Jeez, the stuff you folks are putting out makes me really insecure.
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Indie Game Development |OT 2018| Come, help, learn, show and tell!
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Well, on the flip side at least now I don't feel like I'm the only one!
By far the biggest downside I'm feeling with game development (and one of the strongest reasons for me to go back to normal software development) is that the avalanche of amazing indie games (not just the ones in this thread, but also checking threads like SweetSark's) makes me feel even worse about mine. It's turned something I used to enjoy into something that gives me anxiety. :/
To be fair, your work looks really good and unique too, Weltall Zero! You're much further ahead, and have something cohesive and well done, I feel. :)
Thanks a lot, but there's also the fact that I've been working on it full time for a year and a half. A lot of people here have been working in their games in their free time while also working full time jobs. For the amount of hours I've put into my game, I feel my game isn't exactly impressive-looking... which is to be expected from a programmer that can't draw shit, I guess. :D
Don't worry, if I ever dare to post something to this thread, you'll have something to laugh, art wise, I promise xD
I'll rest when I'm dead ;)
Here's the game; would be super appreciative if people could give it a go, share and leave feedback, etc.
Update on Moon Magic. Tutorial map, new radial menus and a couple of new models, amongst other things.
Also, since I'm shopping around to multiple indie-friendly publishers, I might as well put up the link to the newest build I uploaded as well, for people who want to mess around with it.
Also, since I'm shopping around to multiple indie-friendly publishers, I might as well put up the link to the newest build I uploaded as well, for people who want to mess around with it.
What would ba good engine for a management/simulation type game?
Also are there any good free game engines for making Adventure Games on a Mac?
Also are there any good free game engines for making Adventure Games on a Mac?
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I only just started out, so take my advice with a grain of salt. But I think gamemaker would be a good or at least serviceable engine, if you want to keep it 2D. One can easily create game objects and instances of that object for e.g. different building types and have them behave independently or dependently. Plus: it's rather easy to use, but also allows for more complex development.
I've always liked whitebox/textureless maps. There's something soothing about the easy readability that lets you appreciate the architecture more.
I thought Game Maker was paid though. I should have specified I am looking for a free engine.
You could try the free trial, though it has some limitations in regards to how many objects you can have and you obviously can't publish.
Godot seems worth a shot, though I never got it to work on my computer.
Another option may be Clickteam Fusion 2: https://www.clickteam.com/clickteam-fusion-2-5-free-edition
Did anyone ever told you look like Tom Cruise with this Sunglasses?
"What would be a good engine" questions for most modern engines would just be what engine do you like working with the most - even the paid ones like GameMaker have limited trials you can download to play around with and get a feel for.
FWIW, stuff like City Skylines, Parkitect, Two Point Hospital and Fallout Shelter were all made in Unity.
Unity also has a specific tutorial on making adventure games, which will obviously give you a skeletal framework to build from.
Thanks for the recommendations. I'll look into both the Gammaker trial and Clickteam Fusion.
Thanks a lot. I had no clue adventure games could be made with Unity.
You can make pretty much whatever you want with all modern 3d engines.
For example, in Unity I've made a vr simulation, a bowling game, a first person zombie survival horde mode, an arkanoid clone, an old school text adventure, a guess my number game, a third person multiplayer shooter, a clone of plants vs zombies among other games.
For example, in Unity I've made a vr simulation, a bowling game, a first person zombie survival horde mode, an arkanoid clone, an old school text adventure, a guess my number game, a third person multiplayer shooter, a clone of plants vs zombies among other games.
Unity is extremely flexible, its one of the reason its very popular.
You can literally make any type of game in Unity. You are only limited by your coding ability, or use of 3rd party tools/assets if you go that route.
I don't post in here as often as I should, but I figure this is probably the place to go so, anyone up for providing some trailer feedback?
https://youtu.be/znEK00mZuoA
I'm kinda noseblind to the whole thing at this point and haven't really gotten any general impressions yet, so any feedback/pointers/suggestions would be super appreciated.
https://youtu.be/znEK00mZuoA
I'm kinda noseblind to the whole thing at this point and haven't really gotten any general impressions yet, so any feedback/pointers/suggestions would be super appreciated.
I'm not in the best position to talk about this because I am a complete beginner in game dev but dude, it looks f-ing amazing. The art is so good. The spells look great, love the summons (?). Maybe add some info about the game in the end ?
How long have you been working on it if you don't mind me asking ?
Thanks! Re: How Long I've Been Working on it --
But most of that is revision and fitting it in when I could and it's been off and on overall. And yeah, I still haven't put a logo/tag in at the end, gotta get that together.
This looks insanely good. My inclination would be to have more and more rapid cuts during that ~1:00-1:30 climax stretch that starts with the angel summon, I suppose. Fantastic-looking regardless.
Thanks. And yeah, that's probably a good idea. The tail end of that in particular does start to lag a bit relative to the tempo.
Looks great. I like the way you framed the trailer. It tells a story and shows what the game is about. I assume that the last 20 seconds are left blank intentionally for logo and release info?
The trailer is good.
Good length, nice pixel art, show no tell approach, enough interesting cast of characters.
The only suggestion I have is to cut the black screen at the end.
However I know at this point it would be the title, so I don't know.
On a different note, I think I remember I posted this game in a Thread of mine, but I don't remember it's name.
Do you have plans to name it differently?
Thanks -- and yeah, that's exactly what's going in that last 20 seconds.
Yeah, it was called Chronicle of Ruin, it's still called Chronicle of Ruin, but I'm really thinking about ditching it for something else.... which I probably should've done way before this point.
Sidenote: I was doing some backbrowsing through this thread before I went to sleep last night and I don't want to pop in here and throw out a trailer that might discourage some people when I haven't really participated in the thread at all, so re: that sensation of
I just want to say that beyond having worked on the game for 84years.gif, something pops up every day that gives me that feeling, and it'll keep happening every day forever. Like, what's my trailer next to that Chrono Break trailer that just came out, even if it isn't a game? Just the other day I saw this pop up on Pixeljoint --
Which is fundamentally the same shot as the opening of my trailer, except it uses a quarter the pixels, looks twice as good, and they probably did it in about an eighth the time it took me to make and remake and remake and remake that first shot. And, it's part of an asset pack so anyone can use it for a nominal fee.
So yeah, there's always going to be stuff like that, that makes you think that. You just gotta push through it and use it as motivation to make your stuff better, whether it's graphics or gameplay or whatever.
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I would start with moment aka panning down right away they a bit of a pause at the start
Disregard fringe elements like the UI and stuff in the corners. Which looks better. I think i'm more partial to the second myself. It just seems like it's less busy. Though maybe the first would be okay with different colors.
Yeah, that's definitely one of the first things I was thinking about doing, it does seem like it's hanging there a little long.
I like the first one more -- although I'm kind of partial to busier stuff myself - but you're right about the readability of the sprites against the background. Adding some outlines helps a lot, if that's something you'd be interested in
Here's a pretty great concise tutorial on some of your options by Cyangmou, one of the best pixel artists out there
He has a ton of other excellent tutorials on his Deviantart
Ah, yes, I just saw my entry. It seems you delete the old trailer as well.
At least I found the old Poster you created:
From the look of it, the first old person in the trailer, is a new addition in the roster of characters.
Yeah, that's definitely one of the first things I was thinking about doing, it does seem like it's hanging there a little long.
I like the first one more -- although I'm kind of partial to busier stuff myself - but you're right about the readability of the sprites against the background. Adding some outlines helps a lot, if that's something you'd be interested in
Here's a pretty great concise tutorial on some of your options by Cyangmou, one of the best pixel artists out there
He has a ton of other excellent tutorials on his Deviantart
I'll try it with some outlines and see how I like it. This project is more of a simpler starter project to get my toes wet in development. I have grander ideas that would require much better art than I can produce at the moment. I will definitely check out those tutorials though. Thank you.
I also checked out your trailer and thought it looked great. Definitely up my alley. I thought about making an Ogre Battle-Esque game myself at some point. Surprised we haven't seen anymore.
Ah yeah, from the way way back. The old dude was always there, he just didn't make the poster cut last time. Character art/composition was a bit iffy.Ah, yes, I just saw my entry. It seems you delete the old trailer as well.
At least I found the old Poster you created:
From the look of it, the first old person in the trailer, is a new addition in the roster of characters.
Quite often when I was younger :o
Pearly has gone down pretty well. Despite it just being a competition entry.
I'll share some shots for those curious. I've been quite surprised at how many people have been asking about my process in Unreal 4. It's strange, because Unreal 4 has a lot of good tools built in out of the box, I'm not sure why people think there's a hidden solution or that 3D packages would be required to produce something as low fidelity as my work...
Play it here: https://sean-noonan.itch.io/pearly
I'll have a time lapse of the project up in a couple of days for those actually interested in how it all came together :)
Well, even if you're not a lawyer you are right on the plagiarizing stuff, I was fearful because on some horror stories I heard when I was studying but I think with having a private record with all the important stuff of our game and having both the domain and the social account we can avoid any kind of stealing.
Thanks for your help, I'm gonna try to be more active on this place and post part of our progress eventually, in the meantime I'll leave a sketch from one of the protagonist of the game
Well, even if you're not a lawyer you are right on the plagiarizing stuff, I was fearful because on some horror stories I heard when I was studying but I think with having a private record with all the important stuff of our game and having both the domain and the social account we can avoid any kind of stealing.
Thanks for your help, I'm gonna try to be more active on this place and post part of our progress eventually, in the meantime I'll leave a sketch from one of the protagonist of the game
You're welcome (insofar I could help at all!).
Your image link is broken, it redirects to MS Live so it's probably private. Can you upload it to imgur or such?
If you're looking for paid tutorials/courses, then I was recommended the Udemy ones with Ben Tristem and Rick Davidson, specifically 'Learn to Code Making Games'. I think you can do both the 2D and 3D versions of these courses.
I haven't tried them yet, though. Can't wait to finally dig in.
Okay so, sorry to spam the thread again, but this is probably the final trailer that I'm looking at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrplK0v4CC0&feature=youtu.be
I'm gonna submit to the Square-Enix Collective tomorrow and still have a bunch of crap to get together so there probably isn't that much I can add at this point, but if there's anything horribly wrong with it that I missed, it'd be a huge help if someone could give me a heads up so I can get any issues ironed out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrplK0v4CC0&feature=youtu.be
I'm gonna submit to the Square-Enix Collective tomorrow and still have a bunch of crap to get together so there probably isn't that much I can add at this point, but if there's anything horribly wrong with it that I missed, it'd be a huge help if someone could give me a heads up so I can get any issues ironed out
Still looks great. The only minor nitpick I have is with the logo. What is the thing that the sword is stuck in? It might only be me being hypercritical, but at first glance I thought there is a flaming e-guitar next to logo, which kind of put me out of the otherwise great trailer.
I just want to say that beyond having worked on the game for 84years.gif, something pops up every day that gives me that feeling, and it'll keep happening every day forever. Like, what's my trailer next to that Chrono Break trailer that just came out, even if it isn't a game? Just the other day I saw this pop up on Pixeljoint --
Which is fundamentally the same shot as the opening of my trailer, except it uses a quarter the pixels, looks twice as good, and they probably did it in about an eighth the time it took me to make and remake and remake and remake that first shot. And, it's part of an asset pack so anyone can use it for a nominal fee.
So yeah, there's always going to be stuff like that, that makes you think that. You just gotta push through it and use it as motivation to make your stuff better, whether it's graphics or gameplay or whatever.
I don't know how or why but I missed your first trailer and all the discussion about it. I only just watched the second and...
...
I really have no words. I welled up watching it, actually. I didn't know about your game, and it feels like it's a game I should know about not just because you're a ResetEra member, but because it looks fucking batshit incredible. I paused it to make my SO watch it and she was shocked as well. She asked me "is this the work of a single person" and I answered "I hope not because I should quit mine if so :)".
The Chrono Break stuff is beautiful, but I actually prefer your game by far. Chrono Break (besides obviously not being a full game) is very derivative of Chrono Trigger; your game isn't, it's entirely fresh. The sweeping vistas and huge cities is not something I've seen in a pixel art game often (if ever). The combination of tactical and classic JRPG is also something very unique. It makes me super excited to play it when it releases. I feel like with proper marketing, it could set the world on fire.
I'm feeling exactly like Machachan right now; the quality level in this thread is freaking incredible and it's hard not to feel self-conscious about it. It's about the only part that I dislike about making my own game; the paradoxical negative feeling when you discover an amazing indie game, when it used to be such a high. :/
You're making the game entirely solo? The music as well?
Hah, it's funny, because sometimes I'll catch that logo first thing in the morning and think the exact same thing. It's just fire at the bottom, but now it seems pretty clear that I need to add some contours or something to clear things up. The logo is actually super old and just something I golded over the other day because I couldn't think of anything else, so it makes sense that it needs an update.
Wow, thanks. That's like, the nicest thing I've ever heard about anything I've dev'd. And I hjaven't even thrown out a tweet about the game in like 18 months, so y'know, not surprising you hadn't heard of it.
The music isn't me (it's this excellent dude), but 98% of the rest is. But those 18 months of Twitter silence aren't even the entire dev time on the game. Here's the failed Kickstarter campaign from so long ago it legitimately makes me very uncomfortable to think about. I only worked on things when I could between then and now, but still, it's been way too long. Granted, I don't think I was ready for what I was aiming for before and am now, but at this point it's basically been like taking night courses at college for multiple years to make a game in a niche of a niche that most people will say looks like something that came out twenty years ago, if they don't say "Wow, people are doing crazy things with RPGMaker nowadays!".
If someone ever said that they wanted to do what I did, I would straight up
Find another person (or more) to work with, cut down on the scope, if you can't art, get an artist and focus on learning to art yourself before wasting your time on mountains of iterative work that's going to take a gross amount of time to sort through and replace, etc. Not that art is always that big of a deal. For instance, Stardew Valley doesn't have particularly noteworthy pixel art, whereas games like Chasm and The Mummy Demastered are probably two of the best pixel art games to be released ever, and neither really lit the world on fire.
I don't really have any deadlines or limits for this project until post-crowdfunding, but if you do (and you should), know your limits (if only so that you know an appropriate degree to push them to), and gameplay first.
There's so much to reply to here. Hopefully the rest of the thread doesn't mind, otherwise we can take it to PMs I guess.
As I was writing this reply I told my SO "It's amazing how, no matter how talented and good someone is and how awesome their work looks, they're always going to be insecure". It's kind of like a reverse Dunning-Kruger (or a general case of Imposter Syndrome, I guess).
Both are probably connected. If more people saw your game, you'd be getting a lot of comments like, I can guarantee it. The game looks so evocative. It's extremelly hard to hint at a greater world or even at actual huge cities beyond the bits that we can show in games, but your trailer does that so well it's breathtaking. It feels like that into in FFVI where you see the imperial capital and think "wow, that's an actual, sprawling, industrial city, not like the smal rural towns of previous FF games".
Well, I'll be frank: for what's shown in the trailer, and a solo project, I'd be shocked if it took anyone less than 5 full time years to get a complete game. I'm super excited that CrossCode finally got released, and I played that game's demo in 2012 (and it's multiple people working on it). I see your kickstarter was in 2016, that's like yesterday in terms of game dev times, even if you started a few years before that. This is especially true if you've not been working on the game full time. I've been working on my game for 20 months now entirelly "full time", and it's... well, I won't do a disservice to your game by comparing it to mine. :D
Too true and kind of terrifying. There's games with even simpler art that are very successful. I think the issue here is that you need to make art to learn art, so while it really pays to spend some time learning the basics like shading and antialiasing, in the end I'd almost say it's OK to just do stuff for your game and then replace when you get better.
Are you considering getting a publisher? Frankly at this point I think a publisher can give you far better exposure than trying to be one of the thousands of games trying to capture the public's attention. Your game is spectacular enough that I think you should have no issue pitching it to a publisher; in your particular case, I think Chucklefish would be a very good fit.
As I was writing this reply I told my SO "It's amazing how, no matter how talented and good someone is and how awesome their work looks, they're always going to be insecure". It's kind of like a reverse Dunning-Kruger (or a general case of Imposter Syndrome, I guess).
Ha, c'mon now, don't dump your own game like that. There's a ton of great stuff going on in there. I don't have too much to say that anyone else hasn't already, but something that occurred to me while watching it - that I think you have an opportunity to utilize that I really kinda didn't - is that you have a lot of clear aesthetic models in indie gaming to aim for. The vibrant, cartoon-ish style - as opposed to my dumb ass pixel painting at 640x360 - is a prevalent one, and along with the trailer edits that people recommended, there really isn't any reason why your trailer wouldn't be just as good as mine if you tightened up the aesthetic.
If I were you, I'd write the Rivals of Aether devs, show them your game, and ask if they would be willing to send some of their game's art your way for you to study and improve the art in your own. Obviously, don't copy it, but use it learn how they did shading, and outlining, and squash and stretch, and anticipation and impact and frame timings/count and so on and so forth. And if they're not cool with that, y'know whatever, it's kind of a big ask, but you can still just buy the game, open up gifcam, and do a frame by frame. Divinoids would get a meteoric boost from a little bit tighter of an artstyle and especially from some snappy, reflexive animation, and RoA has all of that plus an aesthetic that doesn't seem too far off from your own. It's true that you learn art by making art, but you learn art much faster when you have a clear goal, compatible style, and definite references to aim for.
The Dunnig-Kruger is twice as deep and four times as long as I ever thought it would be, so that's been ... fun.
Anyway, I'm not really looking for a publisher yet, but I might look into it down the line, once I'm a little more comfortable with the release window. It still feels a little early for it and I don't think that if it even were an option now it would be in either party's interest to lock things in before some more progress was made.
Thanks a lot for the advice. That said, and I hate to "reject" advice that I know is solid, but much as I'd love to, I cannot afford to make a game-wide animation rework; it would take months of time that I don't have right now. I often come back to animations to improve them as my own skills improve, but right now my primary concern is making the game as fun as possible.
If at some point I find myself in a place that I can afford to revisit all of the playable character's animations to add anticipation, windup and so on, I don't think I need to bother the Rivals of Aether devs, I can just study zoomed-up, slow-motion footage. I did something similar to study the exact way Street Fighter IV does hitstop, for example.
By the way, this reminds me of something I read from Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame). He said that other game developers aren't always the best source of feedback because we focus too much on technical aspects like visuals and animation. Non-devs tend to focus much more on gameplay and rarely give aesthetics advice. It's funny because since I read that, it's matched my experience to a tee, to the point that when I actually want aesthetics criticism from my non-dev testers, I have to extract it nearly at gunpoint. :D
Much as I try, I can't seem to be able to parse this sentence. :D
OK, but keep in mind that publishers tend to prefer getting involved before the game is close to release, as otherwise they don't have the time to market the game. You could also secure funds from them, which might help you finish it. This article was quite eye-opening:
https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/24/the-indiebeat-tips-from-publishers-and-how-to-pitch-to-them/
Pixelart looks great. Colours could perhaps be a bit more interesting in the fight scene.
My biggest complaint would be that I do not know what makes your game special? Is it the combat? The story? Or something else? So many indie games are released these days so you have to be very clear what makes your game something extra.
Edit: sorry you can ignore my comments did not see you posted the
second final trailer.
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