just one area (a library).
1 - [left side of library, with a door]
2 - [center of library with a fireplace bookended by two leather chairs]
3 - [right side of library with a near-duplicate door of the one on the left side]
This look:
In something like this style:
To start, I'm just looking to commission the backgrounds (3 screens) so that I have a visual for the design doc and can potentially use it for the game itself. Eventually it would be nice to have the fireplace animated as well as some minor objects, but that'll be at a later date.
What do you think this kind of work would entail? Time-wise, cost-wise, etc. Any thoughts (or recommendations!) very welcome. Cheers for the help!
Pixel art commissions' cost varies by mainly three factors:
1) Level of detail
2) Dimensions of the work
3) Artist's experience
I commissioned the backgrounds for my game. You can see them here.
As the level of detail I assigned that particular artist's previous work and gave him a color palette to work with. The resolution of my backgrounds is 600 x 170 pixels and he charged me 250 USD per background. For reference, had the backgrounds been 640 x 400 pixels the price would've been 400 USD, so think carefully the dimensions you want to go with.
Your example is way lower in the level of detail too so it should cost way less too. Also one of the rooms is a duplicate so It's much less work.
You mentioned you wanted animation in your bg's but what you described sounded so simple It's probably not gonna affect the price much.
I'm gonna say that don't pay more than 300 USD for the entire thing, but that obviously depends on many things.
As an artist Dmitry is definitely (in my opinion) pretty high end, so if those prices seem expensive I'm pretty sure most artists charge less money.
You have one reference image in your post. It's good to give your artist good references, so they know the mood, style and details you wanna go with. If you want to see, here's a reference document I made for one of the backgrounds.
For Dmitry it took about 5 days for him to make me one background. but that obviously varies from artist to artist. Maybe use a solid hour to craft the reference documents to be pretty detailed? The artist can't see inside your head and I always surprise myself when I realize that I need to describe and find references for absolutely everything I want in the picture.
My experience is pretty limited since I've only ever commissioned from one person, but I hope it helps!
What about coding? Do you intend to do it yourself or commission someone to do it?
Thanks very much for all the details and insight! Super helpful.
For the background dimensions, did you choose 600 x 170 pixels over 640 x 400 for any particular reason other than price? Is 600 x 170 more common for say, STEAM games?
For level of detail, I do want something that hearkens back to the age of Monkey Island and Gabriel Knight, but there's a lot of wiggle room to be had. It might just come down to shopping around for an artist with a distinctive 'cozy' style and working with what they're most comfortable with for the best result. I don't mind paying a bit more ($300 sounds pretty reasonable to me, especially if it might include some little animations), but it's good to know that the image I picked isn't too pricey. I love your backgrounds (quality stuff and great mood), btw. Did you 'shop around' a lot or was he recommended? His style isn't quite what I'm going for, but if you have any recommendations/places you know that I might find a good artist, I'm all ears. I went down the reddit rabbit hole and it's endless...
For reference material, thanks for sharing yours! I definitely have a number of materials/details for the setting, and it's great to see an example. I'll be sure to provide a lot of explanation, and I'd not considered the color palette at all. Cheers!
For coding, I'm looking to hire someone for that as well. I do some narrative design/work on a lot of development docs, so I know how I want things to unfold/function, but I'm probably going to save myself the struggle and hire someone to do it for me. Like the art/background, it'll be super simple (just clicking on books, reading them, going between the 3 rooms (not even sure if I'll bother to have a character walking around or just do 1st person view), incidentals, commentary as you click on various objects, simple menu choices, etc.), but I need help for sure. Any recommendations of people or sites? I'm open to paying, collab exchange (I'm a text editor/writer/marketing), etc.
My game is a visual novel and looks like this, so the 600 x 170 resolution for the backgrounds was already set in stone for me.
I was actually looking to make my own backgrounds, but then I discovered his work on reddit's r/pixelart so I went and asked if he would make my backgrounds. And yeah reddit is a jungle but I think it's a good way to find some reasonable priced commission work.
For coding I can only really recommend myself ;) I'm a professional unity developer. Say, Is english your native language? None of my team are native speakers so I've been thinking of finding someone to proof-read our script :)
I don't think there's a standard resolution for pixel art games, but I'm personally using 480 x 270 (for the whole screen) because it scales pixel-perfectly to 1080p (x4), and therefore to 4K (x8). I'm pretty happy with the work / definition balance it gives, and I think is more similar to the lower resolution visual style you linked, as opposed to Hanuli's higher resolution style, unless your game need more detail for the objects, etc.
But yeah, resolution should be the very first thing you nail down, and color palette the second one, or you're looking at redoing a lot of work down the line (sadly talking from experience here). For the latter, I honestly can't recommend Endesga64 enough:
My game is a visual novel and looks like this, so the 600 x 170 resolution for the backgrounds was already set in stone for me.
I was actually looking to make my own backgrounds, but then I discovered his work on reddit's r/pixelart so I went and asked if he would make my backgrounds. And yeah reddit is a jungle but I think it's a good way to find some reasonable priced commission work.
For coding I can only really recommend myself ;) I'm a professional unity developer. Say, Is english your native language? None of my team are native speakers so I've been thinking of finding someone to proof-read our script :)
Wow. Looks amazing! If that's the lower cost option, then happy days all around. When I do find an artist (I'll nose around r/pixelart more), I'll get quotes for that and Weltall's suggestion and see what comes up. Thanks!
For the coding/proofing, I think a collab is definitely worth entertaining! English is my native language, I'm a published author, and editing/proofing video game text is my professional career. :D I'll have to show you my design docs once I get them typed up and see what you think, but in terms of proofing a VN, that's right in my wheel house.
Oh, great point. I'll definitely get a quote for that resolution as well, because it certainly sounds handy. Thanks! For the palette, I'm rather new to this part of it all, so is this something you compile yourself or choose from standard options or...? As I'm just going for an old library feel (like the one in the pic) I was just going to show that example image (and others). The game is literally just those 3 parts of the same big room, so hopefully there won't be any need for redoing things down the line (too much).
Yay :) PM me when you have the design docs done. I'm looking forward to it!
Any Maya users here know if there is any way to bake nonlinear deformer animations into an fbx file so it can be ported to game engines? Bake simulation doesn't work and I've tried doing the same idea with blendshapes but it doesn't nail the vertice trajectory like the bend deformer would as you can see in the gif below.
Was feeling bored today so I started doing some pixel art for the maps in my game. This is what I have so far, which is the protagonist's bedroom (it's supposed to be one of those attic bedrooms, not sure how well it comes across with my limited pixel art skills haha). Any feedback would be appreciated.
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I know that feeling. My latest game (Drop It: Block Paradise), that I been working on since like 2014 for at least 3 years combined easily cost me $5,000. Me releasing the game so late (Last month on the Wii U, as opposed to like 2016/2017) didn't help. So slowly I am trying to re-cooperate my losses by releasing it everywhere I can (currently Android, Windows Store, eventually iOS, etc). Luckily it's not a total loss, as All that money spent was mostly gained from my 1st game (ZaciSa on the Wii U). So, more like a net even in the end.
On the plus side, I officially started up my new project of re-imagining my 1st game's Tower Defense game. Feels good to actually have actual artist to work with now (for music & graphics) instead of just me doodling with a crayon on paper lol
Ideally my game will support crowds with thousands of NPCs where every single person has a unique body and unique clothes. Traditionally that isn't really possible without using a lot of processing power so I've just started working on my own technique.
The approach is to render every single person with a standardized mesh like the one on the right, but have the shader rework the mesh into the correct shape like the one on the left. To do this I'm using a vector displacement map.
Every pixel encodes an ideal movement vector for the base mesh at that specific uv point.
Combined with a normal map of sorts, the "impostor" mesh can look like any humanoid with near perfect accuracy. For most outfits it is possible to include them in these textures and render them without using more resources. Traditional textures are also used for albedo and other surface properties.
During gameplay the system dynamically bakes these textures into an atlas and keeps the majority of them super low res. It takes more ram than traditional methods but supports an unlimited amount of variation per NPC. Still only partially implemented though. Could end up having major unexpected problems so we'll see if I end up switching to a more traditional fallback.
That's really interesting. How does the displacement itself work? I remember that vertex shaders couldn't access textures, but that was a long time ago.
Vertex shaders can access textures just fine but you need to use tex2Dlod and manually set the mip level.
Code:
void vert(inout appdata_full v){
v.vertex.xyz+=(tex2Dlod (_Vector, float4(v.texcoord.xy,0,_LOD)).xyz-.5)*_Displacement;
v.normal.xyz=(tex2Dlod (_Normal, float4(v.texcoord.xy,0,_LOD)).xyz-.5)*2;
}Well, that makes perfect sense. Thanks for the tip. Though I guess I must do something about my usual sources being extremely outdated...
Ideally my game will support crowds with thousands of NPCs where every single person has a unique body and unique clothes. Traditionally that isn't really possible without using a lot of processing power so I've just started working on my own technique.
The approach is to render every single person with a standardized mesh like the one on the right, but have the shader rework the mesh into the correct shape like the one on the left. To do this I'm using a vector displacement map.
Every pixel encodes an ideal movement vector for the base mesh at that specific uv point.
Combined with a normal map of sorts, the "impostor" mesh can look like any humanoid with near perfect accuracy. For most outfits it is possible to include them in these textures and render them without using more resources. Traditional textures are also used for albedo and other surface properties.
During gameplay the system dynamically bakes these textures into an atlas and keeps the majority of them super low res. It takes more ram than traditional methods but supports an unlimited amount of variation per NPC. Still only partially implemented though. Could end up having major unexpected problems so we'll see if I end up switching to a more traditional fallback.
This is absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing the process, it's so cool.
I would love to know how you procedurally generate the alterations to the surface vectors though. I'm guessing that naive, purely random modifications would just result in bumpy / holey humans (which I'm sure would be fun to see on their own!). I'm assuming you're making any modifications symmetrical, but anything beyond that would be lovely to hear about.
Will do! I'll be organizing them this week, and I've been contacting a few artists for quotes. Details coming soon (I need yours as well!). :D
I can't compete with all the great art that gets posted so I like posting tech stuff from time to time. Thank you for appreciating it.
Right now I essentially use the same concept as blend shapes. A target mesh can be directly converted to a vector map using more shaders (you can see this on the left in the tweet) and then saved to file. Do this for a bunch of different meshes and then at run time it can blend them with unique ratios for each person. Clothes can be done in a similar way and stamped on top, just like how clothes can be done when working in 2D.
Ideally however I could do something a bit more unique. Right now I'm specifically working with clothes to see if I can come up with a better method.
Yeah I saw he tweeted about this so it looks legit.
Hihi!
Im working on a soulslike(?) taking some gameplay ideas from ico+wind waker and visuals from tenshi no tamago with noise/collage music on top. Its a bit of a mess haha
It's the first game I've ever worked on (1 year into gamedev) and Im doing everything from coding to 3d models, animations and music.
Here's a really low-quality vid of the thing in motion
So far the core systems are there:
- enemies have varying levels of aggression to determine if they have to act more offensive or defensive
- enemies choose from an array of different attacks and use the best suited one depending on their level of aggression and position in regards to the player
- enemies also have walk routines and idle states. They have a "leash" area and will go back to their starting point if player runs away etc
- enemies can drop weapons on the ground while fighting but also pick them back up (so like in wind waker)
....many more things*
- game also has systems in place for opening doors/climbing ladders etc
only thing missing is a failstate. I want to make the combat system a bit more unique and Im still figuring out what could make for an interesting change that fits with the world im creating.
Also here are the designs for all of the enemies I've done so far. They are all fully animated and each have 20+unique animations
I know the 2nd one can be a bit hard to read which is why I plan to redesign it. It's actually the first enemy model i created many months ago.
In general I feel like im still figuring out what visual style I want for my game
Im working on a soulslike(?) taking some gameplay ideas from ico+wind waker and visuals from tenshi no tamago with noise/collage music on top. Its a bit of a mess haha
It's the first game I've ever worked on (1 year into gamedev) and Im doing everything from coding to 3d models, animations and music.
Here's a really low-quality vid of the thing in motion
So far the core systems are there:
- enemies have varying levels of aggression to determine if they have to act more offensive or defensive
- enemies choose from an array of different attacks and use the best suited one depending on their level of aggression and position in regards to the player
- enemies also have walk routines and idle states. They have a "leash" area and will go back to their starting point if player runs away etc
- enemies can drop weapons on the ground while fighting but also pick them back up (so like in wind waker)
....many more things*
- game also has systems in place for opening doors/climbing ladders etc
only thing missing is a failstate. I want to make the combat system a bit more unique and Im still figuring out what could make for an interesting change that fits with the world im creating.
Also here are the designs for all of the enemies I've done so far. They are all fully animated and each have 20+unique animations
I know the 2nd one can be a bit hard to read which is why I plan to redesign it. It's actually the first enemy model i created many months ago.
In general I feel like im still figuring out what visual style I want for my game
Well I can't compete with either, so... :D
Aaah, of course. I'm wondering if you could perhaps blend from different meshes (or different ratios) for different body parts, for more variation. I'm imagining that would result in some "skipped leg day" stuff which may be fun in itself. :D
Hihi!
Im working on a soulslike(?) taking some gameplay ideas from ico+wind waker and visuals from tenshi no tamago with noise/collage music on top. Its a bit of a mess haha
It's the first game I've ever worked on (1 year into gamedev) and Im doing everything from coding to 3d models, animations and music.
Here's a really low-quality vid of the thing in motion
So far the core systems are there:
- enemies have varying levels of aggression to determine if they have to act more offensive or defensive
- enemies choose from an array of different attacks and use the best suited one depending on their level of aggression and position in regards to the player
- enemies also have walk routines and idle states. They have a "leash" area and will go back to their starting point if player runs away etc
- enemies can drop weapons on the ground while fighting but also pick them back up (so like in wind waker)
....many more things*
- game also has systems in place for opening doors/climbing ladders etc
only thing missing is a failstate. I want to make the combat system a bit more unique and Im still figuring out what could make for an interesting change that fits with the world im creating.
Also here are the designs for all of the enemies I've done so far. They are all fully animated and each have 20+unique animations
I know the 2nd one can be a bit hard to read which is why I plan to redesign it. It's actually the first enemy model i created many months ago.
In general I feel like im still figuring out what visual style I want for my game
This looks insanely good, especially for a solo / one year project. I take you're a professional 3D modeler / animator?
BTW, Angel Egg is an amazing movie to take inspiration from; I wish more games did it.
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Awww thank you so much <3 I was a bit nervous to show my game on here, It really means a lot
Im not a professional at all, only been doing 3d for less than 3 years and outside of 2 comissions it has always been work for my own projects
same goes for animation...its funny cause 4 months ago I finally understood how to correctly use bone constraints to create better animations and had to go back and retroactively fix older animations
If you are interested in games taking inspiration from angel's egg I suggest you play "abyssal somewhere". Its free on itch io and its what finally pushed me to start gamedev myself
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