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i'm impressed, that looks good and came together real fast.
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May 17, 2021 23:16
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Your Computer posted:it's basically a fully playable pinball table now and i exported the .exe to celebrate Itch.io ? You can easily just set up a free project and have the file be downloadable. (Or export a html5 build from Godot as well, and have it be playable in-browser, with some additional fiddling + option for downloading the executable.) Having a project cost something to access is entirely optional.
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May 17, 2021 23:31
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no idea where i would upload it if anyone's interested in trying though
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Path of least resistance for me is to toss a .zip on google drive and create a public download link But itch.io is pretty amazing compared to Steam
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May 18, 2021 00:03
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oh i wasn't thinking of like "releasing" it or anything yet, it's just the first playable build  i'm still working on the table and itch.io seems like a good option for when i'm ready to put it out publicly
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May 18, 2021 00:05
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Yeah, you can just have a private/unlisted project and share the link. It's mostly useful for the fact that you could do html5, and thus share it without people even needing to download it. But yeah, the zero fuss option would just be a Google drive link or something.
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May 18, 2021 02:42
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Your Computer posted:e: also i've been trying to come up with some music for it but no success yet. what i really want is the upbeat and fun bubble ghost music ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGcv5tPLW7s ) but that's exactly the kind of music i just can't make
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May 18, 2021 03:22
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Your Computer posted:just showing off some progress, now with ~*~sound~*~ This is buttery smooth 
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May 18, 2021 12:25
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sorry for spamming this thread with pinball project, but i just spent today kinda uhhhhhhhhhhhh redesigning the table there's a lot more to do now
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May 18, 2021 17:40
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Your Computer posted:e: also i've been trying to come up with some music for it but no success yet. what i really want is the upbeat and fun bubble ghost music ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGcv5tPLW7s ) but that's exactly the kind of music i just can't make
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May 18, 2021 20:33
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Do the street and sidewalk read as asphalt and grimy cement to you guys? I think it's probably fine since everything is stylized and low-detail, but I've been staring at it for too long to see anything but the noise algorithms I'm blending together: 
Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 21:38 on May 18, 2021 |
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May 18, 2021 21:35
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Omi no Kami posted:Do the street and sidewalk read as asphalt and grimy cement to you guys? I think it's probably fine since everything is stylized and low-detail, but I've been staring at it for too long to see anything but the noise algorithms I'm blending together: The ground looks fine, in fact I'd say the only thing in the picture that stands out as odd age the bollards and I think thats because the reflection seems odd, everything else is good.
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May 18, 2021 21:45
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Hel posted:The ground looks fine, in fact I'd say the only thing in the picture that stands out as odd age the bollards and I think thats because the reflection seems odd, everything else is good. Oh awesome, thanks! And yeah... the bollards were a weird one- I build baked lighting into a lot of my indoor prop textures to break up the base color, and I forgot to turn that off on some of the outdoor props. The stripe of lighting is 100% baked (since, yeah, the shadow is like 270 degrees offset from the reflection.) How is the cement trim on the gutters and the edges of the sidewalk? That's the one bit I'm on the fence about- on one hand I feel like it doesn't read like anything, but all it really needs to do is separate the two high-detail textures and not look out of place.
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May 18, 2021 22:09
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godot owns, this took like 10 minutes to make and now I can spawn, fight and defeat bats whenever and wherever I want (has sound) https://i.imgur.com/6vPNkDg.mp4
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May 18, 2021 22:53
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Hot drat that pinball looks cool, looks like a GBA game for sure.
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May 18, 2021 23:05
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Omi no Kami posted:Do the street and sidewalk read as asphalt and grimy cement to you guys? I think it's probably fine since everything is stylized and low-detail, but I've been staring at it for too long to see anything but the noise algorithms I'm blending together: I have painted a ton of asphalt and road textures over the years. The main thing making it not read as road is that is is missing directionalality. Drips, wear, accumulated rubber, sand/dirty should all present themselves in a linear pattern.
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May 19, 2021 00:32
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YC, teach me how to draw, tia
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May 19, 2021 00:45
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asmasm posted:I have painted a ton of asphalt and road textures over the years. The main thing making it not read as road is that is is missing directionalality. Drips, wear, accumulated rubber, sand/dirty should all present themselves in a linear pattern. Holy crap, that is a great observation. It's one of those things that's obvious when someone else points it out, but hadn't occurred to me at all. Even with really minimal adjustments, that makes a world of different- so thank you! 
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May 19, 2021 01:27
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So I ended up playing with Unity. Finding some of the design decisions interesting after working for years in Unreal. Currently implementing player stuff and an inventory and statistics, but I'm not 100% sure this "component" type thing where you add scripts to objects is clicking with me. Feels a bit disconnected and like I'm going to run into issues getting it all to work together. I'm sure it will be fine, but it's a bit fiddley it feels. Still wondering if before I get too far in, that I should also give Godot a try too just for fun.
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May 19, 2021 02:38
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I mean, if you don't like it you're free to write a custom class per game object instead of composing multiple scripts. Or if you really want, forgoe monobehaviors entirely. You do you 
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May 19, 2021 03:23
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The Titanic posted:So I ended up playing with Unity. It's not too bad once you get the hang of it. Being able to stick scripts to different gameobjects makes it pretty easy to recycle scripts that do similar things, plus you can always make empty gameobjects specifically to hold some 'global' scripts that aren't attached to any entity in particular. I'm not familiar with Godot or Unity though, maybe those are more intuitive. dhamster fucked around with this message at 03:31 on May 19, 2021 |
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May 19, 2021 03:28
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If you're from a heavy Object Oriented background, Godot might make more sense. Its node system really clicked with me right off the bat, and I still think its "animation" system is brilliant though that one took me a little longer to figure out -- it's really just interpolating between any two values of any property times however many tracks you wanna make. With the option to throw some function calls in for good measure. Of course in practice gamedev is all about compromise. For my big deal project I went in a little too heavy on the Entity Component System paradigm and basically ended up recreating Unity's system but in my own Godot code. In hindsight inheritance is better for some tasks, composition for others, signals are often great, and sometimes it's fine to just pass around references in method calls. Or, gasp!, store them in stateful variables. I'd still recommend giving Godot a quick looksee 'cause I haven't been as taken by a game engine since Klik 'n' Play. Or maybe the unofficially-translated RPG Maker 95. I can no longer remember which I discovered first.
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May 19, 2021 03:40
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Idk how Unreal does it but my favorite thing about Unity is having complete control over the editor. You can write a single script e.g. “enemy controller” with health, strength, etc and then create a couple prefabs with filled in attributes like goblin, demon, whatever. It’s faster to me than Godot’s node system but the component tree can get annoyingly cluttered if you don’t maintain good housekeeping which seems to be unity in general.
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May 19, 2021 04:57
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Question for everyone here: How do people find out about games these days? I haven't been a game consumer in a long time and trying to understand how to get our game in front of more people is challenging. Are game news websites like RPS and destructoid still popular places to read about games? The comment engagement seems low. Is it all twitch and youtube? A substantial number of our sales seem to come from steam store presence but that is one thing we can't directly control. Anyone have thoughts on efficient marketing for indies with basically zero marketing budgets?
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May 19, 2021 15:24
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Thank you for the comments. I think I will keep playing with Unity a bit more before I try out Godot, I just want to get past the first learning curve and how everything is supposed to go together. I want to have characters that can just be whatever I need them to be and controlled from an AI controller or player controller, and I'm just not yet getting how adding these bits of code yet works, but I'm hoping it will click. I do come from OOP-land and I'm having that hurdle of figuring things out. But there are some good-enough tutorials online it seems that I'm learning from along the way.
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May 19, 2021 15:45
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asmasm posted:Question for everyone here: How do people find out about games these days? I haven't been a game consumer in a long time and trying to understand how to get our game in front of more people is challenging. Are game news websites like RPS and destructoid still popular places to read about games? The comment engagement seems low. Is it all twitch and youtube? A substantial number of our sales seem to come from steam store presence but that is one thing we can't directly control. Anyone have thoughts on efficient marketing for indies with basically zero marketing budgets? RPS cratered in quality a long time ago sadly, I don't know any games websites that aren't trash at the moment. You'd probably get some eyeballs anywhere, but where is the most bang for your buck? Hard to say. Places I find out about games: Steam, SA, youtube, twitch, yeah. I think TooMuchAbstraction was running some ads for their game so they can probably give you some tips? I remember them posting about the results. The Titanic posted:Thank you for the comments. I use Unity in an OOP-y way because that's how I think and it works pretty well. Nothing stops your monobehaviors from themselves deriving from abstract classes if that's what you want to do. (Or as I said before, ignore monos entirely) so I don't think its the OOP that's throwing you off so much. There's definitely a lot of tutorials, although that is a double-edged sword with Unity as you get a ton of youtube videos of people who only sorta know what they're talking about and take a really long time to get to the point. I miss when everything was text and you could scroll quickly and skim for the details you really need
Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 18:14 on May 19, 2021 |
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May 19, 2021 18:11
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Zaphod42 posted:RPS cratered in quality a long time ago sadly, I don't know any games websites that aren't trash at the moment. You'd probably get some eyeballs anywhere, but where is the most bang for your buck? Hard to say. I am throwing money at the problem because I found trying to run ads myself to be very stressful. I had no real idea what I was doing, and was exposing myself to a lot of mean comments on said ads. Plus it took a lot of time that I wanted to be spending on the game instead. So I hired a marketing and PR firm, which is costing me $10k to run a launch, in addition to ad spend. The firm supports ad budgets of as low as $100, though obviously there's less you can do with that compared to larger budgets. The bigger your budget, the more things you can afford; ads on big sites and sponsored streamer videos are the main things that can devour an ad budget. With zero monetary budget (but more time), you're pretty much looking at posting on social media and hoping to go viral. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, etc. all let you make an account for free and post about whatever you want, more or less. But it's up to the site algorithms to determine if you get any attention on your posts.
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May 19, 2021 18:23
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asmasm posted:Question for everyone here: How do people find out about games these days? I haven't been a game consumer in a long time and trying to understand how to get our game in front of more people is challenging. Are game news websites like RPS and destructoid still popular places to read about games? The comment engagement seems low. Is it all twitch and youtube? A substantial number of our sales seem to come from steam store presence but that is one thing we can't directly control. Anyone have thoughts on efficient marketing for indies with basically zero marketing budgets? Game consumer here. I'm a bit hardcore and probably not a great representative sample, but here's how I find out about games: Youtube creators that play the kinds of games that I like, doing a quick video or LP (sometimes even sponsored videos). Steam storefront pages like New and Trending, Popular Upcoming, etc. Tweets or Retweets from Indie devs that I follow. Something Awful threads. Recommendations from Steam. e: Dunno how close to zero basically zero is, but you might check to see how much a YouTuber that vibes with your game would charge for a sponsored video?
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May 19, 2021 19:48
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PC Gamer is like the only big website that will scour twitter to highlight any indie game that looks remotely good.
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May 19, 2021 19:54
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made an attempt at writing a track (it runs on the gameboy!) https://soundcloud.com/noiseyard-1/pinball-tocatta
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May 19, 2021 20:01
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Wasted way too much time on other poo poo, back at games-ing. Work on the Sekiro/Punch-Out!! mashup continues. It feels pretty solid to play at this point, but I need to make my art look a little more standard. My pixel sizes and resolutions and palettes are kinda all over the place  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR6jLEKs_-Q
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May 19, 2021 20:26
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Your Computer posted:made an attempt at writing a track (it runs on the gameboy!) I dig it a lot. This is entirely personal opinion, but I don't know if it matches the pinball scene you've been showing off but rather its a rad title screen track, if that makes sense.
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May 19, 2021 21:36
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Your Computer posted:made an attempt at writing a track (it runs on the gameboy!) tl;dr: IT'S GOOD! The intro/bridge lasts entirely too long for my tastes -- assuming 4/4 time, the first three 2-bar phrases are identical, and the fourth such phrase only differs in its last couple beats as the actual song picks up. I think the phrase itself is fine in isolation, but it's fairly simple and repetitive, and it's the only thing that happens for the first ~12 seconds which is too much for me. I would cut the first two out of those identical phrases, lopping 6 seconds off the intro, and making the song proper get going sooner. Maybe even cut all three of those identical phrases so it starts with just the currently-fourth phrase, for a tidy 3-second intro? And mb bring one of those phrases back for the bridge, so the bridge is two phrases / 4 bars long? Mb! As a parallel suggestion (and especially if it's a title screen thing where some darkened title graphics are slowly scrolling around, and they snap into place / light up when the melody kicks in), I would suggest turning the volume way down on that intro portion and have it crescendo into the current volume when the melody arrives. Once the song starts, I love it though! There's a bunch of interesting stuff going on, you've got some real musicality in the melodies vs harmonies, it's high energy, and it sounds good My only suggestion would be to vary some of the rhythms a little more throughout, so there's a bit more contrast from one phrase/section to the next, but I'm not actually a music person and have never composed much so take that for what it's worth.Overall this is pretty great, it matches your likewise-great gameboy pinball demos (that you've slammed together in a shockingly short amount of time), and I'm enjoying watching it develop. Thanks for sharing all of this!
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May 19, 2021 22:44
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Zaphod42 posted:RPS cratered in quality a long time ago sadly, I don't know any games websites that aren't trash at the moment. You'd probably get some eyeballs anywhere, but where is the most bang for your buck? Hard to say. I used to love RPS but a few years ago they seemed to have gotten on some kind of weird better-than-thou kick with women and it got a bit awkward even as a woman. I just wanted to read about games and funny stuff and not have people mash how woman-centric they are or this isn't or something. Not sure if they still do that because I haven't visited or read an article from there in a very long time after being turned off. It was less about gaming news and more about social attitudes or whatever. quote:I use Unity in an OOP-y way because that's how I think and it works pretty well. Nothing stops your monobehaviors from themselves deriving from abstract classes if that's what you want to do. (Or as I said before, ignore monos entirely) so I don't think its the OOP that's throwing you off so much. It's funny you say that because there's some tutorials out there that seem good but as you go through them the people start doing some bad practices or super horrible designs for speedy computations and it leaves you either stuck because you don't want to continue, or plow through with this concept and consider refactoring later  Unreal was especially bad. I felt like the blueprints were great but they are a horrible breeding ground for people who never took a CS class in their lives. But at least they made it work I guess.
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May 20, 2021 00:30
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Every so often Unity's lightmapper freaks out and claims that one of my models has overlapping UVs, it happens consistently enough that there must be something specific I'm doing wrong, but I've never been able to figure out what it is, or correlate the bad texels to problems in my UV. Like, here are two assets that textured just fine (the stretching on the doorknob is because I used a sphere projection to avoid a visible seam): The textures themselves came out undistorted and I wasted tons of space on padding since I know the lightmapper freaks out if islands are too close together, but both of these still bake with bad texels. The left-hand version is using my UVs, right-hand is having the Unity importer generate the lightmap UVs:  The only thing I can kinda think of is that they're small (each texture's only 128k), or that unity is just freaking out over nothing. They look fine after the lighting bake, but the whole point of churning out tons of practice assets is to iron out workflow issues like this.
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May 20, 2021 00:38
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E:nm
caleb fucked around with this message at 05:07 on May 20, 2021 |
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May 20, 2021 05:04
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Omi no Kami posted:
Probably this yeah. If it goes away when you try an unnecessarily larger texture it would give you the answer.
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May 20, 2021 05:57
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Superrodan posted:I dig it a lot. This is entirely personal opinion, but I don't know if it matches the pinball scene you've been showing off but rather its a rad title screen track, if that makes sense. yeah no, I was thinking the same while I was making it  like I already stated, I'd like something more upbeat and fun for the table and this was mostly just an attempt at writing a game boy track in general and not necessarily something for the gameGrace Baiting posted:tl;dr: IT'S GOOD! I honestly made the intro/bridge that long to pad out the song because it repeated too quickly for me without it so I guess similar but different issues As for the crescendo suggestion I'm not even sure I could do something like that - I'm writing this in the only halfway modern tracker I could find that is hardware accurate ( https://github.com/SuperDisk/hUGETracker ) but it's still very new, a bit unstable and very, very clunky to use. It's my first time using it and I'm not very familiar with writing music on trackers in the first place so needless to say it's a challenge!I really appreciate all the kind words.
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May 20, 2021 11:56
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Omi no Kami posted:The only thing I can kinda think of is that they're small (each texture's only 128k), or that unity is just freaking out over nothing. They look fine after the lighting bake, but the whole point of churning out tons of practice assets is to iron out workflow issues like this. Most of my lightmapping issues have generally come down to overlapping or issues with padding, where they generally expect a certain number of pixels worth of padding around each island etc. (Which can be pretty brutal with low res textures.) Maya has an UV packer/layout tool that lets you set expected resolution of a texture + set up how much padding you want, is there something similar in Blender you could use? Their docs mention that you need atleast 2 texels between .... charts? (Is this some unity specific lingo?) and it looks like you might not have that around the edge, if that is required. I'd suggest spinning up Blender's UV tool and seeing if there's a lightmap-oriented packer with options for a margin/padding, and see how much space you need to dedicate to padding to make the issue go away. (At low res this issue is way exacerbated after all, especially if you're hand-placing the islands/shells.) (At least if the issue is solved with more padding, you'll know that was the cause, and not something else.)
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May 20, 2021 14:16
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Yes, blender has a lightmap option and when you select it a little box pops up allowing to specify padding. The default is comically low at .1. I bump it up to .5 and adjust from there. It has an image size and quality slider too but I've never experimented with them. It would be better if it let you specify the padding as texels, it'd be more intuitive, but that's the cost of a free tool I guess.
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May 20, 2021 14:20
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Hmm, even ridonkulous padding on the UV side doesn't seem to help, so I just blasted unity's generator margins up from 1-2. It wastes space, but it seems to work more consistently.
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May 21, 2021 00:17
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