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Some more NWN texture re-mastering stuff. I've done a bunch recently but this one has been interesting to work on because there was no way to just upscale the original flat diffuse and generate PBR maps for it & tweak those maps to look right. It needed a complete re-work from scratch. So I had to go do more Substance Designer, which is always massive amounts of work. Amusingly enough I also had to create the floorboards here in Substance Designer, which took me ages as I'd never used it before and... drat those big graph maps are insane. Anyways: ORIGINAL GAME (wall texture only - floorboards I already remastered previously):  FIRST ATTEMPT AT NEW TEXTURE (looks way too clean versus the original IMO):  LATEST VERSION NEW TEXTURE (...kind of went too far the other way, looks too broken/dirty lol):  And a couple more shots:    
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Aug 1, 2023 17:12
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El Grillo posted:FIRST ATTEMPT AT NEW TEXTURE (looks way too clean versus the original IMO): I disagree I love this. Maybe do some bricks showing through if you can do it only on one or two panels as an accent (that probably requires remapping the textures onto the geometry), but other than that ship it.
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Aug 1, 2023 18:32
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Oh hey I didn't realise the Slayers X dev posted here. Game kicks rear end, I bought it immediately on release  Really nailed the build engine feeling and had me laughing my rear end off too.
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Aug 1, 2023 19:22
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 slowly starting to take shape. I'm wondering, though, whether I should maybe go with mouse/touchscreen-only controls, i.e. ditch gamepad as an option? My thinking here is that on a PC, the mouse will almost certainly be the best option, and on mobile, touchscreen will be the only option. Main concern is how the Steam Deck would fare. Any thoughts? The main motivation for this is that if I decide to support gamepad, I'll need to have two sets of directional inputs: one for moving the player in the tactical layer, and one for moving the cursor in the match-3 layer. Obviously this is readily achievable by a number of means, but it does feel a bit inelegant.
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Aug 2, 2023 00:17
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If you ditch gamepad option you'll (guessing here, but probably) lose your steam deck certification eligibility Not sure about others but before I buy a game now I check to see if it's compatible with steam deck as a sort of "minimum quality stamp of approval" it's not a perfect system but does sort out the ancient crap that hasn't been updated in a million years
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Aug 2, 2023 01:26
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ah, well, rip to that idea then. Updated the UI a bit. I think this is all the UI elements I'll need, beyond stuff like controller prompts, visuals, nicer backgrounds, and other "polish" items. I moved all of the touch elements to the right side, to cater to righthanded people using phones. Probably have an option to swap that for lefties, once options are implemented.  EDIT: it does bug me a bit that the arrow buttons aren't visually associated with the tactical map, on the left. They're meant to be for moving your character around. But I can't think of a way to make the layout work with that, which doesn't introduce tons of dead space. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Aug 2, 2023 01:58
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If this was on a phone, I would expect to just swipe in the direction I wanted to move on the map instead of pressing a virtual d pad.
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Aug 2, 2023 02:39
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KillHour posted:If this was on a phone, I would expect to just swipe in the direction I wanted to move on the map instead of pressing a virtual d pad.  of course, thank you. I'm not used to mobile design, I completely forgot that gestures were a thing. For that matter, just putting hidden buttons on the edges of the tactical map would probably do the trick.
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Aug 2, 2023 04:19
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I decided after a year of working on my game that it was time to set up a website and steam page to start collecting those sweet wishlists. The Secrets of Skellig (steam) It's a puzzle game that takes place on a remote island in a fantasy world. You play an old lighthouse keeper who gains the ability to jump into tiles on the ground to solve puzzles. The game is full of secrets of mysteries which is the kind of thing I love in a game. From there most of the gameplay is based on crossword puzzles, although since it's a game and not in newspapers the clues can be a lot more dynamic and interesting, for example related to things you see in the environment around you. https://secretsofskellig.com/video/gameplay.mp4 I'm the primary developer on the project so it's slow going, but I'm having a blast learning Godot, Blender and Substance Painter.
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Aug 2, 2023 15:48
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Those animations are   The first image fits with the dark dank theme but maybe too poorly lit for first impression. Consider a close up of a well lit captain/pirate guy
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Aug 2, 2023 19:06
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Evil Trout posted:I decided after a year of working on my game that it was time to set up a website and steam page to start collecting those sweet wishlists. This looks really interesting and unique! If you need a tester I volunteer. I love me some puzzle games and can record a playthrough with commentary to give you an idea of my thoughts at any given time.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:19
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Yeah, that looks up my alley too. I'm a simple man so stuff like Baba is You just get too hard. The underlying process here looks like it can't get too insane, and I like word games. I also love little secret things in games, so long as they aren't absolutely ridiculously obscure. e: wishlisted!
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Aug 3, 2023 03:46
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I wanted something I could do quickly, so I added in the ability to change the perspective away from orthographic. Because this is a fully raytraced/pathtraced renderer, I can do things like proper fisheye. But I can also do a saddle projection, which is a normal far things = small projection on one axis, and a reverse far things = big projection on the other axis. And it's fuckin' weird. Serth, don't watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_DU_3U61ks
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Aug 3, 2023 04:14
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Spatial posted:Oh hey I didn't realise the Slayers X dev posted here. Game kicks rear end, I bought it immediately on release thanks, glad you dug!
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Aug 3, 2023 08:54
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KillHour posted:I wanted something I could do quickly, so I added in the ability to change the perspective away from orthographic. Because this is a fully raytraced/pathtraced renderer, I can do things like proper fisheye. But I can also do a saddle projection, which is a normal far things = small projection on one axis, and a reverse far things = big projection on the other axis. And it's fuckin' weird. Oh don't worry, I read my up to the word "fisheye" and decided to go "nope nope nope nope". Was about to point that detail out to you when I saw you'd already taken my special elven eyes into account.
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Aug 3, 2023 12:10
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Superrodan posted:This looks really interesting and unique! If you need a tester I volunteer. I love me some puzzle games and can record a playthrough with commentary to give you an idea of my thoughts at any given time. Sure, I am still a bit early on for that. I've only done a couple tests with me watching friends on my laptop. But there will come a time where I need more testers. Maybe PM me your email address and I'll add it to a list if you're interested? Gromit posted:Yeah, that looks up my alley too. I'm a simple man so stuff like Baba is You just get too hard. The underlying process here looks like it can't get too insane, and I like word games. I also love little secret things in games, so long as they aren't absolutely ridiculously obscure. I loved Baba is You but I also found it got too hard and bailed on it. In fact all those box moving / rotating games quickly escape me. I think there will be some optional areas with really challenging puzzles in my game, but I hope most of it can be beaten without too much punishment  Balancing a puzzle game is really tricky. Some people will always want it harder and some easier. The NYT crosswords let you use as many reveals/checks as you want but you lose the "Gold Star". I might do something like that.
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Aug 3, 2023 13:22
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SerthVarnee posted:Oh don't worry, I read my up to the word "fisheye" and decided to go "nope nope nope nope". I think it's fair to say you should just not click on any links I post unless I explicitly say otherwise.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:21
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Got the turn sequence and enemies moving and taking actions. The goblin's AI here is: 1. Move towards player 2. Pass 3. Move towards player 4. Transform all air tokens to earth https://i.imgur.com/WeJTNnZ.mp4 Someone asked me if the enemies benefit from mucking with the game board. My thinking right now is that they mostly don't; I might toss a pity 1HP heal per match to the goblin for their special move, but nothing really substantial. My fear is that if the enemies get huge combos that actually do something, that will feel bad for the player. It certainly feels bad in Puzzle Quest when the enemy gets a big combo, whether or not it was one you could have predicted happening. What I do want to do though is make other enemy abilities depend on or affect the board state. Some examples: - When they hit you in melee, damage is (# of earth tokens on the board) points - Their movement speed is (# of air tokens on the board) / 4 - Every time they hit you, they break a token on the board, preventing it from matching for N turns - They place a time bomb on a token. If the token is not cleared in N turns, it explodes, hurting you - They designate a position on the game board. Each turn, they fire a projectile according to the tile at that position: air is up, earth is down, fire is left, water is right, chaos is everything in a knight's move around them (this is the same as the player's basic attack, except the player has to make matches to do it)
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Aug 3, 2023 23:10
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KillHour posted:I think it's fair to say you should just not click on any links I post unless I explicitly say otherwise. You have the perfect avatar for reminding me not to click your links specifically. You were the one with the rhythm based color shifting/shape shifting blob right?
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Aug 4, 2023 05:33
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SerthVarnee posted:You have the perfect avatar for reminding me not to click your links specifically. Yes. All my videos are pretty much about that or variations on that.
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Aug 4, 2023 06:31
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madjackmcmad, the developer of Dungeonmans, has kindly allowed me to use his game's art for this project. So I spent most of today figuring out how to automatically pick the right wall/floor tiles, and how to pull sprites out of atlases. https://i.imgur.com/vPE3QMp.mp4 Y'all should check out Dungeonmans, it's cool.
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Aug 5, 2023 05:04
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Dungeonmans is awesome and I was not aware it is still being updated. I'd start up a new world if not for my backlog and need to catch up on my own project.
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Aug 5, 2023 06:03
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:madjackmcmad, the developer of Dungeonmans, has kindly allowed me to use his game's art for this project. So I spent most of today figuring out how to automatically pick the right wall/floor tiles, and how to pull sprites out of atlases. The flashing on the right is a bit too quick for my liking. Intensity is fine, but the speed of the flash appearing and disappearing is too fast for me to absorb it as anything other than an out of focus event and that is...bad for health.
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Aug 5, 2023 07:33
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After one week of Gamemaker just not properly working on my Mac, followed by my finally updating to Ventura, followed by some confusion because I made the external HD weird, followed by trying to get the danged apartment clean when the AC refuses to dip below 80 F, I have, at long last, gotten it so you can open a box and get an item from it.
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Aug 5, 2023 09:38
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:madjackmcmad, the developer of Dungeonmans, has kindly allowed me to use his game's art for this project. So I spent most of today figuring out how to automatically pick the right wall/floor tiles, and how to pull sprites out of atlases. That's a nifty idea for a game mechanic. I came up with something similar when I saw Peglin, but I basically made the board smaller to make it easier for the player to intentionally do things. Obviously not for a prototype but the thing I realised would go well longer-term with this sort of mechanic is a "daily challenge" type mode where you the dev design an encounter/board setup such that there's a couple pre-designed ways to defeat it "optimally" and then can show the player stats comparing them to other people who went through the challenge (and for sure you'll also see people actually find a better solution than your pre-designed ways). Design a load of them in advance, then make it cycle through them over time, add more when you have ideas.
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Aug 5, 2023 11:44
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SerthVarnee posted:The flashing on the right is a bit too quick for my liking. Yeah, sorry  That is all extremely temporary, as should hopefully be obvious. The reason it flashes so quickly is because I'm trying to identify the correct pacing for animations, but the actual animations will be less intrusive, once I have appropriate art.Red Mike posted:That's a nifty idea for a game mechanic. I came up with something similar when I saw Peglin, but I basically made the board smaller to make it easier for the player to intentionally do things. That's a neat idea, sort of a puzzle mode. The standard daily/weekly seeds approach feels easier to do, though, since there's no handcrafting required. One of the things I quite liked about Puzzle Quest was its crafting system, but it's hilariously overwrought for the scope of game that I'm trying to make here. In Puzzle Quest, you could find and battle "runekeepers", which were basically just up-statted regular enemies. There was a huge number of them scattered about the game, and each one gave a rune that did something different. You could pick 3 runes to make an item: a primary effect, secondary effect, and then one that adjusted the strength of the effects. The game would then determine a crafting difficulty, and you'd be tossed into a "puzzle mode" where you had to clear special hammer&anvil tokens, with the target number of clears based on how difficult the item was to craft. There was no source of refreshing the board in that mode, so you had to carefully manage your special tokens and your free matches to avoid getting the board locked (with no matches possible). It was neat, and absolutely the way to access the most OP equipment, but also you could spend 10-20 minutes crafting a single item, and I want an entire run of my game to be done in under an hour, so I don't think I can reasonably include it.
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Aug 5, 2023 18:42
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That match-3 dungeon fighter is lookin pretty cool. I took more or less a vacation from dev for the summer, interspersed with real vacations and real life work, but I've been back at it for a good while, so I'm catching up with the thread here. I've been grinding down the many to-dos left on Solquence v2, so I can publish it this Fall and start fully on the next cool thing. Biggest change, I gave up on leaderboards. I know they'd be a great feature for this kind of game, but with the dated system I'm working from, integrating either Google or Apple is more want to put in. But, it gives me more space to juice it up, and I found some hints on how to do tweens so maybe the trade off will be worth it. I do have a question - if you're looking at this menu and you tap either 'how to play' or the potato logo, and you then end up on either YouTube or your browser, respectively, do you feel a sense of *ultimate betrayal* that I didn't warn you, especially on your phone, that we're going that way, or is that more or less something a modern audience wouldn't look sideways at? I'm thinking about a popup that says 'hold on, this goes to the INTERNET' but then maybe that's more handholding than is needed? Alternatively, I could just throw a visual clue in there, like a video icon or a globe icon. Every thing I add does become skinnable, so its more work on the pile, but I want it to be welcoming. 
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Aug 7, 2023 16:17
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If you would label it as ”Video Tutorial” I would be OK with it opening a different app. An icon could be helpful too but I’m not sure it’s necessary. The potato thing is a bit more ambiguous. It doesn’t look like something you could tap so if I’d hit it I’d most likely do it by accident which would be confusing. If it would have a globe icon or something instead or as part of the element it might help.
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Aug 7, 2023 16:29
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Contentato posted:I do have a question - if you're looking at this menu and you tap either 'how to play' or the potato logo, and you then end up on either YouTube or your browser, respectively, do you feel a sense of *ultimate betrayal* that I didn't warn you, especially on your phone, that we're going that way, or is that more or less something a modern audience wouldn't look sideways at? I'm thinking about a popup that says 'hold on, this goes to the INTERNET' but then maybe that's more handholding than is needed? Alternatively, I could just throw a visual clue in there, like a video icon or a globe icon. Every thing I add does become skinnable, so its more work on the pile, but I want it to be welcoming. I don't know how representative 40-year-old internet curmudgeons are of your target audience but personally if I downloaded a random game and it directed me to a video tutorial it would probably get uninstalled at that point. Give me words to read you fucker. EDIT: to be clear it's not the existence of video tutorials that annoys me, it's the lack of alternatives. If there's 1-2 slides with a summary and a link to Youtube then I have no beef. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 16:30
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Dungeon match3 game giving me strong memories of 10000000 on ios: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Ofywj3Iy4
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Aug 7, 2023 16:35
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the holy poopacy posted:game and it directed me to a video tutorial it would probably get uninstalled at that point. Give me words to read you fucker. Strong agree
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Aug 7, 2023 17:27
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the holy poopacy posted:I don't know how representative 40-year-old internet curmudgeons are of your target audience but personally if I downloaded a random game and it directed me to a video tutorial it would probably get uninstalled at that point. Give me words to read you fucker. This, but i also hate it when software directs me to an online help or god forbid a wiki
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Aug 7, 2023 17:45
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Tunicate posted:This, but i also hate it when software directs me to an online help or god forbid a wiki Or, even worse, their Discord server. 
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Aug 7, 2023 17:52
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Dewgy posted:Or, even worse, their Discord server. I don't mind being sent to a wiki for help, god knows no one could ever manage to play dwarf fortress without the wiki open in the background, but if the only help available for your game is a discord server I'm never going to join it and if that means I can't enjoy playing it then I just won't
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Aug 7, 2023 18:12
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the holy poopacy posted:I don't know how representative 40-year-old internet curmudgeons are of your target audience but personally if I downloaded a random game and it directed me to a video tutorial it would probably get uninstalled at that point. Give me words to read you fucker. This is totally fair, and its actually how I ended up where I ended up. There's a tutorial built right into the game, so if you just start playing, it walks you through it, but once in a while I've gotten questions that just aren't tutorial-friendly (and there's just other info that belongs in a guide, like 500 wins you the game, or whatever), so I think a way to expand on some advanced info is a quick video. Its stuff you could eventually just figure out yourself playing the game a while, but I feel like seeing it happen is maybe the best summary? Version 1 had a click-through slideshow but I felt like it was just mostly words that nobody would really read, while a few minutes video may just be the best way to get all of that out there. If someone gets invested enough to wonder about more advanced stuff, anyways. I was putting together this popup and I was like 'is this too much?' Maybe it's just enough?  Maybe the logo just needs a 'website' label or something. I guess while I'm on the subject, when you click on the rectangle, it opens up skin choices, but maybe that one just needs a label too.
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Aug 7, 2023 18:16
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Contentato posted:This is totally fair, and its actually how I ended up where I ended up. There's a tutorial built right into the game, so if you just start playing, it walks you through it, but once in a while I've gotten questions that just aren't tutorial-friendly (and there's just other info that belongs in a guide, like 500 wins you the game, or whatever), so I think a way to expand on some advanced info is a quick video. Its stuff you could eventually just figure out yourself playing the game a while, but I feel like seeing it happen is maybe the best summary? Version 1 had a click-through slideshow but I felt like it was just mostly words that nobody would really read, while a few minutes video may just be the best way to get all of that out there. If someone gets invested enough to wonder about more advanced stuff, anyways. If it's got a built-in tutorial that's fine by me, but I would recommend making it clear that the video tutorial is not required or expected to jump in and play. Maybe you could label it "Advanced Tutorial/Guide" or "Additional Info" or something along those lines?
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Aug 7, 2023 18:22
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xzzy posted:Dungeon match3 game giving me strong memories of 10000000 on ios: Yeah, turns out there's a lot of variations on this concept! If I understand the one you linked properly, it's all about quickly making matches of the right token to deal with the threat that has just popped up? I'm aiming for a more methodical kind of gameplay...not slow exactly, but not timed. A bunch of people yelled at me to use the Puzzles & Dragons match3 mechanics, so I quickly implemented them, and I can see why they're popular: https://i.imgur.com/PTk0Uee.mp4 (spoilered because I haven't fixed the flashing tokens yet) You have a lot of flexibility to set up cool combos/chains...maybe too much flexibility? If I understand correctly, P&D puts a timer on you to keep you from micro-optimizing every turn, but again, I don't really want to put time pressure on the player. So I'm wondering if maybe I just give them a move limit? Like, once you pick up a piece, you can make 50 swaps with it, or 100, whatever. Enough that you can set up some cool combos but not so many that you'd be tempted to tediously move a token from one corner of the board to the other. ...but then I worry that maybe some players will just perform all their moves in their head to make sure they do the best thing that fits in under the move limit. Bleh. Can't please everyone I guess. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 18:56
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gently caress discord forever
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Aug 7, 2023 19:02
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:A bunch of people yelled at me to use the Puzzles & Dragons match3 mechanics, so I quickly implemented them, and I can see why they're popular: Huh, never seen those before but they do make it interesting. Play around with a move limit (stamina bar?) but I kinda worry that without the forced timer people will fabricate too much stress trying to min/max the "optimal" outcome. People are dumb.
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Aug 7, 2023 19:13
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Video tutorials made me think of this, excuse the busy ui. This was only possible because a bunch of people have streamed it and some explain it really well. Though I haven't really had anyone mention it helped them learn so maybe I should just remove them. Tann fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 20:10
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