- Charging the power attack while you're note shooting is actually a pretty neat idea! Might try that one out.With the knowledge that there's partial controller support, I went in a second time, so I have a bit of new feedback:
- Taking a page from Subset's (FTL / ITB)'s book, I would flip the cooldown mechanic on its head. Instead of punishing the player for shooting constantly, reward them for not doing so. You already have a charged shot: make it charge automatically when you're not shooting, and fire it when you next shoot; you can even add several charge levels if you want. A lot of bullet hell games (and DMC5) do this and it works fantastically; as a bonus, you need one less button, reducing control complexity. In general, rewarding the player for doing what you want, rather than punishing them for doing the opposite, feel so much better for the player.
- Movement speed feels way too slow. It feels "sluggish" by itself, but it's also simply insufficient to dodge the incoming shots. It feels like you take a lot of cheap shots that are inevitable and whittle down your health pool which is large to compensate. With a controller I had no access to the shield skill, but I don't think defending against undodgeable enemy fire is something that feels good anyway. I would: increase the player's movement speed, decreased enemy shots' speed, and perhaps replace the shield by a directional dodge or dash. Check out most dual stick shooters like Enter the Gungeon, the player can pretty much dance around bullets, because that feels good.
- The enemies that shoot laser beams sometimes hit you instantly with no warning. I think they're programmed to start the beam on one side of you and sweep through you, but sometimes you're moving and they start the beam right on top of you. Perhaps they should instead start the beam on top of you but have a "warning", thin beam appear that does no damage.
- There's no feedback for a lot of things (e.g. getting hit), but I'm assuming this is temporary until you implement these effects. Still, in case you haven't seen it, there's one specific video by Vlambeer about feedback that I ended up implementing a ton of things from, and it made my own game feel like 200% better.
Pixel artists that use tilemaps: what tools do you use for quickly seeing how stuff fits together?
Man that's looking great, particularly the light effects.
ProMotion has reasonable support for tilemaps though if you're not using it now, it's quite a learning curve coming from aseprite.
Agnes Heyer did some great workflow vids a few years back:
Youtube Playlist
Failing that, just copy-pasting, hah.
Edit: Also I think there's a free version of GMS that's probably good enough to at least bodge a tilemap together, even if you're not making the actual game with it. Iteration is a bit annoying though as you'll have to explicitly re-import your tile set image everytime you make changes and export from aseprite, but at least the tilemap you created will be preserved.
- Charging the power attack while you're note shooting is actually a pretty neat idea! Might try that one out.
- I've already increased movement speed by ~30% for the next build. Gonna try out a dash move, I've mostly put it off because I had issues making it look good (not being a 3D/VFX artist and all...).
- Will increase the angle at which the laser beam starts, so that it doesn't start as close to the player. The "aim and shoot" laser is already on my "enemy ideas" list :)
- Yeah, I've already watched that one haha. There's still a lot for me to do in that regard, because I'm still focusing on the core systems right now.
Again, thanks so much for the feedback!
Yeah, that looks solid! I don't have a dash pose/anim yet, but as I don't even have an actual character mesh right now and am still using the UE4 mannequin, it doesn't matter anyway I guess. Plus, I recently bought this in a sale and could try it out: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/trail-masterA pleasure and an honor to be of service. :)
Re: the dash move, I wouldn't overthing it; I get away in mine with simply freezing the player in a dash pose while leaving afterimages (themselves just blue copies of the player sprite that change hue before disappearing). It's basically what Megaman X does; super simple but very effective.
Looks great!
Implemented more-or-less gamma-correct lighting as best I can in GMS. I think my time with that software is rapidly coming to an end as I'm starting to hit the limits pretty hard - specifically the lack of sRGB-aware and high bit-depth surfaces - which is causing some terribad banding in dark areas.
In other news, wrote a gml script to dump my tile-based collision layer to a huge png that I can bring into pro-motion to paint the visual layer over. Workflow isn't too bad now as I can just paint a huge image, import it as a sprite-sheet cut into 512x512 chunks and it will atlas across multiple pages as necessary, as well as cutting out empty or redundant pieces.
Trying to get a handle on Deluxe Paint style index-painting using ProMotion and Grafx2. It's kinda a lost art and although I'm aware of Dan Fessler's "HD Index Painting" photoshop layer technique it's a bit uncontrollable for my taste* and for academic interest at least I'm trying to understand the traditional methods: sometimes it's fun to work in the darkroom even if you own a digital camera.
Edit: *Specifically my problem with Fessler's approach is that the Posterize filter is a bad approximation of greyscale index selection as it doesn't really let you select your start and end luminosities, leading to a lot of wasted or missing indices. A better solution would be an explicit "Map To Palette" filter.
hint: pq + dithering
Implemented more-or-less gamma-correct lighting as best I can in GMS. I think my time with that software is rapidly coming to an end as I'm starting to hit the limits pretty hard - specifically the lack of sRGB-aware and high bit-depth surfaces - which is causing some terribad banding in dark areas.
In other news, wrote a gml script to dump my tile-based collision layer to a huge png that I can bring into pro-motion to paint the visual layer over. Workflow isn't too bad now as I can just paint a huge image, import it as a sprite-sheet cut into 512x512 chunks and it will atlas across multiple pages as necessary, as well as cutting out empty or redundant pieces.
Trying to get a handle on Deluxe Paint style index-painting using ProMotion and Grafx2. It's kinda a lost art and although I'm aware of Dan Fessler's "HD Index Painting" photoshop layer technique it's a bit uncontrollable for my taste* and for academic interest at least I'm trying to understand the traditional methods: sometimes it's fun to work in the darkroom even if you own a digital camera.
Edit: *Specifically my problem with Fessler's approach is that the Posterize filter is a bad approximation of greyscale index selection as it doesn't really let you select your start and end luminosities, leading to a lot of wasted or missing indices. A better solution would be an explicit "Map To Palette" filter.
The metalslug Resident Evil combo is reaaally selling me.
How long have you been doing pixel art as it looks great. I can't get anywhere near that level with shading. Even my fundamental blocking for shading of whole parts needs a lot of work, let alone cloth drape shading.
sux, indeed...
Yeah maybe. I'm toying with that as an option. Additive blending doesn't work correctly in srgb if the gpu isn't informed it's srgb (which GMS doesn't) which breaks the lighting buffer. Interpreting it as linear means there's like 1 bit to represent to first 16 levels of intensity or so (which is what I'm currently doing). By the time dithering would be helpful, the quantization has happened (it's not a matter of quant(A+B+C), it's more like quant(A) + quant(B) + quant(C). ...
Better you spend some more time on it. High-depth targets won't make the... Ultimately I don't know how much time I want to spend on it since I'll be migrating engines eventually and will have high-depth targets there, making it a moot point.
Nope just linking!Nice. Is this your work? I've been generally doing the same thing with sprytile in blender from aseprite painted tilesheets
I don't have the time to apply but I just wanted to say your game looks cool. I'm a bit intrigued by how small your maps are. It looks like there will be constant action.Hello thread, my first time posting here and not sure if allowed (please let me know if not and I'll remove the post)
My friend and I are developing an RTS called Tactical Galactical. It's a weird mashup, with elements from Advance Wars, Starcraft, Civilization, Hearthstone and even Rampage... quite difficult to pigeon hole exactly what it is, it's very unique.
Anyway, the reason for posting is that we are now scaling up and need a couple more people on our team. I'm asking amongst friends, but wanted to ask on ResetEra too. The positions are:
These are fully paid jobs with actual money, not """exposure""".
- Game designer/level designer
- 3D Environmental artist (possibly vehicle work too)
No matter your experience, if you're interested, please message me!
Been a hot minute since I've posted anything, but here's the most recent boss I've been working on:
Still needs some polish and playtesting (without invincibility on :) )
Thanks. Yeah, the maps really force people into combat.I don't have the time to apply but I just wanted to say your game looks cool. I'm a bit intrigued by how small your maps are. It looks like there will be constant action.
I haven't experienced your framerate issues, but how are you handling controller input? That is odd that you can't grab things.Does anyone have experience with VR in Unity? It seems that when I run the editor with VSYNC turned on, my framerate is cut in half. I'm at a steady 30-35 fps. But when I turn VSYNC off, the editor runs at 80+, perfectly without any jitters or hitches. However, I'm not able to grab things anymore... which I also don't really understand.
Any help is appreciated!
The real simple way to handle this is to set the score to static. e.g. static float myscore;It is me....again, I would like to know how can I save my currentScore between scenes, like currentScore from scene 1 is 400.000 and I want to carry this score to the new scene, so the player can continue to collect score.
If You forgot, I'm using Unity and C#.
The real simple way to handle this is to set the score to static. e.g. static float myscore;
Alternatively you can use the DontDestroyOnLoad method so that the object carries over from one scene to the next.
How is your score setup?
public static int currentScore;public int currentScore;
it is public because I need to access it from another script.
I haven't experienced your framerate issues, but how are you handling controller input? That is odd that you can't grab things.
Thanks for the heads-up! Welltall Zero there´s one about Astro Bot you may be interested in.