Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Zanzoken]

I think the stuff Zanzoken wrote is good if you go the Kickstarter/EA route but I never did do that. There are some contrarians who say that wishlists get stale if you take too long from the first announcement until the release. I simply don't know. Both routes can work but the announce and release and do everything in 2 months route is way harder if you didn't do it already.

I used to not be a fan of Kickstarter either, but after doing some more research on it I think the pros outweigh the cons.

Pros
- Steam will provide keys for every Kickstarter backer, free of charge. Given that Kickstarter's fees are 8 to 10% and Steam's fees are 30%, this is a big deal for your bottom line.
- Some people on Kickstarter will voluntarily pay more for your game than the asking price. Sometimes a lot more. This is essentially free money, just be careful not to get too crazy with rewards and all that.
- A backer beta gives you a captive audience to focus test and QA your game before it hits the public marketplace on Steam.
- Kickstarter itself is a promotional tool that will draw attention to your game.

Cons
- Steam reviews left by Kickstarter backers don't count toward your game's review score. This is a significant drawback considering your backers are the most invested in your game, and are likely to leave positive reviews.
- Launching and managing a Kickstarter requires a non-trivial amount of time and effort.

I don't pretend to have all of the answers either, of course. This stuff is not an exact science by any means.

Thanks, sounds like a good plan. I guess it's just my own biases at work. 'Are you telling me people seriously get interested in a game before they can even buy it?'. I never follow upcoming games (apart from BG3 because I like sharing videos to my wife who's keen to try it).

Well, a slight variant on the approach I described is you could hold off on announcing the game until you're ready to launch the Kickstarter, and then do both at the same time. If you wait to go to Kickstarter until you've got a playable demo / vertical slice, then you can go straight from the campaign into the backer beta if you want. Then you're selling something tangible, unlock most Kickstarters which are just promises.

 

[Twiglard]

I will never use 3d to achieve what I want. Yes the art is amazing and I cannot take any credit for most of it, which is the work of this incredible artist https://ember-atelier.tumblr.com/

That art looks great. Are you going to make an urban fantasy or steampunk RPG with that guy rather than a dungeon romp?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

There are some contrarians who say that wishlists get stale if you take too long from the first announcement until the release.

It's possible if you have long periods of radio silence and/or keep delaying the release. There's too much noise out there, if you don't keep promoting your game, something else will take the attention away from it.

Thanks, sounds like a good plan. I guess it's just my own biases at work. 'Are you telling me people seriously get interested in a game before they can even buy it?'. I never follow upcoming games (apart from BG3 because I like sharing videos to my wife who's keen to try it).

Don't let your biases ru(i)n your business. No one will know about your game if you won't start advertising it, and poor initial sales are hard to turn around, and they can (and will) tank your career if you're not careful.

 

[Tweed]

Games vanish from my wishlist once I see the sheboons and important opinions show up.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

I could get it better actually by adding further layer encodings. But its a bit of a tradeoff between time and effort, is it worth it. Not really.

idk, I'd really like to be able to see the tile pattern on the floor behind the doorway instead of a generic entrance that looks like it should be used to lead to another map. Takes me out of the game.

Looks pretty decent though. The artist you linked to has some insanely well-done isometric art for sure.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

It's funny how nothing is ever as easy as it seems. This simple speech bubble took all day. It has a popup animation. It types out the letters one at a time. The words do not jump down to the next line as they get written out; if the full word is long enough that it can't fit on the line, it starts on the next line. The bubble sizes itself to the length of the dialog. The animation to set the size of the speech bubble takes the same amount of time regardless of the size of the speech bubble. The speech bubble appears over the speaker. And the speech bubble location and offset are correct across different resolutions and aspect ratios.

Next I need to add the speaker's name to the speech bubble. And after that I need to make some scripts that allow me (or a modder) to create cutscenes where characters can speak one after the other.

 

[Modron]

Single letter type writer effects are aggravating; be sure to have an instant text display option. Sentence-by-sentence or line-by-line text crawls are the only decent types of crawls because they don't impede reading.

Sometimes I do wonder if word by word might be a tad bit more palatable as well since that's what the Japanese are doing with their games before they get translated.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Single letter type writer effects are aggravating; be sure to have an instant text display option. Sentence-by-sentence or line-by-line text crawls are the only decent types of crawls because they don't impede reading.

Sometimes I do wonder if word by word might be a tad bit more palatable as well since that's what the Japanese are doing with their games before they get translated.

Yeah, that can definitely get annoying. I remember sitting through the interminable chapter changes in the original Final Fantasy Tactics on PlayStation. Those took forever to write out.

No need to worry about Septaroad Voyager though. Pressing A on the controller or clicking with the mouse will instantly complete the text. And after the text is finished, the next button press or mouse click after will close the speech bubble.

Edit: word by word would be easy to do in English. But I'm not sure how to do it in Japanese, which I'm already planning. Japanese doesn't have spaces the way English has spaces. I think Japanese word wrap only works after certain words that mark parts of grammar. Like with "watashi-wa," word wrap will allow a break after the "wa" but not before. I should research that more... Probably for my next game.

 

[Modron]

I just meant with kanji a single a character input is far more of a word than "s" is. So a single letter crawl might be less painful for the Japanese.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

Are we allowed to post our vapourware here if it's not an rpg?

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

You can do anything you want, chief. Make yourself at home

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

About two months ago, I attended a 48 hour on-site game jam called Chillennium (we slept there) with some teammates from school. We were able to successfully submit a game. I was in charge of programming (used unreal blueprints) and some project management as well as depot management. The other team members who handled the art, level design and sound/music and animations were mostly amateur students in this field. It went mostly okay with the skill level we had.
https://nekotthebrave.itch.io/the-light

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

I have also, between classes and work, been designing my own retro/ps1 style game (albeit progress has been a bit slow lately) called "Grim Tomes", which takes heavy inspiration from Tomb Raider. In fact, I kind of imagined it as a "new" one, since there are no "classic style" Tomb Raider releases coming in the ever. I started development a few months ago and have been documenting my progress quite a bit via a codex unsupported screen recording tool called "screencast/techsmith capture". I started the project in Unreal Engine 4.27.2, but upgraded to 5.1 after some time. I'm currently in the middle changing my design workflow from building my levels in MAYA, to a more modular workflow where I'm building the levels directly in Unreal. As such, I'm not finished with rebuilding the first level yet and so the demonstration I'm linking will be for the 4.27.2 version of the game. I'll also not be talking in this video thankfully.

The majority of everything except for a few animation and texture assets were created by me. I'll replace the animations that came from a 3rd party source as soon as I get off my ass and make them again (had to change skeletons mid way through and couldn't be assed to make the animations again). The extreme texture warping is fixed (I think) in the 5.1 version, but I haven't textured everything there yet.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Welp, the Dungeon Crawler Jam is over, and Demon Lord ended up being #43, which ain't bad. I nailed the visuals and audio but gameplay-wise it wasn't good -- in fact, I'd say the game played itself for the most part.

Fortunately, I got tons of feedback, and there seems to be a lot of interest in the game, so I started working on the extended edition as a way to remain productive whenever I take breaks from Ringlorn Saga Gaiden.

It's going to be quite different from the jam version, and I have a clear idea of what I want to do with it, so I hope people will give it a shot once it's ready.

 

[Justinian]

Am in a lull. On one hand i should be producing promotional stuff for my game. But I don't want to do that, I want to make games. OTOH, I haven't started work on my next game because I don't want to leave my first one unpromoted. So I've done nothing all week except a minor patch.
I should at least upgrade to windows 10 this weekend. I really hope it doesn't screw up my installed shit.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Hey guys, I noticed something interesting in the screenshots for the Live A Live remake.

 

[Abu Antar]

Not the first game they did it for.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Am in a lull. On one hand i should be producing promotional stuff for my game. But I don't want to do that, I want to make games. OTOH, I haven't started work on my next game because I don't want to leave my first one unpromoted. So I've done nothing all week except a minor patch.
I should at least upgrade to windows 10 this weekend. I really hope it doesn't screw up my installed shit.

Don't worry, once the burnout sets in, you won't be able to promote your game OR work on a new game for a while.

 

[Justinian]

Am in a lull. On one hand i should be producing promotional stuff for my game. But I don't want to do that, I want to make games. OTOH, I haven't started work on my next game because I don't want to leave my first one unpromoted. So I've done nothing all week except a minor patch.
I should at least upgrade to windows 10 this weekend. I really hope it doesn't screw up my installed shit.

Don't worry, once the burnout sets in, you won't be able to promote your game OR work on a new game for a while.

I'm already there.

Also, I have one person complaining about the controller moving the cursor on its own, AND my controller seems to be broken (or at least need a cleaning), so I can't tell if the game is the issue or both controllers are broken (or some other hellish issue that has nothing to do with either the game or the controllers).

 

[Justinian]

Bill Gates can now watch me masturbate but other than that upgrading to win 10 was surprisingly painless. Everything is still there, including all the shit I put on my desktop, every game I've tried (including mine) still works, gamemaker still works, etc.

 

[Justinian]

Have decided my next game will be another roguelite. Wanted to do something more tactical but:

*AI art isn't where I want it to be. I think letting it mature a bit is the right move
*It would be a waste to not use the fresh experience of making one arpg to make another.
*I had a bunch of games I made half-ass designs for (and in one case half-finished before switching to Mage Lords of Brams) and I'd like to close that mental loop
*I think the genre is easier to advertise and more streamer friendly than most. the reality is that i need to advertise and need to make money if I want to keep making games.

Anyway, my next game will involve playing as one of several infernal waifus/daughters of an underworld god tasked with keeping the souls damned in hell from escaping.
The working project name is "Gate to the Underworld" but that's not the name of the game. Will release that when it has a steam store.
This time I'll do more aggressive promos from the start, including demos and ideally I'd like to make a basic version of the game in a game jam to gather some basic interest. If anyone knows of any that are coming up soon plz let me know.

My idea isn't that original, waifus vs Cthulhu has already been done, twice, in a similar low res pixel style, with 20 Minutes till Dawn (a great game) and Her Name Was Fire (which I didn't care for, but it made use of color a lot better than the often confusing 20 min). Hopefully it doesn't come off as TOO derivative.

For now, some preliminary work on basic character design. Made a base model body, then painted features on her.

The robe will def not be what it looks like, I just wanted to see what she looks like clothed.

I'm also messing around with a color pallet. Her Name Was Fire used Red/Blue which worked really well at differentiating everything. 20 minutes till dawn made everything look desaturated and kinda samey. Lots of white projectiles on desaturated colors + white parts included in enemy design. The details otoh are much better than the simpler and more amateurish looking HNWF.

HNWF - amateurish art done right
20min - professional art done ok

 

[Egosphere]

I have also, between classes and work, been designing my own retro/ps1 style game (albeit progress has been a bit slow lately) called "Grim Tomes", which takes heavy inspiration from Tomb Raider. In fact, I kind of imagined it as a "new" one, since there are no "classic style" Tomb Raider releases coming in the ever. I started development a few months ago and have been documenting my progress quite a bit via a codex unsupported screen recording tool called "screencast/techsmith capture". I started the project in Unreal Engine 4.27.2, but upgraded to 5.1 after some time. I'm currently in the middle changing my design workflow from building my levels in MAYA, to a more modular workflow where I'm building the levels directly in Unreal. As such, I'm not finished with rebuilding the first level yet and so the demonstration I'm linking will be for the 4.27.2 version of the game. I'll also not be talking in this video thankfully.

The majority of everything except for a few animation and texture assets were created by me. I'll replace the animations that came from a 3rd party source as soon as I get off my ass and make them again (had to change skeletons mid way through and couldn't be assed to make the animations again). The extreme texture warping is fixed (I think) in the 5.1 version, but I haven't textured everything there yet.

Pretty cool. Reminiscent of Lud's Gate.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

I have implemented some background pictures for Steel Breeze.
Does it look better?
https://youtu.be/nEzzP50glXQ

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Finishing up the intro/tutorial level for Septaroad Voyager. In-game, this is presented as a dream.

 

[Bad Sector]

Finally after three years of development, Little Immersive Engine now has the ability to let you use a different material when making brushes than the default "bathroom tiles" one :-P. Still can't change the material after creating the brush though, that's too advanced.

Seriously, last year i was busy with work so did pretty much zero work on the engine and earlier this year i was busy with other stuff. Then i got distracted with other projects (e.g. the xbox homebrew stuff i mentioned a few posts ago). But i thought to try and focus on Little Immersive Engine for a bit since i'd like to use it for an actual game instead of just dicking around.