Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Lord of the Files]

A first look at the character sheet and advancement system.

These initial skills have been implemented with some impact on gameplay, although they will surely be tweaked and expanded as I add more mechanics (armor, fatigue?, critical hits).

Here are some additional skills I am considering:
* Mechanics / Lockpicking
* Whisper / Occult
* Prayer / Theology
* Alchemy
* Diplomacy / Speech

At the bottom you'll see Abilities. These are roughly analogous to Feats or Perks. They can grant new actions, new ways to use existing actions, and passive bonuses / effects.

CP costs (or should I call it EXP to dodge Cheese Pizza jokes?) can be adjusted to balance abilities and skills.

 

[Agesilaus]

Just spent my evening learning OBS Studio and Shotcut. I'm pretty impressed with the latter, it's free and gets the job done. I put together a new trailer featuring a lot of new assets and a turn based combat system:




OBS is good, too, for making the raw video files for Shotcut. It's more for streaming, though, and was a bit of a pain to get working.

 

[Mastermind]

the animation and walking speeds are badly out of sync.

 

[Agesilaus]

the animation and walking speeds are badly out of sync.

Walk speed should be faster or slower?

 

[Mastermind]

the animation and walking speeds are badly out of sync.

Walk speed should be faster or slower?

slower (or speed up the animation if a slow walking speed unnecessarily slows the game down)

 

[Agesilaus]

the animation and walking speeds are badly out of sync.

Walk speed should be faster or slower?

slower (or speed up the animation if a slow walking speed unnecessarily slows the game down)

Thanks, I have a terrible eye for this stuff. Is it distracting enough that you recommend remaking the trailer? If so, anything else you think needs changing?

It is very easy to speed up the animation in Gamemaker Studio 2. Slowing down the walk speed would probably annoy players. I don't intend to release the EA demo until Monday so I have time to fix it. I poured a cup of tea on my laptop the other day, though, which broke the keyboard so everything is a pain in the arse until I get it fixed (still under full warranty, love MSi). I want to release it on itch.io and send some marketing stuff out on Monday, and then mail my laptop to be repaired.

 

[Mastermind]

I'd remake it, yeah. As a general rule you want your presentation as flawless as possible. Although you shouldn't need to remake the whole trailer, just reshoot those portions and edit them in.

 

[Agesilaus]

I'd remake it, yeah. As a general rule you want your presentation as flawless as possible. Although you shouldn't need to remake the whole trailer, just reshoot those portions and edit them in.

Got it. Right now the video is set to unlisted, I'll update it before publishing it outside the workshop threads.

 

[Mastermind]

I'd remake it, yeah. As a general rule you want your presentation as flawless as possible. Although you shouldn't need to remake the whole trailer, just reshoot those portions and edit them in.

Got it. Right now the video is set to unlisted, I'll update it before publishing it outside the workshop threads.

get someone else to look at them after the increase if you really have a hard time noticing. to me it looks like maybe a 15-20% increase in animation speed should fix it but it's hard to tell without actually seeing the result and shooting videos / posting them here to tweak it would be a pain in the ass

 

[vlzvl]

Walk speed should be faster or slower?

I would like a slower moving as well and you could add some frames for turning the high quality sprites.
I guess they're pre-rendered and should be pretty easy to shot them with some rotations for turning reasons.

 

[BlackGoat]

As long as you're making changes, I would recommend not using Papyrus for the dialogue font. It's about as much a joke now as comic sans.

 

[Agesilaus]

As long as you're making changes, I would recommend not using Papyrus for the dialogue font. It's about as much a joke now as comic sans.

The search for a decent font has been a huge pain in the arse. Whenever I find something that seems to look good, it actually looks terrible in game.

Someone here made a suggestion of a paid font, but I held off purchasing it because even though it looked good, everything looks different and shitty when in game. I'll keep looking and testing.

Just to be clear, though:

The font used in the slides is fine, it's just the dialogue box font that is cheesy/bad?

 

[AdolfSatan]

Eh, I wouldn't vouch for any of the two. Papyrus definitely has to go, though.
You're probably talking 'bout the ones I mentioned. From what I see, the main issue is that the in-game font renderer ain't quite sharp, therefore serif fonts must end up looking like shit.
Here are some free alternatives which are pretty good, though I'm pretty sure that as long as you don't fix that problem, most will still be looking quite bad.

Serif
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cormorant
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lusitana
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Scheherazade
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Crimson+Text
http://www.fontpalace.com/font-details/TrajanPro-Regular/

Sans
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Condensed
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Oxygen
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Montserrat

Also, it's never good to have a multiplicity of fonts strewn everywhere. You've got one for text, another for dialogue, and then another one for the menu, that's disastrous!

 

[Agesilaus]

Eh, I wouldn't vouch for any of the two. Papyrus definitely has to go, though.
You're probably talking 'bout the ones I mentioned. From what I see, the main issue is that the in-game font renderer ain't quite sharp, therefore serif fonts must end up looking like shit.
Here are some free alternatives which are pretty good, though I'm pretty sure that as long as you don't fix that problem, most will still be looking quite bad.

Serif
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cormorant
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lusitana
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Scheherazade
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Crimson+Text
http://www.fontpalace.com/font-details/TrajanPro-Regular/

Sans
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Condensed
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Oxygen
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Montserrat

Also, it's never good to have a multiplicity of fonts strewn everywhere. You've got one for text, another for dialogue, and then another one for the menu, that's disastrous!

Thank you! The Montserrat font (medium) seems to work well. I'm using it now for both the dialogue and the slides. Finally done with this font issue, hopefully.

 

[Agesilaus]

Thanks for the help, everyone. I remade the video; main improvements are the increased walk animation speed and the new font. There are some new art assets, too, and I also included the ruins at Apollo Maleatas.

EDIT: I had it set as private; it should be viewable now.

 

[AdolfSatan]

Doesnt' play.

 

[Agesilaus]

Doesnt' play.

Good catch. It was still set to "private" instead of "unlisted" on Youtube. It should work now.

I have released it now, too: https://antiquity-games.itch.io/theseus-journey-to-athens

It is incredibly easy to set stuff up on Itch.io.


UPDATE: Demo is now set to free; it should be readily accessible.
UPDATE2: Demo has been re-released to resolve an issue with the save-game function.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I had some fun with Photoshop's polar coordinates filter. I took some tiling textures and wrapped them in a circle, which mapped very easily to these domes.

Those domes look blurry, by the way, not because of low texture resolution, but because of the camera's depth of field.

Edit: I feel like kind of a prima donna posting giant screenshots in the forum like this. Is there a setting that you know of that will let me post a smaller version that you can click on to see the whole thing?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Not shown: bitch ass nigga planting traps while you're not looking.

 

[DakaSha V]

Started over in gamemaker where I actually had to do the rendering/drawing myself ( to some degree )
This will grant me a lot more power in the future though, so I guess its aight

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

So Raapys and I had a convo about visual feedback a few hours ago and I sat down and did some just for the heck of it.

Lo and behold (make sure to watch in HD).


Will be added to the game w/ the upcoming update.

 

[hilfazer]

I did some networking and serialization in Godot 3:



So far i've only tested it on single machine.
ATM, upon loading a game, all units are assigned to server. Also, serialization now only works for single level.

Project is on github: https://github.com/hilfazer/Projects/tree/master/Godot/DungeonCrawler

 

[Lord of the Files]

Interesting. Nice start. I had a look at the source code - is that godot script? Can you also use the high-level network API from e.g. C#? Is it P2P or client-server? I see RPCs being used in the Godot docs, but I always felt those were an antipattern.

I had the foundations of a client-server RPG done with Monogame, Lidgren, and Awesomium some years ago, but the scope was too large so I eventually gave it up.

 

[hilfazer]

I'm a networking noob and i may be getting things wrong but i think it's a client-server (i use this terminology in source code). Server is authoritative and owns pretty much everything (including units) but it is also one of the players. Clients only communicate with server, not with other clients.
Linux downloads offer 'headless' and 'server' versions of Godot for 'true' server implementation. I didn't use these so i don't know how they differ.

Language i use is GDScript. I know very little of Godot's C# version but documentation suggests high level networking API can also be used with C# and Visual Script.

High Level Networking API (rpc/rset) was created so noobs like me can write networked games too.

I can't say writing it was easy. I try to keep amount of content and gameplay to minimum until fundamental stuff: networking and serialization, is solid.

 

[7h30n]

All your nice images inspired me to show off some of my own work. I'm making a regular first person shooter. Basically, I'm more interested in the whole process of development instead of creating an original idea in an existing engine. So, naturally the images are from my own engine and code.

The screenshots are a bit colorful because I'm drawing the debug information on generated convex areas of BSP.

Spoiler

Spoiler

In case you can't quite figure out where does this level come from. Here is a screenshot of my own map editor with the whole map shown.

Spoiler

The collisions and gravity against static environment are working. My next stop is making some 3D models and shooting them. Since development is very, awfully, snail-like slow, I probably won't post in this thread until everyone grows old.