TooMuchAbstraction posted:

He's also said he's willing to act as an epilepsy consultant for other goon devs.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

That's more or less how it works currently; you have to hold the special and then press a direction.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

This is the primary reason why my approach to game art is to be hilariously sloppy and then wait until one of my testers calls me out on something before I put in the effort to do it properly.

Fun fact: a bunch of my skyboxes have a misaligned top texture (i.e. the one in the cubemap that you see if you look straight up). This has been noticed exactly once by one player because nobody ever looks straight up.

Dirty posted:

I'm working on a space RTS, and I've found myself spending a ton of time on the tools for building the missions. Here's the first mission's logic visualised in the editor I built. Not quite sure the Unity UI system was really built for this, but it works pretty well.



There's a whole game to go with it, I'm just showing off the editor because I've just finished a ton of work on it and I'm super proud! Here's what the "front end" of the game looks like:

Dirty posted:

I'm hoping to release by the end of the year (I have said that for about 4 years running though, but I really think it might be true this time!). I've just opted in to the Steam Next Fest and I'm working hard to get a demo ready for that in June. There's a store page up now, I don't know if I should link to it here, but the game's called "Dust Fleet".

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

This is my Panama map:



The overall structure for this mission is:

- There's a giant concrete barrier across the canal entrance (in the top-left)
- Go drop your commando squad to deal with that
- A boss shows up for you to fight
- When the boss is dead, pick up your commandos, they set off the charges on the barrier, and you can continue.

I need some mission content before the boss fight starts, and I am just not feeling inspired. What all should I put in there?

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Thanks for the feedback on my cinematic, folks! I made a few minor tweaks, including making the ship pivot about its rear instead of the middle. Ultimately this is a very unrealistic kind of turn for a ship of this size to make, so I'm not sure how to make it properly "realistic", but I hope it passes the smell test now.

https://i.imgur.com/sUXmUYp.mp4

Your Computer posted:

https://i.imgur.com/J7k7sEz.mp4

the game's pretty much complete at this point.

Your Computer posted:

Of course!

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Some stats on the first day of the Steam Next Fest, because I have them handy and think they're interesting: 911 downloads, 162 unique players, median time played 13 minutes (way higher than I expected, to be honest). A net 233 wishlists yesterday, representing 24% of all of my wishlists since the Steam page went live in early January. I'm just shy of 1000 wishlists now, which is...nowhere near enough considering how much I've spent on this game, but it's a heck of a lot better than it was two days ago!

I've gotten 9 feedback items in my Trello (I have an asset that allows players to submit Trello cards in-game), and 1 submission to the ship designer contest so far Feedback has been generally positive, with a few non-game-breaking bugs identified and a couple of helpful suggestions. Like adding the option to invert the camera's Y axis, which, after I tried it out, had me going "oh yeah, I've always been an inverted player, this feels way more natural".

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I bought an asset that you can hook up to a Trello using their API, so players just hit F7 in-game, fill out a quick form, and it uploads their comments, the game's log file, and a screenshot as a new Trello card. You definitely want something along those lines if you want to get feedback. Make it as frictionless as possible or they won't bother.

dhamster posted:

I basically put in a small but prominently located tooltip that shows up if you click the mouse during the input phase. I had put in a similar tip if players are taking a long time to take their turn, which would indicate to me that they don't understand how the turn system works. Here's what it looks like when both tips are onscreen:

TomR posted:

I'm making a game for a game jam. It's a Tetris like game but the play area wraps around. Anyone want to give it a shot and let me know what I'm missing? https://atomr.itch.io/hyperblocks



Thanks!

Also the gamejam is here: https://itch.io/jam/vaporjam

TomR posted:

I published my game. https://atomr.itch.io/hyperblocks

ESC key brings up the menu where you can stop the scrolling texture and turn off the music.

eonblue174 posted:

Hi folks! Can I have some opinions on my HUD options?

https://twitter.com/IndeedRyan/status/1411808504642510851?s=19

Sorry, here's the game

https://twitter.com/IndeedRyan/status/1358981777482735618?s=19

FuzzySlippers posted:

Playing around with some ways of doing fog of war and backgrounds. When the game switches to isometric combat there are spaces in view which have nothing there in addition to which is hidden.

All Black:


Colorful background (we are cosmic fantasy so spacey poo poo is in our wheelhouse):


All colorful:


I'm thinking #2 but any thoughts appreciated.

FuzzySlippers posted:

Thanks for the comments!

Here's #2 with the space background a lot less bright:

That seemed to be the most popular option. I was also experimenting a bit with a greyer fog because it animates a little but that's not clear in a screenshot.

One confusing thing about that shot is that its my combat test which loads in the player and then immediately has a pack pounce them so there's no "explored but not visible" area. I do the usual greyed out can't see enemies bit for that

Though that screenshot makes me think I actually need to darken the "not currently visible" area more.

dhamster posted:

Still kinda at a loss on how to find more testers so I paid thirty united states dollars for a very "intricate" and "high effort" banner ad to run on the something awful forums. Should show up pretty soon

Coldrice posted:

Sorry to gif dump again!

One of the things I put together when I first started the concept of Duster was a list of "mini-games" I wanted to plug into it. Just fun things that can randomly happen to break up gameplay. When I was struggling to get funded, I pushed it all to the end and narrowed it down to like... 1 or 2 games max. Well now, I'm going hog wild!


Poker, spawns in saloons. Random number of opponents



DUELS (Excuse the darkness, this is an overlay, so the black background is really a shadow that overlays your game while you're playing)



Fording a river. Anytime you cross a river on the map, you can either pay for a raft or try to swim across



Stampede - can trigger when leaving an area



Scorpion stomp - 1 in 10 chance to happen when you sleep outdoors



fend off vultures - 5% chance to happen when you die, allowing you to revive at 1 health


Remove a bullet - if you get shot and have a knife you have a chance to remove a bullet, healing you or hurting you if you fail




This is probably about half of what I got planned so far. I'm having so much fun, I might add more as well.. good ol' overscoping

Coldrice posted:

I think I'm just going to have an option to disable any "objectionable content" in the game. Anything bloody or gory (which is minorly here or there). I find it kinda silly, and I think others will too so I'd like to leave it in if I can.

Also, I will definitely have an option to disable flashing in the settings FOR SURE.

eonblue174 posted:

https://twitter.com/IndeedRyan/status/1428676262659346433?s=19

I've done some more work on my HUD, primarily on the bit that floats around enemies. I've made each pip represent a set amount of health. I feel that this makes each enemy more fun, since it feels like a more dramatic engagement as you wear it down. I've also added in a simple cover seeking mechanic to this enemy.

My problem right now is coming up with an interesting set of behaviors for this enemy. It will shoot you with a hitscan smg, it'll jump into cover, and it has a big pew pew laser it can shoot. Unfortunately the player reaction is always seek cover and take shots of opportunity and I want some of the moves to lead to different player behaviors

Firgof posted:

Hammer Bro. posted:

Yeah I noticed that with a couple in-person friends so I've adjusted the wording on the first hint and added a "Click Orbs Do Things" subtitle on the main screen.

I'd like to add decals and proper colorblindness stuff but I'm basically out of time and built-in paint.net stencils. Definitely if I take the concept further.

I didn't exactly intend to make a click-fest (I also get sore tendons) but I did manage to capture some of the chaos I was aiming for. Just out of curiosity, which soundtrack didn't you care for?

I'm slightly curious as to the situations you ended up in where much happened up-top. I tried to tune things so that only happened rarely / if backed-up, but I recognize things vary with play style. That's mostly an academic curiosity as I'm up against my deadline for the jam and if I do revisit the concept it'll probably be in more of a puzzle-oriented context. Physics are just much easier when in a hurry.

Thanks for all the feedback from everyone. This might be my most-played jam game purely 'cause of beta testers. Gonna partially thank the page snipe for that.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Ironically, this is something that looks better in gameplay, because I made a script that can position splash particles where the leg intersects the water. But that script doesn't work in cinematics for various reasons.



So, the way my tripods work is that each leg has an inverse kinematics (IK) solver, which causes the "toe" to seek to a particular point. Normally, that point is locked to the ground, but when the leg in question is stepping, the point arcs through the air. Meanwhile, the body of the tripod is steadily moving towards its destination, irrespective of what the legs want -- so if the body moves faster than the legs can keep up with, then the legs end up floating behind, as in this image:

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1463659187120971776

That's caused by the IK solvers trying to get the legs to connect to points that are well behind the body of the tripod. In this case it was caused by a software bug.

Meanwhile, the body has an IK solver of its own, that causes it to shift and tilt away from the leg that's lifted off the ground. All this does is help sell that the tripod has mass and has to balance itself, by making the body move to be more between the two legs that are actually grounded. One of the things that I had to do to get this to work properly is manually enforce the order of operations for the four IK solvers. The body has to solve first, and then the legs can go (in any order). Doing otherwise causes things to glitch out, because the body's solver changes the position of the hips, which then affects the solutions that the legs come up with.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

My game features torpedoes as a weapon type, of course. They work sort of like a shotgun: you fire a spread of them at a ship (or a group of ships), and when they hit they deal tremendous damage. Projectiles are slow, and the launchers are heavy, have limited ammo, and don't fire very fast...but they can really thin out an enemy fleet or help you take down a specific high-value target. Oftentimes, many of the projectiles will miss, either because you fired from far away or because the target slipped between shots in the spread.

So far I've given the player 3 different sizes of torpedo (21" diameter, 24", and 28"). Larger torpedoes deal more damage per projectile, and weigh more when installing them on the ship. An obvious extra weapon to add to the game is homing torpedoes. The question is: how do I make them work without obsoleting the non-homing types? If the only difference between them were that the homing torpedoes homed in, then you'd basically be able to fire a "spread" and then have every single torpedo hit the designated target. That's a ludicrous amount of precise firepower to give to the player. So they need to be weakened somehow.

The obvious answer would be to just make the homing types deal less damage per projectile. But that feels unsatisfying somehow. Any suggestions for other ways to weaken them? My one caveat is that I can't easily have each torpedo home in on a different target.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I have some plans to give enemy ships "specials" like the player has, but I want to be careful not to introduce an enemy that's specifically a hard counter to all non-homing weapons. What if the player brings an all-big-gun loadout to the mission? Plus, to a large extent, any individual enemy's job is to get hit and die. The harder that job is, the more likely that enemy is to be viewed as "annoying", in my experience. Unless they're a boss, of course.

nurmie posted:

sooooo, hopefully this is ok to post here but i took part in a game jam (7dfps, specifically) and somehow managed to make a game that i actually do kinda like (first time this has happened, on my third gamejam)

here it is! it's called POSSESSOR and it's a fast-paced FPS (or TPS if you're feeling dangerous) where you can, well, possess your foes. and slow down time. and do both at the same time if you're so inclined. can be played in browser but probably best experienced as the downloadable version (the browser version is kiiiiinda wonky)

i'd be super greatful for any and all feedback!

Dieting Hippo posted:

I gave the tutorial a quick shot, this is fun! I had a good strategy going of posessing enemies then quickly dropping their gun, unposessing, then repeating with each other enemy.

KillHour posted:

loving HELL, just putting a barely-functional prototype to play with game mechanics took me two long rear end days of coding. Those people who can end up with something playable in a few hours are crazy.

Anyways, it's definitely not a game yet but I have a sandbox to start tweaking things and seeing if this can actually be fun or if I need to go to the drawing board.



So here's the elevator pitch:

Potion making RPG / puzzle game that tries to fit into that era of alchemy where people were barely starting to turn superstition into chemistry. The aim is to make it feel like the world has concrete rules, but they're just barely out of your reach at the start, and you slowly unlock the secrets of how to make kickass potions to sell to suicidal idiotsfuture heroes. I know the schtick has been done before, but I'm hoping I can make the puzzle mechanics stand out a bit more than your typical potion crafting game.

Anyways, I have a really rough prototype here:

https://killhour.itch.io/potion-test?secret=bWBQVKL8WQWHrvvwzGaBRW7yT4

Obviously, there's no tutorialization, but the mechanics are pretty basic.

- Drag elements from the right onto the grid to add them to your compound. Click on an element to rotate it. Drag it into the garbage bin to delete it.
- Combine elements into compounds by lining up the dots (currently the game doesn't check or care about this, but the idea is that it won't let you finish one without matching them all up)
- Pairs of elements contribute to stats. Each pair has a major and minor attribute. For instance, H-O's major attribute is Life and its minor attribute is Cleansing. All attributes have opposing forces (Death and Toxic in this case). The game doesn't tell you what these are, and many combinations have tertiary attributes. The puzzle is to figure out what does what, but hopefully it's semi logical, and there will likely be unlockable ways to get more quantitative about it.
- The game calculates stats in rows and columns - it doesn't matter if two elements have a bond or not. If they're next to each other, they count as a pair. More than 2 in a row increase the strength of each pair. So for instance, if you had O-S, you would have the stats from that single pair, but if you had O-S-O, you would have the stats from two pairs, multiplied by a further 2 due to it being a 3-long chain. The idea here is to make the shapes a puzzle you have to work around to get the lines of pairs you want. All rows and columns are added together at the end to come up with the final stats and ideally, I'll be able to balance everything so that it's challenging, but possible to get a potion with the exact stats you're looking for (fat chance but a person can dream)
- Too much of any stat in any one direction makes the potion unstable and will fail. The bars turn red when this happens. There will probably be a way to level up your ability to make strong potions when there's actually a game to play.
- In the future, the game will assign a potion archetype based on the stats, and a score to how closely you align to the "ideal" for that archetype. Then you can set your price to match. Or dilute it with water and rip everyone off until someone comes back to tear your legs off. Whatever, I'm not your dad.

Like I said, players won't see what each element contributes directly, but there will be guidance in the form of lore that I'm totally going to write. The idea is to give players a vague "feeling" for each element combo. Here are my messy notes on that. It's inspired loosely by the color system used in MTG, but doesn't follow the same associations.

pre:

Alignment

    O
  /   \
H   N   C
 \     /
  K - S

O - Oxygen - Purity / Cleansing / Fire
C - Carbon - Heavy / Earth / Calming
S - Sulfur - Dirty / Explosive / Poison
K - Potassium - Strength / Constitution / Grit 
H - Hydrogen - Light / Healing / Vigor

N - Nitrogen - Neutral

Pairs

Aligned:
OC - Technology, Refinement, Smelting, Society, Artificial laws, Rhetoric
CS - Earth, Rock, Nature, Wisdom, Natural laws
SK - Venom, Poison, Bugs, Snakes, Mutations, Attack, Randomness / Chaos
KH - Defense, Food, Crystals, Complexity, Mathematical laws, Logic
HO - Religion, Curse removal, Anti-undead, Supernatural laws

Opposing:
OS - Unstable, Explosion, Rage, Berzerk, Warriors
CK - Steel, Sharpness, Rogue / Ninja, Refined Force
SH - Antivenom, Smelling Salts, Necromancy, Recovery
KO - Paladins, Holy smiting, Crusades, Genocide
HC - Oil, Fluid, Salve, Slippery, Medicine, Driuds

As you can tell, the above is just vague word associations for what I want each element and pair to "feel" like. I'll have to come up with better in-game descriptions to help players figure out what the gently caress is going on. Maybe you have to discover them by blowing yourself up a bunch; I haven't gotten that far.

Future features to add:
- Gameplay! Sell yo poo poo to adventurers for money, equipment, and rare elements
- Some kind of tech tree for unlocking stronger elements, analyzing your creations with completely ethical testing on willing participants (and rats), and making stronger potions without blowing yourself up
- Mechanics - make an actual puzzle with rules and poo poo.
- Double bonds. Right now, only two elements can be at the end of a compound and that means pretty much everything you make has to have those elements. I have to figure out a sane interface for actually doing it though.
- Things I haven't thought of yet but they'll be really cool

TL;DR: Please gently caress around with my thing that I spent way too long on and give me praisehonest feedback.

KillHour posted:

I finally figured out the magic settings in OBS to record this fractal without it just turning into a jumbled mess. It also took YouTube an ungodly amount of time to transcode.

Video that is not healthy for SerthVarnee (it only looks good in 4k, unfortunately)