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Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

Justinian

Educated
Joined
Oct 21, 2022
Messages
149
Just tested out some smarter enemy AI today (and fixed a couple of bugs related to dungeon generation).

SpiderAttack.gif

The thing I'm pleased with here is that only one of these spiders performed its immobilizing web attack. All the others went for a standard attack. That means the enemies are now coordinating their attacks. If one of them is already applying a status that doesn't stack, the others will choose a different action.

Something else I noticed is that I might need to make the web attack a little more obvious. The spider using web was attacking directly from the side, so the web is about as small as it possibly can be from this angle. Maybe if you get attacked from ahead or behind, the spider web will show up a little better.

And it's probably time for me to go make a dedicated thread under the JRPG subforum. My progress is probably now past the dev-blog-for-other-devs stage and is ready for the advertise-to-potential-customers stage.
How much is it gonna be?
 

Nathaniel3W

Rockwell Studios
Patron
Developer
Joined
Feb 5, 2015
Messages
1,036
Location
Washington, DC
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
Justinian $25 US, but I'll put it on sale when it's first available.

I know that's at the top end of indie game prices, and that's a price for a really good game produced by an actual studio, and not just one guy. But I'm pretty confident that there's a lot of price signaling in video games. If it's priced too low, people assume the game sucks. If it's priced higher, people are more likely to buy it, more likely to put hours into it, and more likely to give it a recommendation.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

Graverobber Foundation
Developer
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Nov 21, 2015
Messages
2,969
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デゼニランド
But I'm pretty confident that there's a lot of price signaling in video games. If it's priced too low, people assume the game sucks. If it's priced higher, people are more likely to buy it, more likely to put hours into it, and more likely to give it a recommendation.
I had the same opinion for a long time but recently ended up experiencing quite the opposite.

Ringlorn Saga is $7.99 and I was upfront about its small scale. Despite my own experience and recommendations to not price games below $9.99 to avoid getting lost among shovelware, it ended up working in its favor -- more people were willing to try it at full price and there were few complaints that it offered too little for the asking price. Since more people bought and played it on release (partly due to aggressive marketing and luck), more people gave recommendations, and thus even more people bought the game -- it's a few steps away from becoming my best-selling game.

I think that price signaling works a bit differently these days -- it's more of an exercise to come up with the *right* price. Sure, if it's priced too low, people assume the game sucks, but there's also the polar opposite -- if it's priced too high, more people will wishlist the game and forget about it until it's 90% off, and fewer players on launch == fewer reviews == slow start == worse performance unless you're lucky.

That's the impression I get based on what I've observed over time.
 

Moaning_Clock

SmokeSomeFrogs
Developer
Joined
Feb 7, 2021
Messages
614
I wonder how much money Walter Machado has made.
A rough estimate is to take the review count times 20-50 to get the number of sales. Assuming across all of his games 4000 reviews, it would be 80000-200000 sales times what he gets per copy on average like 10 cents or something after taxes so 8k-20k? Maybe a bit on the low side.
 

RobotSquirrel

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Aug 9, 2020
Messages
1,517
Location
Adelaide
I know that's at the top end of indie game prices, and that's a price for a really good game produced by an actual studio, and not just one guy. But I'm pretty confident that there's a lot of price signaling in video games. If it's priced too low, people assume the game sucks. If it's priced higher, people are more likely to buy it, more likely to put hours into it, and more likely to give it a recommendation.
Is the community behind your game telling you that is the case though or are you doing this based on your own perceived valuation of your product. Because that perceived valuation is probably wrong unless you have the evidence to support that thinking. I would setup a poll, show your game off and get feedback on pricing point.

Come up with 3 scenarios, the Best case, the middle case and the worst case, risk assess what is most likely to happen and remember you only get to do this once so make sure you're upping your confidence in success and reducing the unknowns.
You want to price according to your break even point based on your investment into your product so far, if you can break even with the numbers you know are visible in your community then you're in a pretty good state to succeed.

As a first time launch you will need a community to vouch for the game and populate your steam page with reviews ASAP. You might want to consider early access regardless of the stigma (only 25% of EA games actually release). Demos are essential, especially for first time developers. *this is just general advice to everyone not just you. I can see your previous game went through the same general idea so you know what you're doing.

Do Not Assume invisible customers are going to just magically show up and buy your game, its rare and most of the time its because an influencer played your game, you should have a fairly good idea where your customers are coming from, gauging how many will follow through is tricky and most of that is going to come down to marketing strategy. I can't tell you how to convince an influencer to play your game, but I can tell you not to rely on it, if it happens hell yeah! but you have to assume going in that most of the marketing is happening on your end and only your end.

If you don't already have a community around your game then you need to before you release because otherwise no one will be there on launch day. Community building is equally as important as development and marketing. And as nice as it would be, don't rely just on RPGCodex, its a great starting point but its just that a starting point, you've got people here that will likely evangelise your product which is cool but you're going to need to bring in quantity as well. *again just being general with this its not specific to this game.

The fact that you're a second time developer means you've got an installed fanbase already, you should be utilising these people for feedback as they've clearly supported you in the $25 price point before, they might have some surprising feedback that challenges your assumptions.

I saw that you have an IndieDB page for your first game but not the new one? You also don't appear to have an Itch.io (what happened there? you KS talks about one), for IndieDB I'd be keeping a constant supply of content to at least get those initial front page clicks, they do help, I'm curious though why there was minimal engagement from the community there. What you've been showing here should also be on sites like those as well.

I see you also did a kickstarter on the first title, which was a very good move. Maybe you could consider that approach again? KS doesn't have to be for Development they can be promotions as well, From what I can see you've done everything right in the past more than anything you just need more eyes on the product.
 
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Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
1,989
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The advice i remember from ancient times is that if you are not sure how to price your game, it is better to err on the higher side as it is always possible to drop the price, but doing the opposite - well, it is technically possible, but nobody will like it (especially true now with modern tools/sites that track the game prices). Unless you are a AAA developer that the press will hype for free or one of the 0.001% of indie darlings that already have an established wide userbase, your game will be in a perpetual long tail anyway, so your chances of your game being noticed at release date are not going to be very different from your chances six months later (not taking into account hitting the jackpot with a very influential influencer).
 

Twiglard

Poland Stronk
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Staff Member
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Aug 6, 2014
Messages
6,619
Location
Poland
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
So I was able to render a character controllable through arrow keys. But it wasn't a real part of the game world, and because of this it drew on top of transparent scenery. This meant that I've had to start adding real entity types, and convert existing scenery into an entity subtype. I'm in the middle of refactoring it, and hopefully there won't be regressions all over the place (if anything it simplifies some of the logic).

It simplifies the code a bit because entities have constant addresses and store more information related to themselves. So there's no more need for intermediaries when updating their positions and what have you.
 

Twiglard

Poland Stronk
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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
What would you use to store the entity list in draw order? I'm using a vector right now along with binary search and it's going to be a scalability problem sometime in the future due to having to reinsert elements during the update loop on events such as entities moving or animations playing.

There are concerns such as locality of reference and malloc pressure (both kind of good with vectors).
 
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Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,644
What would you use to store the entity list in draw order? I'm using a vector right now along with binary search and it's going to be a scalability problem sometime in the future due to having to reinsert elements during the update loop on events such as entities moving or animations playing.

There are concerns such as locality of reference and malloc pressure (both kind of good with vectors).
For your purposes, I would consider making use of a very tiny Z axis offset on objects, applied to their model matrix, and enabling depth testing. And then the vector doesn't have to be sorted at all, the GPU will just discard fragments that would be behind other objects. Define a small "main Z constant factor" (0.000whatever001f), get the object's north-south world coordinates, multiply that value by the main Z factor, apply this to the object's model matrix, update the matrix. If the factor is small enough then this should result in objects still appearing to be on a 2D plane. If you want to be able to further set rules on cases where objects have the same north-south world position but are overlapping (so that, say, floor tiles always go on the back in cases where an object is sitting on top of them and has the exact same north-south world coordinates), you could also have a smaller "fine tuning Z constant factor" that is the main one / 100 or whatever, and you give your object a depth priority value that you multiply by that fine tuning factor, which is then added to the main Z coordinate. I haven't tested this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Then you don't have to store the list in draw order.

This would also let you batch the entire scene into one draw call, if you so chose.

This is since you appear to be basing draw order off an object's position in the vector. I would, personally, be more inclined to decouple gameplay objects from render objects in the first place which makes sorting less of an issue (smaller render objects), but in the end if I wanted to control the draw order of objects in a 2D scene the above is how I would do it. Actually I'll be putting something similar into my engine eventually since there will be layers where objects on the same plane overlap, but each layer is a multidrawindirect call (aka, the GPU draws them all in whatever order it wants, which can vary from frame to frame) so they need to be made to belong on a subtly different plane (that looks like the same plane to the user) with depth testing to avoid z-fighting.
 

Twiglard

Poland Stronk
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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
For your purposes, I would consider making use of a very tiny Z axis offset on objects, applied to their model matrix, and enabling depth testing.
So you're saying I should go back to sprites with 1-bit transparency? The Z buffer can't be used otherwise.





More work. Wall height's current value is temporary.
 
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Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,644
For your purposes, I would consider making use of a very tiny Z axis offset on objects, applied to their model matrix, and enabling depth testing.
So you're saying I should go back to sprites with 1-bit transparency? The Z buffer can't be used otherwise.
Right, forgot about that aspect of partial transparency :(
In that case, your best bet is likely to decouple render objects from gameplay entities and get yourself as lightweight a render object struct as possible so that sorting your vector of render objects based on their desired draw order is as fast as possible. If they already are decoupled then you probably won't run into any issues (provided the sort is run only once per frame) but I would go with sorting over reinserting.
The other alternative is to do some sorting of your objects so that translucent materials are done in a later draw call or series of draw calls. This, I think, is how most engines would handle it, but it does add some complexity in that you then have two or more conceptually separate "draw lists".

Edit: also, having render objects decoupled from gameplay entities means gameplay entities could be in one vector but render objects in separate vectors depending on their material.
 
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ds

Liturgist
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Joined
Jul 17, 2013
Messages
259
Location
here
For your purposes, I would consider making use of a very tiny Z axis offset on objects, applied to their model matrix, and enabling depth testing.
So you're saying I should go back to sprites with 1-bit transparency? The Z buffer can't be used otherwise.

You can actually do up to 3-bit transparency with Z-buffer depth testing by using a 8x multi-sample buffer and setting the sample mask based on the transparency in the pixel shader. OpenGL can even calculate the sample mask for you via GL_SAMPLE_ALPHA_TO_COVERAGE although the implementation is driver dependent - e.g. good drivers add dithering.

Of course 3 bits transparency is still limited and multi-sampling isn't free so this might not be worth it for your use case.
 

Justinian

Educated
Joined
Oct 21, 2022
Messages
149
My game is almost content complete. I just need to add the abilities for the last 3 normal races and everything i promised in the EA roadmap will be in the game.
I still have to add features like controller support and will have to improve/modify the interface.

Plus bug fixing of course.

But still.

Feels nice to be so close to a finished game after years of abandoned/mothballed projects.
 

Nathaniel3W

Rockwell Studios
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Developer
Joined
Feb 5, 2015
Messages
1,036
Location
Washington, DC
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
zwanzig_zwoelf is your game based on that one game that was widely regarded as the worst game ever made? I can't remember the name of it, but the layout reminds me of whatever that game was.

Also, did you make some kind of custom filter that mimics a CRT screen? If so, you did a good job of it. Very convincing. Red on the left, blue on the right. Does it also have a slight fisheye effect?
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

Graverobber Foundation
Developer
Joined
Nov 21, 2015
Messages
2,969
Location
デゼニランド
zwanzig_zwoelf is your game based on that one game that was widely regarded as the worst game ever made? I can't remember the name of it, but the layout reminds me of whatever that game was.

Also, did you make some kind of custom filter that mimics a CRT screen? If so, you did a good job of it. Very convincing. Red on the left, blue on the right. Does it also have a slight fisheye effect?
The original Ringlorn Saga was inspired by Hydlide. Dunno if that's the game you're thinking about.

As for the CRT filter, I didn't create it -- it's the only Unity asset I bought since I started making games.
 

TheDeveloperDude

MagicScreen Games
Developer
Joined
Jan 9, 2012
Messages
277
Is there any method for balancing the game? Or only the "play it, tune it, play it, tune it, etc"
My nnRogue roguelike was very hard. Then I decreased the difficulty. Decreased again. Again. etc.
Now the beginning is hard, but from the middle it becomes easy, after that very easy.
Last level gameplay
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
1,989
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
P7SSTie.png


Remember the engine i was working on for the original Xbox i bought around Christmas? (...i did post about it here right?)

I decided to work on it a bit more and add text render and i needed some way to convert a font to a texture with glyphs in a format that can be used by the engine directly so i quickly made one. But then i had the idea to add a few visual effects and then a few more visual effects and anyway, the tool so far is as shown above, but while i have added a few visual effects i still haven't implemented the "save to a format that the engine can use" part (or the engine side of text rendering).

I did spend some time making a bunch of different bitmap fonts though, here are some more from an earlier iteration before i added a preview panel:

g5Af2ut.png
 

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