Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[groke]

So, on the business side of things, anyone have any advice for promoting the announcement of an indie fantasy RPG game? Obviously, I want to have a gameplay video to show off on social media(twitter mostly), make an IndieDB page, maybe Steam so people can wishlist. Is having a webpage/blog desirable? Anything else I'm missing? I'm probably not crowdfunding right now.

Start courting twitch streamers now.

 

[Volokard]

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

Those games look amazing. I'm glad Godot is getting more love as well, now more people can see its potential.

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

...What's the deal with... all those... ellipses... though?

I do not have voice actors, so that is the next best thing i can think of to approximate "spoken" words, with its delays and such :-P. Yeah, i don't know, i might have been playing too many JRPGs (and other games that use this dialog style), but it feels more "natural" for text-based speech to me (notice that the computer notes do not have any text delays or ellipses, for example).

Please add the option to display that text instantly though rather than having it type out word by word JRPG-style. I absolutely hate that about JRPGs.

If that's not enough, you can make it extra terrible by having annoying UI sound to accompany the slow typing out of the text.

 

[Bad Sector]

If that's not enough, you can make it extra terrible by having annoying UI sound to accompany the slow typing out of the text.

Thanks for the idea, i just finished programming sound support and was trying to figure out what sort of sounds i should add!

 

[AdolfSatan]

Will the ost be inspired by psx TRs also?

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

If that's not enough, you can make it extra terrible by having annoying UI sound to accompany the slow typing out of the text.

Thanks for the idea, i just finished programming sound support and was trying to figure out what sort of sounds i should add!

Troubleshooter is a great recent example:

(It luckily has a toggle for that specific sound effect in the options)

 

[Ninjerk]

If that's not enough, you can make it extra terrible by having annoying UI sound to accompany the slow typing out of the text.

Thanks for the idea, i just finished programming sound support and was trying to figure out what sort of sounds i should add!

Troubleshooter is a great recent example:

(It luckily has a toggle for that specific sound effect in the options)

Tactics Ogre had it, IIRC, and it was really uninstrusive and kind of soothing.

 

[Modron]

I don't find typewriter sounds to be annoying but yeah letter by letter text scroll is the worst thing ever, the only acceptable kind of text scroll is line by line. Instant display is preferable of course.

 

[Bad Sector]

Will the ost be inspired by psx TRs also?

Sadly, i suck at anything involving audio, with music being completely no-go and sound effects being things i can record around the house with my tablet and edit a bit in Audacity.

Though i do not remember TR1 having any sort of music outside the menu theme, the levels were mainly ambient sounds. Was the PS1 version different?

 

[AdolfSatan]

There wasn't music at all times, but it was pretty nice:


If you care for advice, rather than suffer thru recording all the sounds by yourself, get the FXs from freesound.org (with due attribution to the owners) and pass them thru a bitcrusher to even out the tonal palette and some extra lo-fi crunch.

 

[Bad Sector]

If you care for advice, rather than suffer thru recording all the sounds by yourself, get the FXs from freesound.org (with due attribution to the owners) and pass them thru a bitcrusher to even out the tonal palette and some extra lo-fi crunch.

The lo-fi comes for free by the samples being 8bit 22050KHz :-P.

Thanks for the advice but TBH i prefer to avoid free asset sites since i do not know where these assets really come from and often they need registration and have weird licensing terms. The only exception is opengameart and even there i only pick CC0 stuff. Also i find keeping around a list of attribution for every single thing kinda bothersome as i prefer to mix, match, modify, etc stuff without thinking much about things.

Besides, this adds to the charm, like the early shareware games with digitized sounds that were essentially whatever random objects their developers had around to bang together :-P

 

[vlzvl]

and have weird licensing terms.

Many resources now require some kind of CC BY xx license, freesound.org, opengameart.org, fontstruct.com etc. are full of them.
Most of those sites are even providing similar licenses such as OFL, FFL, OGA etc. which are all similar to CC BY ones.
Public domain or CC0 licensed resources (the public domain subversion of Creative Commons) are usually indicating lesser quality or of ancient age, since the user can even sell those resources on his own, not really an intention by most developers to do or creators to give.
The weird variations of CC BY i found are mostly the -NC (no commercially) and -SA (include the changed files to your package) or -4.0 that does indeed requires the indicate if changes were made text.
In all cases, simply attributing the guy & (optionally) adding some text about changes made, is enough.
Although i agree, it is a bitch to keep a record of credits & been able to show that on your users in reasonable manner.

 

[ragnor]

I released a short text adventure game called The Hittite Prince. You can play it here: https://ragnor.itch.io/the-hittite-prince
Hopefully this thing will turn into a proper rpg both as a setting and engine-wise.

 

[JarlFrank]

I released a short text adventure game called The Hittite Prince. You can play it here: https://ragnor.itch.io/the-hittite-prince
Hopefully this thing will turn into a proper rpg both as a setting and engine-wise.

Please add an option to make the next line of text appear instantly instead of typing out

Other than that, great game. I absolutely love the bronze age so I'm greedily lapping up any game set in it.

The grammar is awkward though. You need an editor.

 

[Bad Sector]

Started working on the second map:



The jam ends this Saturday so i hope i have all four maps done by then. Installing New Vegas this last weekend might not have been a good idea.

 

[Nito]

Started working on the second map:



The jam ends this Saturday so i hope i have all four maps done by then. Installing New Vegas this last weekend might not have been a good idea.

That looks fantastic. Love the texture warping.

 

[Mastermind]

spent a few hours cutting and pasting room transition scripts before I said fuck it and just made a coordinate array using the map coordinates I already implemented (like I should have to begin with). No idea why I didn't just do that from the start, i'd have had to cut and paste almost 1000 scripts doing it the other way.

I'm just not cut out for hard work, that's for the rest of you slaves. Laziness always worked better for me, ima stay true to myself from now on.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Laziness always worked better for me, ima stay true to myself from now on.

Lazy dudes that want to work end up working smarter.

 

[Mastermind]

Laziness always worked better for me, ima stay true to myself from now on.

Lazy dudes that want to work end up working smarter.

exactly. i feel dumb for wasting half a work day doing stupid shit, esp with school starting up again soon

 

[ragnor]

I released a short text adventure game called The Hittite Prince. You can play it here: https://ragnor.itch.io/the-hittite-prince
Hopefully this thing will turn into a proper rpg both as a setting and engine-wise.

Please add an option to make the next line of text appear instantly instead of typing out

Other than that, great game. I absolutely love the bronze age so I'm greedily lapping up any game set in it.

The grammar is awkward though. You need an editor.

Thanks.

I updated the game, fixed some typos, and make the line of text appear instant by default.

 

[Catacombs]

Laziness always worked better for me, ima stay true to myself from now on.

Lazy dudes that want to work end up working smarter.

exactly. i feel dumb for wasting half a work day doing stupid shit, esp with school starting up again soon

Work smarter, never harder.

 

[Bad Sector]

So, i finished the game. Well, "finished". I was fixing bugs until the end, i managed to submit it just three minutes before the deadline :-P

Here it is:

https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra

Some screenshots:

Despite looking Tomb Raider-y, it doesn't really have much platforming (and the platforming it has is very forgiving). It is mainly about exploring the areas and solving the puzzles to move to the next area.

There will certainly be some bugs in there, but hopefully nothing game breaking. Sadly, due to GOG releasing the Dishonored series, as well as a mistake involving a brand new installation of New Vegas, i couldn't find the time to make many maps, so there are only four in there. This means the game will only take you around 25 minutes to finish if you know what you are doing, though i guess it might take you around an hour the first time. In any case, it is a very short game.

EDIT: forgot to mention that this also contains a Windows executable (gdipetra.exe). It is just a quick hack to allow playing the game natively on Windows in case DOSBox is too slow, but it also has 16:9 aspect ratio instead of 4:3. I'll probably make a direct draw version later so that it also runs on Win9x PCs :-P.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

a mistake involving a brand new installation of New Vegas, i

Quid?

 

[Bad Sector]

a mistake involving a brand new installation of New Vegas, i

Quid?

I made the mistake of installing it and thus spending a lot of time playing it instead of making the game :-P

 

[Bad Sector]

Uploaded version 0.99c which fixes an important bug with the keyboard handler (basically having numlock on and using the arrow keys from the arrow pad - as opposed to the numpad - caused Petra to walk slowly... that is because the keyboard controller sends these keys prefixed with a shift key itself prefixed with an 'extended code' key and the documentation i had around about the keyboard didn't mention this :-/ - that my test PCs started with num lock off didn't help either and the bug report was basically that Petra walks slowly unless you also turn and... that's about it, i had to figure out the rest :-P Fortunately running the game in 86box reproduced the issue, but it still took me a while to figure out why it happened).

In addition to the fix above, i also made a small configuration utility:

It can also be used to run custom maps (added an extra tiny map as an example).

Here is a changelog:

• Added CONFIG utility for configuring settings and launching user maps
• Added the ability to configure the Sound Blaster 16 port, DMA and IRQ
• Added a setting to disable sound completely (can make the game somewhat bearable in slower systems)
• Added notifications when the game is loading a map (previously it could appear as if the game crashed, but it was just taking a long time)
• Made sound to stop between load maps (previously the sound buffer looped, again giving the impression that the game crashed - especially on slower systems)
• Maps are now first checked under the 'User' directory before the 'Data' directory, allowing for user maps to be placed there (the CONFIG utility will also display maps and text files under the User directory)
• Added a very simple example 'pool' map
• Added a "failsafe" key in the inventory screen in case the user gets stuck: pressing F7 while the inventory screen is open will kill Petra, causing her to teleport back to the map start
• Fixed keyboard handler bug with arrows and numlock which caused Petra to walk instead of running when numlock was on and the arrow pad was used instead of the numpad arrows

I think this version is good enough and unless there is some big bug (though honestly the game is too short to have anything big), i'll take a rest for now. If nothing else, i bought the new Deus Ex games from GOG and i want to play them :-P.