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Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

zwanzig_zwoelf

Graverobber Foundation
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I did more game-y music recently. Grab it here, it's free: https://surt-r.itch.io/devil-tower-bgm
If you want to use these tracks in your projects, just ping me and I'll loop them properly.

(FYI, it was for the EP Jam and recorded in about 43 hours total.)
 
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barker_s

Cipher
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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
A little mockup scene - testing the billboard tree system I got from the Asset Store and prototype unit shader. Unit artwork not mine, obviously ;) . Disregard the ugly texture stretching at the cliff walls, as I intend to cover it with actual cliff mesh later on.

90as2qo.png
 

Nathaniel3W

Rockwell Studios
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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
Looks like you're off to a good start there. Are you drawing the terrain with a hexagon-shaped brush? Is that character 2D or 3D, and if 2D then how did you decide to display it in your 3D world? I had a heck of a time trying to get it right in my game and I'm just wondering how other people approached the problem.

Disregard the ugly texture stretching at the cliff walls, as I intend to cover it with actual cliff mesh later on.

I'm not very familiar with Unity's shader system, but you might want to consider doing something like I did with UDK:

HS_TerrainCombined.jpg


Instead of having the texture drawn onto the surface from the top, you might be able to draw the texture on from the side, and then switch which texture shows up depending on the slope of the terrain. That's how I made it work in UDK anyway. Related blog post here.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Why did I go with UDK? Because at the time I started my project, it was the most powerful and fully featured engine I could try out completely for free. It gives you tons of features for free that you have to pay extra for in Unity. Like the material shader system for example. In the end I decided to pay for a full Unreal 3 license, but I'm sure that I could have done most of what I need to do with just plain UDK.

As for 3D texture projection, as I was suggesting to barker_s, he might be able to do it in Unity if he bought one of those fancy shader upgrade plugins. I think Shader Forge is what everyone uses?
 

Zed

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Codex USB, 2014
I am severely triggered by highly visible repeating patterns in textures.
 

Bester

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Nathaniel3W Yeah I understand all that, but what I meant is why still UDK? I may be mistaken but your project doesn't look close to completion, so why not just move to ue4?
 

Nathaniel3W

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your project doesn't look close to completion, so why not just move to ue4?

I have about 200,000 lines of code and tons of content invested in UE3. I may not be close to completion, but I'm 3 years of development into UE3, and I'm not going to repeat that in UE4. I just started working on my project full-time about a month ago, so I'm hoping to finish it in under 6 months.

I am severely triggered by highly visible repeating patterns in textures.

Yeah, that's just an example of the one technique. In production, I use a bunch of other techniques (and different textures) to hide the tiling.
 

Nathaniel3W

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As for what I'm working on right now, I'm trying to get the scale of the maps right:

HexScaleTest.jpg


That's about 32,000 hexes projected onto the map. I want one hex to represent about 1.5 kilometers. So I think that a grid of this size would take about 8 days of hard travel in game time to cross. (And I'm not even sure how well the pathfinding algorithm would hold up on that scale.)

And from the screenshot below,

HexScaleTest2.jpg


...you can see that those 32,000 hexes cover just a small part of the map. I think I could use a map of this size for the entire continent of Himeko Sutori, but I would rather use several smaller maps with more personality on each one to represent the different areas.
 

barker_s

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
Instead of having the texture drawn onto the surface from the top, you might be able to draw the texture on from the side, and then switch which texture shows up depending on the slope of the terrain. That's how I made it work in UDK anyway. Related blog post here.

Thanks for the suggestion Nathaniel3W. The approach you're describing is called triplanar mapping and I've been using it previously, but I had to ditch it as it wasn't flexible enough for my needs ;) . Currently I'm using a system similar to that used in Civ5 and Civ6. I'm creating a procedural texture for each terrain chunk at runtime (which allows each hex to have a different "material") and then I map it to the mesh using traditional UV mapping. It does have the unfortunate side-effect of visible stretching at steep cliffs. I could use some kind of hybrid solution (UV-mapped on top, triplanar on the sides), but I think mesh cliffs will do just fine, even from aesthetical standpoint.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
LandscapeDayCycle_optimized.gif


Next it needs actual rivers carved into it, then I'll add a water mesh and foliage, then I'll add tiles and decide which areas are actually navigable. Then I need to figure out how to actually play the game on it. Why did I do this? It's like making a whole other game that you play in order to play my game in it.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Next it needs actual rivers carved into it, then I'll add a water mesh and foliage, then I'll add tiles and decide which areas are actually navigable. Then I need to figure out how to actually play the game on it. Why did I do this? It's like making a whole other game that you play in order to play my game in it.
So you can sell your game just like Oblivion, based on soil erosion.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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Did some quick testing of baking normalmaps with lightmaps to see if it's possible to fake some elements of geometry through textures. Most likely going to use it in later projects for backgrounds and smaller details.

The textures were generated real quick just to see if it's doable at all.
C2yiNCxWIAE8Li4.jpg
C2yiPaFXEAAZ1cO.jpg
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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I've said before that I usually start my day by prototyping something random before moving on to Das Geisterschiff to warm myself up and avoid getting rusty (as in forgetting the basics while dealing with more complex stuff).

Well, instead of a bunch of small dungeon sketches I've made something half-playable today.
C22TrNgWEAA-vAh.jpg
C22Tut7WEAACDYY.jpg


I was making shit up as I did stuff, but the basic idea is the following:
  • There are several types of dungeon tiles (Wood/Stone/Metal/Fake/Map Edge), and the player can move each one of them (except for the edge of the map) if the stat check allows him to (STR here, want to make it STR+WGT later);
  • Instead of gaining levels the player gains bonuses to stats by finding elixirs, food and weapons (only HP elixirs were implemented while I had time);
  • Strength determines the attack/push power, Wisdom determines the magic power, Charisma makes the low WIS enemies avoid you, Karma increases the chances of encountering traps and Weight allows you to push tiles/enemies (combined with the Strength);
  • Tiles can be pushed into pits to open new paths or pushed towards the enemies to crush them;
  • Magic is mostly about dragging the tiles and healing yourself;
  • You can use axes to destroy wooden tiles and hammers to destroy the stone tiles. Swords are better against the enemies in general.
Of course, so far there's only the grid movement, tile movement, stats and a few items implemented, but if I keep this as a morning exercise I guess it's possible to turn it into something interesting.

If you want to give it a try, get it here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/h7axguy5b61x7jh
 

Mustawd

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If you want to give it a try, get it here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/h7axguy5b61x7jh

I gave this a try. Just some thoughts:

-Ran fine but made my toaster a bit hot. Not sure if related. I have a 2012 craptop with Windows 7 64 bit.
-Graphics look p. gud for me
-Only keys that did anything were the arrow keys. Nothing else worked. I had to alt tab out of the program to close it.
-No automap made it super disorienting as the layout doe snot have enough unique landmarks for you to get your bearings. After a while I just pushed boxes and shit until I got bored and quit.
-Not sure if there was an end to the game, but collected like 5 or 6 of the red bottles before I quit
-Music was nice
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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1. Which settings preset you were using?
3. I forgot to mention that this version only uses the arrow keys. I think about adding about 3 main keys later.
4. The disorienting layout, however, is a feature in several ways. Try figuring out where you are after pushing all these tiles all over the place. But I'll think about adding some landmarks, though that's going to be rather tricky considering the gameplay.
5. There are about 10 bottles.
 

Mustawd

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1. They're all maxed out, but didn't think it'd be an issue since the program didn't seem all that complicated. I'll try it with different presets later
4. Well I'm not your intended audience anyhow as I hate puzzles :P
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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'Fantastic' presets turns on AA, so it's either that or a number of objects + shaders. I'll tweak them later, but I also didn't do any optimizations, so there's that.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
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KK, so what I've been doing in recent months for my projects:

- Since summer, we've been recoding the X Caeli from the scratch. Well, it's been a bit less than that - the design was made in the summer, but we've only found a coder at the end of the october. For 3 months of work, the progress is rather steady - we've done 5/5 ships, 5/5 shields, 5/12 weapons, 1/4 specials and 2/10 traits. The groundworks is also set up as well as some work on the visual novel element. We've decided to ditch the gamepad this time - that thing is a fucking waste of time, tbh. Takes too much effort (because you can't just add it - you need to design the entire GUI around it and it makes the GUI shitty as a result, duh) and the payoff is not likely to be there. The game logic is flowing steadily and the toughest part that remains are the effects. We plan to return at the stage of our previous demo by the april (or so).

- I'm kinda growing retarded with years. Or more retarded, I dunno. Anyhow, now that I have to check the implemented features in terms of how they're working, I have to consult our wiki relentlessly. Even when that's my design and writing - I'm like "so who's done this shit?" Don't recognize a thing. Design is awesome, though. First, I've made it much more top-down, flavor-wise. Our gear is called many arcane names and, previously, that was kinda glued on for no reason. Now, if a ship is called "Testament" then it gives you extra reward if you follow the rules it sets. If a weapon is called "Parable" (our protagonist is an evil deity) then it requires some thinking and calculation. If a weapon is called "Genesis" then it creates stuff. This time, I'm trying to make esoteric stuff reasonable. Same goes for the name, btw - X Caeli shall become a suffix and I'll invent something more reasonable than that. So people can clearly see what the plot is about.

- The game is still pretty difficult to get in - the forgetfulness part really helps to understand it. Still, the good and complex design of the weaponry sorta makes it mandatory. I have two solutions - first is color-coding it all for player's convenience so more things can be understood at a glance, requiring less reading. Color-coding is great tool to assist memorization so I'm not sure why it's not utilized as much - if you want to craft complex RPG systems, make them easy to learn, dammit. Second is the plan to give the player a healthy dose of presets so, if he feels lazy or unsure, he can just load up whatever the game offers him. That's not hardcore, but that's what people want. And I'm not even talking about mainstream folks - a ton of Underrail & AoD's audience wants that - believe me, I know.

- I've been able to rid myself of some stupid RPG pre-dispositions. The easiest to talk about is the context oversensitivity. You see (this'll sounds offensive on the RPGcodex, but who gives a fuck), the problem with many RPG systems and their admirers is that they care not about the function, but the formality. Like, you may have two different character builds and, in terms of the gameplay, they're both about clicking foes to the death or just spamming some bland AoE nuke, but no-no, they're totally different, you see, one is build from attribute A and the other - from attribute B! Fucking shit, don't you understand, you have to take an entirely different arrays of feats and multiclassing for that to work, that's so awesome!!! No, it's not, it's bullshit. It may "work" in niche stuff like Dungeon Rats (its fans really want to believe that that works), but overall that's a dead end. If it's a different class/build/archetype (in our case - different ship setup), it has different gameplay. Period and no exceptions. Even in the game as simplistic as Space Invaders, there's still enough mechanical space to implement that. Not to speak of the bigger genres. Honestly, the reason why most of the world doesn't give a fuck about hardcore RPGs is that the gameplay is just shit once you look past the numbers. Sure, the numbers may be part of the gameplay, but they're the bones, not the actual meat.

- Since the design work on X Caeli is done, I'm moving to our next project - the bio-postapoc roguelike. I've already mentioned it, but that was long time ago - we were not sure what to do. Now we are. I've kinda done the design already, lol, now I just need to remember it all (I'm undisciplined so I don't write the stuff down) and add more versimilitude to it. The core principles are the 100% deterministic system (the world is randomly generated, but combat is all about smarts), rich combat system (our graphics will be minimalistic, like, really, but we'll use the upside of that - our game will be one of the very few where you will be able to use some nice moves on the foes; push them, throw them, choke them, use the surroundings to your advantage, etc.), wasteland-style search of the quest answers and stat boosts on the global map. Our protagonist is a sentient alien/tyranid-like mutant so RPG system will be quite natural - you don't level up, you evolve and adapt. With all the logical strings attached. We're only starting, but at the very least all the channel work begins to bring its fruits, bringing us a volunteer coder to boost our strength. Let's see if I'll be able to conjure something in terms of the artist too, even though we plan to have minimalistic graphix (probably as complex as Wasteland I, lol), art style still means a lot.
 

Agesilaus

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I set up some hosting for other purposes, and decided to host an android and a windows version of my crap mobile CYOA game. If anyone was interested previously, here it is:

www.keksociety.com

 
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zwanzig_zwoelf

Graverobber Foundation
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Did some items, created a slime enemy and the UI stuffies, built a basic dungeon to teach the basics to new players. Still implementing magic/enemy AI/spawning, but if you want a rough estimate, a few more weeks of these morning exercises and I'll have a feature-complete game on my hands that I can put out while I'm finishing Das Geisterschiff. This is the result of what a year of non-stop fucking with code and stuff can do with you, kids.

C2-6ZlSWQAAjXC9.jpg
C2-6Wh0WgAEvciS.jpg
 

gaussgunner

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Update on my game

Decided to make it a pulp scifi-fantasy rpg. It takes place in the present day, in a setting inspired by a real place where I briefly got lost last year in a maze of identical underground passages and remarked "I feel like we're in a dungeon rpg". I'm doing everything wrong - CYOA dialogue, misleading choices, wall-of-text rants, Codexian in-jokes, plots ripped from the headlines, caricatures, foreign accents, memes, tabloid sleaze, sex, innuendo, anime, and worst of all, in-game smartphones.

It will have turn-based combat. Plain old "baseball batting lineup" style, not that creative shit I was testing in "Machiaville Tactics". For storyfags I plan to add an option to skip the fights - it just tells you the outcome based on stats, and gives you the option to back out. Combatfags can skip through most of the dialogue by pressing spacebar.

Graphics will remain topdown 2D with sprites that only face left/right, all vector-based & zoomable, with anime portraits. I actually learned Blender, made a few 3D characters, rendered out animated bitmap sprites, and put one in the game. Huge success. But it's overkill for this game. Another time, on a bigger project.

There will be a Based stat to counter the Charm stat, which really comes into play when encountering vampires. I actually thought this up without regard to gamergate or vampires; I was balancing out stats for normal/small/tall/fat character archetypes, the small/fat types came up short, so I gave them a "doesn't give a fuck" bonus. hahaha

Progress is extremely rapid. If this continues I'll finish the CYOA stuff in about 2 weeks, then fill in the rpg gameplay. Honestly, I haven't had this much fun writing since I was a teenager.
 

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