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The Gripper posted:Also even if you find the worlds greatest study material on level design, for the love of god get other people to play your levels. First-impression critiques are often the most valuable and you lose out on that if you're testing iterative changes yourself, and you even miss a lot of it if you have the same people testing each time. This is true for software in general. In building Psychopomps for the SAGameDev competition two years ago, I did a bunch of silent usability tests -- sit someone down who had never seen the game, give them an objective ("beat the game"), ask them to narrate themselves playing ("I'm going left because the right looks dangerous...", "I pressed enter because that often starts things...") and then shut up. Seriously, answer no questions. Straight up silence on your end. It's harder than you think. Because you want to be like, "No no, press S there." But all that does is assuage your mind, when really you have a major usability problem. (S was Psychopomp's use key, and also the dialog advancement key, which was stupid.) Doing this frequently, with fresh people, will expose SO MUCH about your game that you didn't realize.
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Dec 12, 2012 17:10
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Unormal posted:I've found iTween (http://itween.pixelplacement.com/index.php) to be a pretty nice tool for automating some of this stuff if you're using Unity3D. (I think Shalinor originally suggested it in a thread somewhere.) It's just a small set of source, too, so it's pretty easy to hack in support for new stuff (like various 2D libraries, etc). iTween is the best. Seriously, tween everything.
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Dec 19, 2012 05:06
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Unity peeps, I'm working with an artist on an awesome space project. He has delivered a video of a sensors screen and was wondering if I could do it in code: I see some pieces here -- render a rotating model, render some colored noise on top of that, use a shader to sample a displacement map to get the mosaic effect. Is there any way to do this with Unity free? It seems like accessing/altering the render targets is something I can't do without Pro. NGUI looks like it might be able to do what I want, but I'm not about to pay for it just to find out. Any suggestions? (The gameplay is that as you move closer/farther away, the mosaic gets higher/lower resolution, so a person with experience operating sensors can see a ship in the noise more easily.)
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Dec 19, 2012 18:55
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Shalinor posted:Short of jumping through some very, very serious hoops, you're going to flat out need Unity Pro for that. Rather than rendering the ship to a texture, could I just draw a sprite of the ship to a quad and use a fragment shader on that quad? I figured render to texture was pro only, but are writing shaders?
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Dec 19, 2012 19:36
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MSPain posted:I'm looking to get involved in some kind of an open source html5 game project. So, I've written some html5 games, and generally found the experience to be a little immature. Any reason you've picked it over other web technologies like Flash/Unity? I'm not saying HTML5 won't ever be awesome (and I sincerely hope it is soon), just that there are things like the audio support that aren't quite there yet.
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Dec 27, 2012 23:24
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MSPain posted:I just personally like working with Javascript, and while I agree it is an immature platform it seems like it wont be that way for long. 2D or 3D (webgl)? quote:I was wondering if anyone had any advice in regards to making 2D games with SDL + OpenGL. Man, I'm going to be that guy today, but have you looked at SFML? It's a C++, OpenGL 2D game library that is wonderfully awesome.
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Dec 28, 2012 03:21
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HappyHippo posted:Could you go into a little more detail about the audio support? I recently made this game, which has no sound, but I want to start a new project soon which will, and I haven't looked into HTML5's audio stuff yet. It's been a few months since I tried anything, but basically everything lives in <audio> tags, which have different codec support between browsers. When I was using it, I found that timing audio to events in a game was a pain, since they didn't always fire immediately. And the spec was still under review, with different browsers implementing different extra features. Once the spec settles down a bit, I think you'll probably be good to go, but don't expect it to behave like a proper audio library yet. Edit: Also, some browsers refused to play more than one audio file at a time. Which is stupid.
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Dec 28, 2012 20:10
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TheresaJayne posted:I was talking with a friend who used to work for Blizzard, I am trying to develop a MMORPG but i am a noob at 3D worlds and how to store the data in the server to represent the world. Stop here. What else have you done? Published any other games? You are trying to paint the Sistine Chapel here... quote:Can anyone point me to something to help a non advanced math person understand.... Advanced math is more or less required for making games. Might be a good idea to brush up on linear algebra and trigonometry. Also, we don't sign our posts here.
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Jan 17, 2013 16:53
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 04:07 |
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After three years of trying to get the policy changed, my company finally relaxed the "No building games in your free time" policy, and I reinstalled Unity and started messing around. Feels good to be building games again, though I'm nowhere near as on top of things as I was. Especially with a nine month old crawling over everything. I'm learning that I can't wait for the 'flow' state if I want to be productive. Sit down, open editor, bash out small improvement, go to bed. Anyhow, I started working on a sim/god game (because everyone needs to make absurdly overscoped projects in their free time, right?) Will I be successful? Who knows (no), but I'm making the game I want to play, so the mental exercise has been entertainment. Put in a couple evenings work and got: [Not Pictured] A basic A* pathfinding manager. GameObjects can issue a request for a path and receive a callback when the path is finished computing. The path computer is current limited at one path request per frame, but could easily be tweaked to limit it to a certain number of cycles per frame (or some other constraint.) You can see some of the paths it returns in the cyan lines on the left side of the images below.  Basic blueprinting/player tools state machine. There's only a small handful of states in the state machine at this point (select, blueprint, bulldoze, spawn object), but it lets you click and draw out a set of blueprinted walls. Bonus: The walls are smart enough to know which tiles around them are walls, and render the correct sprite. The shields were my first attempt at creating workers, but I scrapped their code because it quickly became clear I was going to need something much more robust for their behavior...  Behavior trees with a basic tree for the workers in the game. (Using a third party Behavior Tree library for Unity). As well as some job management classes, so objects in the world can provide their own logic. I wired this into the blueprinting system, so that when a blueprint is created, each tile registers a job. The workers then pull jobs off the queue, and all the logic for performing the job is given to them. It's worked so far, with the two main jobs a worker can before being Build Wall and Bulldoze. I wired up the pathfinding system to the BT as well, so at this point, I'm basically done, right?  I replaced my worker shields with worker green circles, rendered their pathing gizmos only if they were selected, and stuffed a bunch into the map to see how well they could navigate around/compete for jobs. I also built a basic wander behavior for when they have nothing to do, which means I can now have them build little mazes, then have them wander the mazes. I wish they weren't so rigid in their movement, but I see that as a bit of polish down the line. For now, it's enough to see workers requesting jobs, performing jobs, or just wandering around. I'm sure I'm being wantonly wasteful with resources, not cleaning up after myself, and generally doing bad things, but it works, so I'm happy. drat it feels good to be making games again.
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Aug 5, 2015 05:48
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