Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[supervoid]

I'll try to make point and click adventure in AGS before civilisation collapse, wish me luck.

 

[Ninjerk]

All of Unity's learning material will be free to access for the next three months: https://learn.unity.com/

I believe there are things not so Unity-specific too.

This is great. Does anyone know if it's possible to download all the materials for later?

The site is laggy asf for me, but you might be able to use VLC's Open Network Stream feature to find the actual address of videos and then just "Save As" when you access them directly in a browser.

EDIT: Not laggy, somehow I think the site caused a memory leak lol.

EDIT2: Aaaaand, now Copper Dreams beta won't run and Return of Recknoning is broken, too. Thanks Unity!

 

[Bad Sector]

Has been a while since i posted a video of that DOS game i'm working on. Here is one i just uploaded:



I just made a few textures and added the necessary functionality in the editor to set them on the grids that make up the world geometry. Here is an editor shot too:

You can actually play the game inside the editor too, which is neat.

 

[Bad Sector]

Added doors and sensors (invisible entities that respond to the "action" key and send a command to another entity - in this case an "open" command to the door):



I think from this moment it is when the first bits of gameplay start to emerge :-P

 

[Alchemist]

One of the long-standing complaints about the Godot engine has been the lack of drawcall batching which led to degraded performance on mobile. Looks like this is being fixed now: https://godotengine.org/article/gles2-renderer-optimization-2d-batching

Spoiler

GLES2 RENDERER OPTIMIZATION - 2D BATCHING
By: Bartleby Lawnjelly Apr 09, 2020
While Juan (reduz) has been busily working on Vulkan, the rest of the rendering team have not been idle. They have been working on many bug fixes and some improvements to the OpenGL rendering in the 3.x branch.

One of the most eagerly awaited 2D features has been batching of drawcalls, and it is something myself (lawnjelly) and Clay (clayjohn) have spent several weeks researching and coming up with a reasonable implementation, that should hopefully significantly increase performance in a lot of 2D games.

Soon we will be migrating this work to the 4.0 branch, but for now at least some of the improvements will be available in 3.2.x.

HOW IT WORKS
Up until now, the GLES2 2D renderer has been drawing primitives (such as rectangles) on an individual basis. Each rectangle, polygon, line, etc., has been causing a drawcall to OpenGL. While GPUs can cope with this method, they don't work at peak efficiency because they are optimized to handle larger numbers of primitives in each drawcall.

In order to better take advantage of GPU horsepower, we organise these primitives into batches at the beginning of each frame. Each batch is made as large as possible so that we can reduce the number of drawcalls and the number of state changes between drawcalls, which are also expensive in performance terms.

After trying various approaches we have settled with a multi-pass approach:

1. The first pass identifies similar items and groups them into batches.
2. The second pass draws each batch using a single drawcall.

Right now batching has only been implemented for rectangle primitives (which includes tilemaps, text, sprites, and many GUI nodes). Scenes making heavy use of polygons, meshes, or other non-rect primitives will not benefit from the current work, batching will be extended to those other types once the current rendition of batching is properly tested.

To best take advantage of batching, group similar nodes together in the scene tree as batching cannot extend across scene layers and Z indices. Similarly, batches must share a texture, material, blend mode, shader, and skeleton.

RESULTS
As predicted, even with the small added housekeeping costs, batching greatly reduced drawcall bottlenecks. Highly specific benchmarks focusing on drawcalls show large improvements in performance.

In real world games however, the speedup will depend on to what extent drawcalls are your bottleneck. Games drawing a lot of rects, particularly with high density or multiple tilemaps, or text, are likely to see the largest speedup. Let us know your results!

Even if you don't make large gains because your bottlenecks are elsewhere, note that you can often effectively bump up the amount of detail without adversely affecting performance.

Left is without batching, right is with. Can you spot the difference?

Top: 10,000 Sprites with a randomized modulate and position. Bottom: 8 layers of a screen full of "A"s with two Sprites intermixed.

Let the above example images teach you all a lesson that us graphics programmers don't stare at beautiful images all day, often times we work with images like these.

HOW TO TRY OUT THE NEW BUILD
Rémi (https://github.com/akien-mga) has kindly been making a series of test builds which we are trying to test as widely as possible before we merge into the main 3.2.x branch.

Please try these changes out yourself, they are linked from the PR with many more details:

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/37349

Let us know if it worked okay for your project, and also let us know if you discover any problems so we get onto fixing them.

The banner image is using the Godot bunnymark bunny from godot3-bunnymark. Thank you to cart for making such a great profiling tool. Consider this a warning that all your bunnymark scores have become outdated.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

One of the long-standing complaints about the Godot engine has been the lack of drawcall batching which led to degraded performance on mobile. Looks like this is being fixed now: https://godotengine.org/article/gles2-renderer-optimization-2d-batching

That's nice, I guess. Maybe I'm out of touch, but who uses Godot? Who plays games on mobile besides little kids?

 

[Ysaye]

One of the long-standing complaints about the Godot engine has been the lack of drawcall batching which led to degraded performance on mobile. Looks like this is being fixed now: https://godotengine.org/article/gles2-renderer-optimization-2d-batching

That's nice, I guess. Maybe I'm out of touch, but who uses Godot? Who plays games on mobile besides little kids?

I don't think there has been a serious game made in Godot but I have dabbled a bit in Godot 3.X (Using the 3D side of the engine) and as a game engine it has some nice features and obviously it is open source.

I don't play mobile games.

 

[LESS T_T]

Godot is starting to see some "serious" (as in indie with some commercial effort) 2D games.







And there are some smaller things too.

 

[Bad Sector]

Who plays games on mobile besides little kids?

Back when mobile games first game out, mobiles had actual physical buttons (and even a joystick), they were great to play games on since they had many games similar to those you'd find on older computers and dedicated handhelds of the time.

Also early iPhone games were trying to explore mechanics that would work nice on a touch screen and some were neat, especially physics games or turn based games. I've played a bunch of turn based first person games on my iPod Touch like Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG and Undercroft (which was the first game i've ever played and finished on my iPod Touch and actually spent several days - or actually nights - on it). They'd never replace my PC, of course, but they were nice for playing for an hour or so on bed before falling asleep. Also when i had some surgery that forced me to stay on bed for several days, i was playing some sort of turn based sci-fi strategy game (that i sadly forget the name of and my iPod Touch isn't working anymore) pretty much all day.

Those were all games you'd buy though and none had anything like microtransactions or DLCs or in-game ads or any of that crap. I'm not even sure if those schemes were even a thing back then (i'm talking late 2000s).

TBH i had high hopes for mobile gaming - i always liked handheld games because you can lie down anywhere and play or you can play before going to sleep (...with the occasional danger of getting hooked to the game and getting up late next day :-P) but i never liked the closed locked down nature and ridiculously expensive SDKs of consoles like Game Boy/GBA, so something that would be open to anyone to create anything they wanted for free and without much interference was something i always liked. And i thought and still believe that while touch screens are awful for trying to shoehorn control schemes you'd find in other platforms, they can have their own mechanics.

But sadly this didn't happen, there weren't any games that you couldn't do in other platforms (later when tables became a thing you'd get Angry Birds and Cut the rope that, while had similar games on PCs, felt much more natural on a touch screen at the size of a tablet, but those were the exceptions, not the rule). And the monetization schemes, rush to the bottom and absolutely horrible discoverability the official app stores had basically killed any interest i had for mobile games.

Every time i saw a company like Gameloft making a first person shooter on a mobile or tablet that was an almost exact clone of Halo or Modern Warfare or whatever was popular on consoles at the time, my heart sank a bit. Why are you making such a game on a touch screen? And even when you do, why are you making it with the laziest controls possible using an on-screen gamepad? At least some earlier attempts, like Prey for iPhone, tried to take advantage of the touch screen by using tapping to target monsters. Why was this thing ignored instead of being explored more? And still, ok, you are making those lazy controls, why aren't you at least trying to make an original game?

(of course i know why and it was explicitly spelled out to me by someone who worked at Gameloft some time ago: because that is what people will buy - the original stuff do not sell)

I was into mobile games ever since the original Nokia 3410 with its monochrome screen allowed me to install Java games that i could download from WAP sites and for me the way mobile gaming evolved was one of my greatest gaming disappointments.

 

[Alchemist]

One of the long-standing complaints about the Godot engine has been the lack of drawcall batching which led to degraded performance on mobile. Looks like this is being fixed now: https://godotengine.org/article/gles2-renderer-optimization-2d-batching

That's nice, I guess. Maybe I'm out of touch, but who uses Godot? Who plays games on mobile besides little kids?

Godot has been gaining some traction for indie projects, but no big-name studios yet. I feel it's a better engine for pure 2D than Unity, and the 3D is getting to be quite capable with recent developments. The 3D is actually all any indie dev would need unless they're aiming for mainstream AAA-level graphics. Open-source, 100% free, no royalties needed - there are a lot of benefits. Market share is low mostly due to lack of marketing / awareness, and many studios already being heavily invested in Unity and the asset store that goes with that.

About mobile, I don't develop for mobile nor do I care for mobile games, but a Codexer specifically called that out about Godot one time, so I was just posting to inform. To answer your question, millions of adults play mobile games.

 

[The Avatar]

I'm ashamed to admit, I played Candy Crush Saga for about a week.

 

[Catacombs]

I played Candy Crush Saga for about a week.

Definitely an RPG

Spoiler

 

[The Avatar]

Discovering a secret room

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Hey hey people.

 

[Bad Sector]

The Avatar
Nice single pixel outlines, how are you doing them?

 

[The Avatar]

Exploring the tower of the archmage.

The Avatar
Nice single pixel outlines, how are you doing them?

Sobel filter

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Well, I just got a negative review. Two actually, in the past week. I got a negative review before, but I fixed the dude's issue pretty quickly, so he changed his review to positive. So anyway, I got this negative review. I try to look at these as ways to improve...

Too expensive, may turn out great, but they need to hire a competent programmer.

Himeko Sutori is strange. Some of the game-design and balancing is really good (give whoever did this a real job!), however the programming, the user-interface and graphics are rather hilariously bad. It's like if a group of friends had a project, and they didn't want to exclude anybody.

The menus are clunky, they are using 2D sprites in a 3D world with free camera, Some of the triggers for game-events are just silly... this does have a lot of potential though, they just need to hire atleast 1 competent developer, aswell as one moderately competent graphics artist.

But I'm not really sure what to make of this one. I especially wonder how my competence as a programmer can appear so lacking. Oh well.

 

[Bad Sector]

I wouldn't read too much into it, he points out some issues that he found annoying and might genuinely need improvement (i haven't played your game to judge, so i'm not sure which is which), bundled together with some parts that there were noticeable and he thought were also something that caused the game to be "bad", regardless if that was the case or not universally (e.g. there have been a few JRPGs with 2D sprites and 3D world with a free camera, like Chantelise) and... "attacks" the developer as an emphasis :-P. Whenever faced with something they mostly dislike, most people ignore the positives and focus to the negatives, so in this case since the game is "all" negatives ("all" because all the positives have been filtered out), then it is obviously the fault of the programmer (ie. whoever made the interactive things) and the artist (ie. whoever made the visual things) and they need to be fired and replaced (because that is yet another so common reaction to whenever someone dislikes something: "whoever did X should be fired").

 

[Ninjerk]

Well, I just got a negative review. Two actually, in the past week. I got a negative review before, but I fixed the dude's issue pretty quickly, so he changed his review to positive. So anyway, I got this negative review. I try to look at these as ways to improve...

Too expensive, may turn out great, but they need to hire a competent programmer.

Himeko Sutori is strange. Some of the game-design and balancing is really good (give whoever did this a real job!), however the programming, the user-interface and graphics are rather hilariously bad. It's like if a group of friends had a project, and they didn't want to exclude anybody.

The menus are clunky, they are using 2D sprites in a 3D world with free camera, Some of the triggers for game-events are just silly... this does have a lot of potential though, they just need to hire atleast 1 competent developer, aswell as one moderately competent graphics artist.

But I'm not really sure what to make of this one. I especially wonder how my competence as a programmer can appear so lacking. Oh well.

I can't speak to how he might know how the programming is bad, but UI and graphics are a bit more straight forward. I think first you have to take into account that he's listing 2D sprites in a 3D world with a free camera as something ostensibly negative--you can say the same thing about FFT except that it didn't have a free camera (which arguably would have been an improvement) and that game is virtually unassailable in terms of quality. The UI being "clunky" is sadly not very descriptive. If you had a lot more feedback like this vis-a-vis your art assets, you might have to look at changing the presentation of your characters, but if it's just one I wouldn't sweat it too much. This feels a bit rambly but I'm trying to stay ahead of a potential power outage (it's storming here).

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I'd say the fact that he thinks a group of people worked on the game (when in reality it was just Nathaniel doing most of the heavy lifting as far as I know) can be taken as a compliment.

 

[Bad Sector]

Has been a while since i worked on the MS-DOS game (playing games tend to eat into the making games time), but today i sat down and worked a bit on the game, so here is a new video from something i just added:



I wanted to add some sort of environmental hazard so that some of the moves actually have a use and since it has a sci-fi theme, what is more appropriate than exposed electricity? As far as i'm concerned, this is pretty much a must :-P

But to do that i needed to add animated textures, so this is what the video above is about. Now any texture (both in the world and in the models, though only world is shown in the video) can be made animated simply by creating additional frame files with the +1, +2, +3, etc suffix in the filename (e.g. for a foo.raw, the files foo+1.raw and foo+2.raw define two additional frames for a total frame count of 3). The engine animates the textures automatically (the speed is hardcoded to about 7.5fps, that is ten times slower than the VGA refresh rate which is also the rate the game updates itself).

Up next is actually killing you. This will need some extra work since right now there isn't any "dead" state nor any dying animation. Actually, there isn't even any "current level" state, so i'll need to do that first :-P.

EDIT: also added a command to play the game from the selected object (essentially teleporting the player after the game starts) instead of the beginning so i wont have to play all the rooms to test the one i'm working on:



EDIT2: embedding imgur mp4s looks weird, i might stick with YouTube in the future but i didn't want to list this :-/

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Added a beam sword to the next game. It deals a lot of energy damage and can be upgraded to the point it can kill any high-level entity in ~3 hits (or even one-shot it if you manage to score a critical hit and the target is vulnerable to energy damage). However, you must remain stationary in order to pull off such an attack, forcing you to lure kiting enemies into a dead end, it eats a ton of energy and last, but not least, if the target evades such an attack, you'll suffer a ram response from them, making it a very tricky weapon. I get the feeling lightbane is gonna enjoy this one a lot.

 

[Bad Sector]

Looks nice, but are the outlines meant to be drawn over the beam? Maybe you can fade them out a bit (e.g. draw the beam mesh a second time with low opacity)?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Looks nice, but are the outlines meant to be drawn over the beam? Maybe you can fade them out a bit (e.g. draw the beam mesh a second time with low opacity)?

That's a good idea -- I'm still adjusting things as I go. Generally, the lines are drawn over the transparent geometry like explosions / light shafts.

 

[Bad Sector]

Another minor thing: rotors, which are basically rotating meshes. Can be used for very simple animations, just to have something on the screen that moves :-P. They also accept "start" and "stop" script commands so they could be used as indicators for "something" that happened after an event.