Indie Game Development |OT 2018| Come, help, learn, show and tell!

Heck yeaaaah Pehesse, still looking dope as hell

Anyway, I also got a nice one this week, as i've made a new progress video for the game, result of the last months of work with the new programmer on the team



(Video on the tweet)

All in all, while visually it might not have changed that much, the amount of work that went into having a way better combat flow, juggling, and a WHOLE bunch of polish really makes it feel better

For funsies: this is how it looked back in march: https://youtu.be/z_IH-HZrGQY so you can compare

Long time no post! Been spending the last two weeks fleshing out one of my racers I created back in April.

Been doing the GMTK Jam - not going overly great this time. I struggled a lot with AI...

Looks like this:

Hi everyone!

I've been super busy moving home over the past month (Bought my own place, woo!) so I barely had any time to play anything, let alone work on my own stuff! However now that everything is settling down, I'm getting back into the swing of things.

I've decided to focus on fixing the readability of my current level before pushing forward with any new content or features, and I'd really appreciate feedback on how I'm doing.

In my own opinion, I don't think I'm there yet. However, here's a list of what I have been attempting:

• Zoom the camera out (This one is more a gameplay issue rather than visual,)
• Limit the colours of background buildings to use five shades of a single colour, reserving mixtures of colours for foreground/terrain buildings
• Increase the saturation of foreground and terrain whilst decreasing that of the background
• Increase the physical real-estate of the foreground buildings so that they are obviously wider than background buildings.

My current thoughts are:

• The distinction between the orange and red buildings on the left of the image are fairly clear
• Not sure if the purple needs to be changed
• The green building doesn't appear to have so much of a blue "hue" (Is that the right word?) as the other two bg buildings, but I'm not sure if this is problematic when compared to the orange of the floor and the blue/grey of the right hand building
• The "Billboard" at the top of the screen needs to be more clearly distinguished as terrain. Perhaps add a more colourful border?
• Is this combination of colours too much? Should I simply maintain a "main" colour for the ground, one for the terrain buildings and a single colour for the background buildings?

I feel like I'm making progress, but still plenty to do!

Hope you don't mind me taking the liberty, but I did a quick photoshop mockup of what I think would help


foreground elements are outlined, background elements much more desaturated

HandsomeCharles said:

Hi everyone!

I've been super busy moving home over the past month (Bought my own place, woo!) so I barely had any time to play anything, let alone work on my own stuff! However now that everything is settling down, I'm getting back into the swing of things.

I've decided to focus on fixing the readability of my current level before pushing forward with any new content or features, and I'd really appreciate feedback on how I'm doing.

In my own opinion, I don't think I'm there yet. However, here's a list of what I have been attempting:

• Zoom the camera out (This one is more a gameplay issue rather than visual,)
• Limit the colours of background buildings to use five shades of a single colour, reserving mixtures of colours for foreground/terrain buildings
• Increase the saturation of foreground and terrain whilst decreasing that of the background
• Increase the physical real-estate of the foreground buildings so that they are obviously wider than background buildings.

My current thoughts are:

• The distinction between the orange and red buildings on the left of the image are fairly clear
• Not sure if the purple needs to be changed
• The green building doesn't appear to have so much of a blue "hue" (Is that the right word?) as the other two bg buildings, but I'm not sure if this is problematic when compared to the orange of the floor and the blue/grey of the right hand building
• The "Billboard" at the top of the screen needs to be more clearly distinguished as terrain. Perhaps add a more colourful border?
• Is this combination of colours too much? Should I simply maintain a "main" colour for the ground, one for the terrain buildings and a single colour for the background buildings?

I feel like I'm making progress, but still plenty to do!

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I would outline all the foreground elements in black. In fact, since your pixel size is relatively small, I would even consider adding a two-pixel wide border. Your background elements already have pretty light outlines, so I'd leave them as they are.

JonDadley said:

I've spent the last month or so completely reworking demo for Transmission to focus on gameplay. Here's one of the new features. Funny story, the dynamic road signs at the end of this clip took FAR MORE time, effort and stress to make than the main feature of the video (the job monitor) and no player will ever know or care

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That looks good.

And I don't know what it is but I hate working on menus. I'm jealous of your job monitor even if it was simple.

Buuuuuugs (but funny) :)



Oh and here's the entry:

Dr Wily said:

Hope you don't mind me taking the liberty, but I did a quick photoshop mockup of what I think would help

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Dr Wily said:

foreground elements are outlined, background elements much more desaturated

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Weltall Zero said:

I would outline all the foreground elements in black. In fact, since your pixel size is relatively small, I would even consider adding a two-pixel wide border. Your background elements already have pretty light outlines, so I'd leave them as they are.

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Thanks for that guys! I might look at embiggening the borders to two-pixel width. Thanks for the mock up, interesting to see how it would look with black borders as this was something I had never even thought to persue. I'll post my progress in a few days!

Sean Noonan said:

Buuuuuugs (but funny) :)

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Leave it as it is, its too good to change :D

How do you guys handle posting to social media? I've heard you should update fairly regular--as even as like, once per day--but I don't know where exactly the content comes from. Like, we're nearing the end to our first piece of DLC, and we haven't shared much about it at all, which is a mistake. But I'm not sure where to begin with it, since I don't want to give the real cool parts away.

And once that's done, it's onto the next project, but it can take months to have anything worth showing.

Conkersbadfurday said:

How do you guys handle posting to social media? I've heard you should update fairly regular--as even as like, once per day--but I don't know where exactly the content comes from. Like, we're nearing the end to our first piece of DLC, and we haven't shared much about it at all, which is a mistake. But I'm not sure where to begin with it, since I don't want to give the real cool parts away.

And once that's done, it's onto the next project, but it can take months to have anything worth showing.

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I just post every Saturday with the #screenshotsaturday tag. I know I should be more active promoting, but who has the time for that? And as you say, who has something visually interesting to show every single day? I think too much promoting can end up burning out followers.

Dusk Golem said:

Making some progress on my little project, my project isn't nearly as impressive as some of your guy's, but I'll try to share a few times before launch.

Crunching and things going well, already done with most assets, so just designing right now, managed a few fairly unique odd scenarios.

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Wait a minute....Are this places I saw from the School of Corpse Party?

I realized that it's sooo difficult to find full time programmers to help you with RM scripts.

Conkersbadfurday said:

How do you guys handle posting to social media? I've heard you should update fairly regular--as even as like, once per day--but I don't know where exactly the content comes from. Like, we're nearing the end to our first piece of DLC, and we haven't shared much about it at all, which is a mistake. But I'm not sure where to begin with it, since I don't want to give the real cool parts away.

And once that's done, it's onto the next project, but it can take months to have anything worth showing.

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Once or twice a week is usually enough. It's enough to stay in people's mind that your game is a thing and is in development, but not enough to spam people's timelines/pages/emails and either burn people out or have them unfollow you.


Speaking of which, here's some screenshots from Saturday from my game:

Hello everyone,
first post here. Today I decided that it's finally time to stop procrastinating and to start developing a small game as a side project. As of now I only have some ideas and a rather general direction in my head, and a small prototype made in SmileBASIC which I want to port to GameMaker. The game - at least as I imagine it now - will be low on action and more akin to an interactive short story. I think that this will make it more probable that I will actually follow through as I don't have to care too much about things that, as of now, go beyond my skill set like implementing movement, jumping and collision detection in a satisfying way. If things go well and I'm not getting too distracted by other duties, I hope to have something to show this or next saturday.

plngsplsh said:

Hello everyone,
first post here. Today I decided that it's finally time to stop procrastinating and to start developing a small game as a side project. As of now I only have some ideas and a rather general direction in my head, and a small prototype made in SmileBASIC which I want to port to GameMaker. The game - at least as I imagine it now - will be low on action and more akin to an interactive short story. I think that this will make it more probable that I will actually follow through as I don't have to care too much about things that, as of now, go beyond my skill set like implementing movement, jumping and collision detection in a satisfying way. If things go well and I'm not getting too distracted by other duties, I hope to have something to show this or next saturday.

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Welcome to the thread, don't hesitate to ask anything!

In other news, I think this would be interesting for a lot of people here:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/humble-unity-bundle.66441/

Weltall Zero said:

In other news, I think this would be interesting for a lot of people here:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/humble-unity-bundle.66441/

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I got it after seeing it in a FB group the other day.

Worth it. So many good things for Unity Users plus some games :) (plus some course tutorials on top of it all)

Weltall Zero said:

Welcome to the thread, don't hesitate to ask anything!

In other news, I think this would be interesting for a lot of people here:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/humble-unity-bundle.66441/

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Thanks for the welcome. The questions will probably come when I start porting my prototype to gamemaker or, seeing that the bundle contains flowCanvas, unity.

Hoot said:

Anyway, I also got a nice one this week, as i've made a new progress video for the game, result of the last months of work with the new programmer on the team

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Getting some strong Vanilla x Salt & Sanctuary vibes from this. Like how it's coming together so far.

So, I've actually made some progress. Took me about 130 lines of BASIC code to get this simple object working. Never thought that it would take that much. Next step is to switch to gamemaker.

plngsplsh said:

So, I've actually made some progress. Took me about 130 lines of BASIC code to get this simple object working. Never thought that it would take that much. Next step is to switch to gamemaker.

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130 lines doesn't sound so bad for all that stuff you can do with the lighter!

Took the gravity system from my marble prototype and made a grappling hook



Still super buggy tho, but this was only an hours worth of work

Weltall Zero said:

130 lines doesn't sound so bad for all that stuff you can do with the lighter!

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I guess, I'll just have to get used to coding longer and more complex programs. All of my previous efforts were more or less just little tests that rarely exceeded 30 lines or so. I now know how important it is to have a coherent structure and good commentary.

plngsplsh said:

I guess, I'll just have to get used to coding longer and more complex programs. All of my previous efforts were more or less just little tests that rarely exceeded 30 lines or so. I now know how important it is to have a coherent structure and good commentary.

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That may be the most important thing that separates bad programmers from great programmers. Comment everything, try to keep repeated / copypasted code to the absolute minimum (ideally none), and name your classes with as descriptive names as you can think. Don't be afraid to refactor early and often to keep your code base clean and understandable. Don't just comment out unused code: delete it.

A lot of this stuff needs years or decades of practices, but that's no reason to start doing things as best as possible as early as possible.

Weltall Zero said:

Comment everything

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I very strongly disagree with the notion that great programmers comment everything. I've only ever seen this rule/guideline lead to horribly bloated files to read through, and out-dated invalid comments which cause confusion instead of helping.

Comment what needs commenting. If something needs commenting, see if there are ways to rewrite the code so it no longer needs commenting first.
Something I find myself doing often is making a variable, and then putting a comment as to what it's actually used for right above it. In almost every single case, renaming the variable to better match the comment means I can just delete the comment altogether, and have more readable that's easier to understand.

I've spent all day on the grappling hook.....I love it so much

wwm0nkey said:

Took the gravity system from my marble prototype and made a grappling hook



Still super buggy tho, but this was only an hours worth of work

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Why was this video removed O.o

Stuart444 said:

Why was this video removed O.o

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I posted a MUCH better one above lol

wwm0nkey said:

I posted a MUCH better one above lol

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Yeah but when I clicked it, it says:

Video unavailable
This video has been removed for violating YouTube's Terms of Service.

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Which made me go "wut?"

Stuart444 said:

Yeah but when I clicked it, it says:



Which made me go "wut?"

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Huh that's weird, I removed it myself lol

I may have asked this before on the old place, but what do you guys recommend for making .gifs? I want to start posting more to my social media stuff. People seem to like them.

I think gifcam was one I had on my old PC, but I'm wondering if that's like the "standard" or if there are others you guys know of. Strictly free :P

Edit: Wow, literally on the first page. Stupid me is stupid.

I think I've run into one of my first at least somewhat major situations in regards to overcomplicating code. In an attempt to reduce the number of code instantiated game objects, because it's "expensive", I've removed most of those function calls and their respective destroy calls. So instead of spawning a bullet each time, each player has one inactive bullet object inside their body that can be reused later. But bullets as children of course lead to them being anchored to player movement, and the same with children to the bullet itself.

So instead of just firing and forgetting a non-parented instantiated bullet from a prefab list, I first need to activate the bullet, move it outside the player's body, start any and all particle effects and sounds, and when the bullet hits something, the particles must be decoupled from the bullet so they can play until done (since SetActive(false) on a parent will deactivate children as well). So all firings after the first one need to reattach its missing particles and restart them, so they can be decoupled later again xD I'm gonna need to move the audiosources to the particle child as well since an inactive object can have running scripts.

It sounds so dumb writing it out :) But soon we won't have a single instantation at all outside of the lobby. It's just a pet project, there's very little performance to be gained from this, but it feels nice apart from the much less cleaner code :/

Minamu said:

I think I've run into one of my first at least somewhat major situations in regards to overcomplicating code. In an attempt to reduce the number of code instantiated game objects, because it's "expensive", I've removed most of those function calls and their respective destroy calls. So instead of spawning a bullet each time, each player has one inactive bullet object inside their body that can be reused later. But bullets as children of course lead to them being anchored to player movement, and the same with children to the bullet itself.

So instead of just firing and forgetting a non-parented instantiated bullet from a prefab list, I first need to activate the bullet, move it outside the player's body, start any and all particle effects and sounds, and when the bullet hits something, the particles must be decoupled from the bullet so they can play until done (since SetActive(false) on a parent will deactivate children as well). So all firings after the first one need to reattach its missing particles and restart them, so they can be decoupled later again xD I'm gonna need to move the audiosources to the particle child as well since an inactive object can have running scripts.

It sounds so dumb writing it out :) But soon we won't have a single instantation at all outside of the lobby. It's just a pet project, there's very little performance to be gained from this, but it feels nice apart from the much less cleaner code :/

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This seems... somewhat "ad-hoc". I think a more general purpose solution that decouples the pooling functionality from the objects using it will save you a lot of headaches and repeated code later on.

I created a PoolManager which holds a dictionary of pools: when an object is needed, the pool manager provides the next unused object in the pool associated to that prefab. When an object is no longer needed, they have a Remove method that disables them and re-enqueues in the appropriate pool for later reuse.

The other half of the equation is preloading these pools with the appropriate number of pre-created instances, so that there's no delay when a lot of objects are suddenly needed at once. This preloading is done at the start of the scene, in a cascading way, i.e. enemy generators preload a number of enemy instances, and the first time an enemy is preloaded, it also ensures that anything it needs, like bullets, has at least a certain number of preloaded instances. I even show a warning in the log if any object is actually instantiated after the "preload" phase of the scene (e.g. if I forgot to preload something, or preloaded too few objects and more needed to be instantiated at runtime).

All of this is handled very high in the object hierarchy; pretty much all objects (enemies, projectiles, explosions, etc.) descend from a PoolObject class that provides this functionality. If you're interested I can send you or post here the relevant classes!

Minamu said:

Soon we won't have a single instantation at all outside of the lobby. It's just a pet project, there's very little performance to be gained from this, but it feels nice apart from the much less cleaner code :/

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Look up "object pooling". You'll get better performance (since there won't be a need to reparent anything) with no sacrifice in code cleanliness, and don't have to assume the amount of bullets that can be created.

I started working on fire fx this week and am also trying to improve the look of the grass a bit:



I hope to have a brush fire demonstration in place within the next few weeks.

Man, i finally got a prototype working on cryengine, but seems like there is no easy way to distribute games made on it. I simply modified the code from a asset with 50MB in size, but when i compiled, i ended up with a 300MB standalone zip! Is there a place where i can make a file this big available without much hurdle?

Anyway, I'm also looking for tips on particle effects, since this will be crucial for the game to make sense. Any advice?

justiceiro said:

Man, i finally got a prototype working on cryengine, but seems like there is no easy way to distribute games made on it. I simply modified the code from a asset with 50MB in size, but when i compiled, i ended up with a 300MB standalone zip! Is there a place where i can make a file this big available without much hurdle?

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itch.io is the best, but tbh your problem isn't going to be hosting, its going to be finding people willing to download a large executable just for a mechanics test.

So in these past few days, I've really gotten behind the idea of my prototype, the swinging just feels soooo good. So I've made an itchi.io page, a Trello board for team members and will be going to GDEX to hopefully get some additional help.

First time I have had this much faith in such an early prototype/idea.

After some discussion, I think we are going with a Mario Kart style racer....but with gravity hooks. Some levels will be low gravity (more vertical stages) and some will be normal ass gravity but you and 7 other players will race to the finish and use wacky ass power ups to stop each other from getting the lead. All this while swinging around and abusing gravity to get the fastest times.

Oh, made a quick dinky logo, but I actually kinda dig it.

Time for more mining.
https://www.facebook.com/832526933561276/posts/1133672006780099/

wwm0nkey said:

So in these past few days, I've really gotten behind the idea of my prototype, the swinging just feels soooo good. So I've made an itchi.io page, a Trello board for team members and will be going to GDEX to hopefully get some additional help.

First time I have had this much faith in such an early prototype/idea.

After some discussion, I think we are going with a Mario Kart style racer....but with gravity hooks. Some levels will be low gravity (more vertical stages) and some will be normal ass gravity but you and 7 other players will race to the finish and use wacky ass power ups to stop each other from getting the lead. All this while swinging around and abusing gravity to get the fastest times.

Oh, made a quick dinky logo, but I actually kinda dig it.

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Sounds a bit like Speedrunners in 3D - interesting :)

anteevy said:

Sounds a bit like Speedrunners in 3D - interesting :)

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Yeah that's part of the inspiration for sure lol

Also had a few friends test it out last night, originally they were sucking at going around corners, but eventually leaned a few tricks and just kept on playing it over and over and over hahaha.

Oh and new footage!

So I kind of put together a trailer for my game.



I would dearly appreciate feedback, positive and (especially?) negative, about things you may like / not like (as always, the more specific, the more helpful). Edit: Mostly about the game itself, rather than the trailer.

Weltall Zero said:

So I kind of put together a trailer for my game.



I would dearly appreciate feedback, positive and (especially?) negative, about things you may like / not like (as always, the more specific, the more helpful).

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Love the style!

wwm0nkey said:

Love the style!

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Thanks! To be frank, I don't even know if the game has a "style" beyond "what my limited spritemaking skills allow for". :D

Weltall Zero said:

Thanks! To be frank, I don't even know if the game has a "style" beyond "what my limited spritemaking skills allow for". :D

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Better than my gray boxes lol

wwm0nkey said:

Better than my gray boxes lol

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To be fair, 3D modelling has to be so much harder. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly. I don't think I could ever develop the skillset for it. :S

Weltall Zero said:

To be fair, 3D modelling has to be so much harder. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly. I don't think I could ever develop the skillset for it. :S

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Im using Pro Builder right now, VERY happy Unity added that to the official packages. Still though I need my wife to do some actual models, because I am garbage at it.

Also there are a few Udemy courses out there that can help :)

Weltall Zero said:

So I kind of put together a trailer for my game.



I would dearly appreciate feedback, positive and (especially?) negative, about things you may like / not like (as always, the more specific, the more helpful).

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I like your trailer and the look of the game in general.
My nitpicks I have are maybe you should cut the sequences which are visible when it download an area.
I think I saw the words "generate map" I think? I think you should cut this from the trailer.
Also maybe the trailer should had been shorter and more to the point. Showing all the things you had done so far is nice, but maybe you can make it shorter and sweeter.

I hope I helped.

Weltall Zero said:

So I kind of put together a trailer for my game.



I would dearly appreciate feedback, positive and (especially?) negative, about things you may like / not like (as always, the more specific, the more helpful).

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I'm not sure if you were asking for feedback for the trailer or the game. But here are some things I'd have done differently with the trailer:
Use a pixelated font.
Do away with the abrupt cut at 0:24.
Make some inbetween frames or layovers for your main points and the gods:
- play as one of three gods
- cooperate
- customize
Make the trailer shorter.
Maybe only use the second piece of music.
The logo/thumbnail could use a different background. The blue looks rather unimpressive. Maybe you could give it some outline and lay it over overworld footage.

SweetSark said:

I like your trailer and the look of the game in general.
My nitpicks I have are maybe you should cut the sequences which are visible when it download an area.
I think I saw the words "generate map" I think? I think you should cut this from the trailer.
Also maybe the trailer should had been shorter and more to the point. Showing all the things you had done so far is nice, but maybe you can make it shorter and sweeter.

I hope I helped.

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Yeah, pretty much everyone I showed it to told me it was too long, even though I tried to make it as short as possible. I will definitely try to make the next one shorter.

plngsplsh said:

I'm not sure if you were asking for feedback for the trailer or the game. But here are some things I'd have done differently with the trailer:

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It's kind of my fault, but I would rather have feedback about the game. About the trailer is fine, too, although I'll probably not go back to it now that I've sent it to people.

plngsplsh said:

Use a pixelated font.

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It might seem ill-advised, but I used a non-pixelated font precisely to make it stand out as something that's not part of the game itself. But point taken, I'll try to do the same differently next time.

plngsplsh said:

Do away with the abrupt cut at 0:24.

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Hmmm. This specific cut is entirely unedited gameplay; the player entering a stage, as it happens in the game. That's why there's no transition, it's the same piece of footage. Perhaps I should cut it and add a transition all the same. It might be a bit tangential but perhaps this indicates I should add an actual a transition in-game.

plngsplsh said:

Make some inbetween frames or layovers for your main points and the gods:
- play as one of three gods
- cooperate
- customize

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You mean like title cards where it's only the text? The issue with that is that it increases the trailer's running time; whereas by showing titles directly during the action I feel like I can cram more of it.

plngsplsh said:

Make the trailer shorter.

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I definitely need to master the art of minimalism. :)

plngsplsh said:

Maybe only use the second piece of music.

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Oh! Hmm, you think it would be better that way? Would you start the music right away, or after the initial text?

plngsplsh said:

The logo/thumbnail could use a different background. The blue looks rather unimpressive. Maybe you could give it some outline and lay it over overworld footage.

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Wouldn't that make it a bit too busy? I can definitely give it a try for the next trailer and see how it looks.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, guys!