Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Nathaniel3W]

So I'm thinking of reusing all of my Himeko Sutori sprites in an Octopath Traveler clone. And today I came across Smile Game Builder. Any of you ever try it out? In their second video, at 12 seconds, you get a look at the map editor. I would buy their product just for that editor if it can export as fbx.

I did some minimal Googling and I found this on their Facebook page.

In 2016 they were working on fbx export, and what you see there is rendered in Maya and UE4. I tried looking for some more information, but most of it seems to be about importing fbx into their game engine, and not exporting fbx from their editor into a different game engine.

 

[Ysaye]

So I'm thinking of reusing all of my Himeko Sutori sprites in an Octopath Traveler clone. And today I came across Smile Game Builder. Any of you ever try it out? In their second video, at 12 seconds, you get a look at the map editor. I would buy their product just for that editor if it can export as fbx.

I did some minimal Googling and I found this on their Facebook page.

In 2016 they were working on fbx export, and what you see there is rendered in Maya and UE4. I tried looking for some more information, but most of it seems to be about importing fbx into their game engine, and not exporting fbx from their editor into a different game engine.

I have tried it, though I have never tried the FBX export. Like RPGMaker it can be fun for doing simple stuff, but:

• Customization (bringing in new 2D tile covers for example, particularly for steps/slopes, or bringing in new 3D objects or sounds etc.) is a bit of a pain, limited in some areas (I think changing the fonts can be done theoretically but I could never get it to work) and very undocumented;
• Did I mention that documentation is VERY minimal? I know they made a big huw and cry about the exporter (I suspect because it made it attractive for those that would want to do lots of customization), but I doubt you would find much information on it;
• For something so pre-setup, if you go into first person mode you get a lot of clipping which is a bit annoying. It works better if you are going to use it from the third person perspective. You can use sprites over the top of the 3D (I think that was what you were thinking of) and that can be done to good effect however;
• The editor is good but also again limited. One space there can only be stacked with one type of tile; so you can't have ground+ground+ground+castle wall -> you need to switch to castle wall object to put over the top. Which means having conforming 3D objects is really important.

Anyway - just some ramblings.

 

[Wysardry]

I tried Smile Game Builder for a few hours to see if it would be suitable for the recent Dungeon Crawler Game Jam, but decided not to use it because the combat was in third person POV.

I did notice that they have a Unity exporter plugin DLC available on Steam, but I'm not sure what the conversion process is or what format the models end up as, as I have no need to buy it. You could ask on their Steam community forums.

RPG in a Box (also on Steam) has a similar editor, but it is voxel-based and still in early access. I did not use that either, as the combat is incomplete and the voxels are a little too chunky for my tastes when in first person mode.

 

[Ysaye]

I tried Smile Game Builder for a few hours to see if it would be suitable for the recent Dungeon Crawler Game Jam, but decided not to use it because the combat was in third person POV.

I did notice that they have a Unity exporter plugin DLC available on Steam, but I'm not sure what the conversion process is or what format the models end up as, as I have no need to buy it. You could ask on their Steam community forums.

RPG in a Box (also on Steam) has a similar editor, but it is voxel-based and still in early access. I did not use that either, as the combat is incomplete and the voxels are a little too chunky for my tastes when in first person mode.

You can change the battles to 1st person (Old Dragon Quest style) in Smile Game Builder - there is a toggle in a menu to do that.

 

[Wysardry]

Thanks. I did search for the option in the docs, but could only find how to switch to first person in exploration mode.

Does combat take place on the exploration map, or is it still on a separate battle map that has little resemblance to where you were before the fight started?

 

[Alpan]

If I were to consider making a 2D game I planned to commercially ship, Game Maker would probably be my first thought and actual choice. Unlike all the newfangled stuff like Godot, Smile etc, it has definitively proven itself over time with quite a few excellent (and very popular) games, and it does not have a reputation for being janky (unlike, say, Unity), either.

 

[Ysaye]

Thanks. I did search for the option in the docs, but could only find how to switch to first person in exploration mode.

Does combat take place on the exploration map, or is it still on a separate battle map that has little resemblance to where you were before the fight started?

Yes the docs are useless; I think the option was in some wierd location (maybe the section on battles, which is an unrelated tab on another section?). B

asically the enemy appears in front of you in first person, with the background being the background of the first person view (so no unrelated battle background).

 

[Wysardry]

Doh. If I'd known that, I could have avoided buying the Dungeon Crawler Toolkit for Unreal Engine.

At least I still learned a little about how such games are constructed.

 

[Bad Sector]

For some reason even though i have this thread watched it stopped popping up in my alerts :-/. I wonder why, it does happen with some threads (i think it is because i do not always visit them when i get the alert, though i'm not sure).

Anyway.

Today i spent a bit of time and made a DOS floppy disk image with a simple installer for the DOS version of Post Apocalyptic Petra:

https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra/devlog/244590/added-dos-floppy-disk-image

Nothing big really, just something i had in my mind ever since i was working on the game. Neat thing is that the DOS version of the game alone (ie. without the various Windows versions) is only around 710KB compressed.

I wish i had a printer so i could try making schematics for a DIY box for the game :-P.

 

[Tavernking]

Organising all changelogs/updates to my game like so: New Bits, Changes, Bug Fixes, and Known Bugs.
It also doubles as a development tracker, the stuff I've highlighted in green is the stuff I've finished so far.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

What did Kevin win though?

I've seen this post at the top of this page every day, and I just now got the joke.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I'm doing a Mac build for Himeko Sutori. I finally got everything set up. It was such a freaking pain.

AWS recently made Macs instances available and I thought I would just set up a Mac instance on AWS. Easy, right? Set up a VPN, share my files with the Mac, run Unreal Build Tool, and I've got myself a Mac build. Except Egypt blocks VPNs. So without a connection to the outside world, I have to run the build on actual local hardware. I looked into buying a Mac, but imports in Egypt being as they are, Macs of any kind cost 30-50% more than they do in the US. And because of that, Egyptians have unrealistic expectations for how much they should be able to sell their used Macs for. I'm not about to pay $1000 for a 6-year-old MacBook. So I said, "Screw it," and got my Hackintosh game on. Now I've got macOS Catalina in VirtualBox using half my RAM and CPU cores. And networking between Windows and macOS is a pain even without the extra complexity of running a virtual Mac.

Eventually I got it all set up, tried building the code, and now I find out that I have to rewrite sections of it because clang and XCode (oh--and I had to find an XCode build with the right OSX SDK for building Unreal Engine 3 and that would run on a slightly outdated OS that I don't want to upgrade because I don't know if it will break VirtualBox)--clang and XCode won't compile stuff that Visual Studio is fine with. So now I actually have to learn something about C++ so I can fix the code and make it compile.

Edit: Oh yeah, and I forgot. It's not like you can just click the "Build" button and it works. Epic has this thing called the Unreal Build Tool that you have to build first, and it sets up everything else for compiling the C++ for the desired platform. I didn't have the settings for making UBT start a Mac build, and I've been working on Himeko Sutori for so long now that I no longer have access to the UDN and the documentation in it, and no one at Epic remembers anything about UE3, and they're not answering my emails. I got lucky and found out that I didn't delete a sample UBT project file when I set up UE3 five years ago, and I was able to copy that file and change a couple of entries in it to make UBT compile my game for Mac.

Moral of the story: It's always going to be harder than you expect. Fixing one issue is going to cause another issue. Murphy's Law is perhaps nowhere more evident than in software development.

 

[Hag]

If this can save time and sanity to anyone in a similar situation : SDL_Image loading of PNG images is broken and will segfault with some valid files God know why.
I decided to use stb_image instead with three benefits :

1. it works,
2. it is one single header file, so one less dependency to ship with,
3. it has a built-in option to flip the image when loading (by default it is x-inverted).

 

[Tavernking]

https://www.youtube.com/c/Kingsblood/videos

What's this indie game dev obsession with video dev logs? This guy is up to his 51st dev log, average video length is like 15 minutes. Must take hours for each one to write a script and present and edit... and he only gets like 100 views per video. Is it worth it? It looks like a huge waste of time.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

I'm doing a Mac build for Himeko Sutori. I finally got everything set up. It was such a freaking pain.

AWS recently made Macs instances available and I thought I would just set up a Mac instance on AWS. Easy, right? Set up a VPN, share my files with the Mac, run Unreal Build Tool, and I've got myself a Mac build. Except Egypt blocks VPNs. So without a connection to the outside world, I have to run the build on actual local hardware. I looked into buying a Mac, but imports in Egypt being as they are, Macs of any kind cost 30-50% more than they do in the US. And because of that, Egyptians have unrealistic expectations for how much they should be able to sell their used Macs for. I'm not about to pay $1000 for a 6-year-old MacBook. So I said, "Screw it," and got my Hackintosh game on. Now I've got macOS Catalina in VirtualBox using half my RAM and CPU cores. And networking between Windows and macOS is a pain even without the extra complexity of running a virtual Mac.

Eventually I got it all set up, tried building the code, and now I find out that I have to rewrite sections of it because clang and XCode (oh--and I had to find an XCode build with the right OSX SDK for building Unreal Engine 3 and that would run on a slightly outdated OS that I don't want to upgrade because I don't know if it will break VirtualBox)--clang and XCode won't compile stuff that Visual Studio is fine with. So now I actually have to learn something about C++ so I can fix the code and make it compile.

Edit: Oh yeah, and I forgot. It's not like you can just click the "Build" button and it works. Epic has this thing called the Unreal Build Tool that you have to build first, and it sets up everything else for compiling the C++ for the desired platform. I didn't have the settings for making UBT start a Mac build, and I've been working on Himeko Sutori for so long now that I no longer have access to the UDN and the documentation in it, and no one at Epic remembers anything about UE3, and they're not answering my emails. I got lucky and found out that I didn't delete a sample UBT project file when I set up UE3 five years ago, and I was able to copy that file and change a couple of entries in it to make UBT compile my game for Mac.

Moral of the story: It's always going to be harder than you expect. Fixing one issue is going to cause another issue. Murphy's Law is perhaps nowhere more evident than in software development.

Can't you just use one of the vpn solution which provides obscurification of traffic? VladikSS stuff is cutting edge https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI, or you can use one of the plugins for shadowsocks https://github.com/cbeuw/GoQuiet , some vpn providers provide their own options (but they usually inferior to custom stuff). AFAIK vpn traffic obscurification has reached the state where the only way to effectively block them is either implement white-lists or selectively block unknown endpoint hosts with large ammount traffic (like if people use vpn to watch videos or decide to pass ALL of their traffic through vpn).

 

[PrettyDeadman]

https://www.youtube.com/c/Kingsblood/videos

What's this indie game dev obsession with video dev logs? This guy is up to his 51st dev log, average video length is like 15 minutes. Must take hours for each one to write a script and present and edit... and he only gets like 100 views per video. Is it worth it? It looks like a huge waste of time.

I think other than promotion it's also a self-discipline thing, making regular reports on your progress.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

https://www.youtube.com/c/Kingsblood/videos

What's this indie game dev obsession with video dev logs? This guy is up to his 51st dev log, average video length is like 15 minutes. Must take hours for each one to write a script and present and edit... and he only gets like 100 views per video. Is it worth it? It looks like a huge waste of time.

I think other than promotion it's also a self-discipline thing, making regular reports on your progress.

I haven't watched these videos. How often are the updates? 51 dev log videos seems like kind of a lot, especially if they have any extra production value.

I promised my Kickstarter backers monthly updates and I delivered those for nearly 5 years. That surpasses the 51 dev log updates this guy made, but mine were mostly text with some screenshots. And I often felt those were pretty tedious and that my time would be better spent either working on the game or taking a break from the game. But still... maybe knowing that I had a monthly update due motivated me to squeeze in a little more at the end of every month. And I think my monthly updates kept my backers happy even though my development stretched years past my original timeline.

Is this guy trying to update anyone specifically? Like Kickstarter backers, for example? Maybe he wants to keep reminding everyone that the game he announced isn't abandoned vaporware. Maybe the publicity juggernaut takes a long time to get rolling, and if he keeps adding quality content, people will take notice. 51 updates though, you would think he would have more than 100 people paying attention. Maybe he has a lot more fans than we realize, and maybe they tune in for a minute, but they don't watch enough of the video to trigger a +1 to the watch count.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Can't you just use one of the vpn solution which provides obscurification of traffic? VladikSS stuff is cutting edge https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI, or you can use one of the plugins for shadowsocks https://github.com/cbeuw/GoQuiet , some vpn providers provide their own options (but they usually inferior to custom stuff). AFAIK vpn traffic obscurification has reached the state where the only way to effectively block them is either implement white-lists or selectively block unknown endpoint hosts with large ammount traffic (like if people use vpn to watch videos or decide to pass ALL of their traffic through vpn).

Thanks, but I think I'm done with the VPN route. I can tolerate a slow build in my VM. And with internet speeds around here, the time I lose in compiling might be a lot less than the time I would lose trying to communicate with the cloud. And also, AWS will only let you rent Macs by the day. That's not very efficient for me if I think a build will only take an hour at most.

Where I'm at now, the ancient UE3 code relies on conversions from string to wchar_t, which was disabled in C++11. So I figured out how to make the code compile in C++03, which solves the string conversion issue, but now the compiler doesn't know what nullptr is because that was introduced in C++11. So now I have to find out some way to resurrect this horrible Frankenstein's monster, stitching together code made years apart under different standards.

The Windows version compiles just fine though. Go figure.

 

[LESS T_T]

With Epic acquiring ArtStation all of its learning materials will be free "for the remainder of 2021": https://www.artstation.com/learning

 

[Tavernking]

I'm doing a Mac build for Himeko Sutori. I finally got everything set up. It was such a freaking pain.

Do you really expect many sales for Mac? 96% of Steam users use Windows, 3% Mac, less than 1% Linux.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I'm doing a Mac build for Himeko Sutori. I finally got everything set up. It was such a freaking pain.

Do you really expect many sales for Mac? 96% of Steam users use Windows, 3% Mac, less than 1% Linux.

Not really expecting many sales, but it was something I promised my Kickstarter backers and there are a couple of them still waiting on Mac builds. UDK was supposed to have an effortless Mac build, and UE3 was supposed to be ready to build for Mac too. So I thought, "If it's not that hard, I may as well get 3% more sales." Turns out the Mac build actually is pretty hard.

 

[Mustawd]

Nathaniel3W ima buy ur game cuz of your game dev thread. I admire your perseverance in game dev. Hope it's profitable for you, but if not at least know that the effort is admirable. I'm way too risk adverse to ever do anything like what you are doing. Good job man.


EDIT: Purchased.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Turns out the Mac build actually is pretty hard.

Don't want to break your balls, but keep your expectations low (around 3% or so, like you said). From my experience, DGS only had about ~4% of its total sales on Mac and roughly twice than that on Linux.

It might be a nice learning experience for you, though.

 

[Tavernking]

Shameless Godot shill here, with Godot you don't have to worry about porting to mac/linux at all. It takes about 5 seconds.

 

[J_C]

Shameless Godot shill here, with Godot you don't have to worry about porting to mac/linux at all. It takes about 5 seconds.

Shameless GMS2 shill here, in GMS 2 it is easy to port to Linux/max as well. Basically Click Export to .... (platform)