Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Aaand the trailer is up. Sorry for tripleposting, shit's moving faster than my own shit after two coffees and chainsmoking session.

Love this art style so much. Can't wait to try it out. This is the best argument for chainsmoking I've ever seen

 

[what am i doing]

Added cultures to the list of generator stencil options. Learned a bit more about how ImGui popups work and how to close them properly.
Adjusted the cartographer a bit to turn off tile borders and zone borders at certain distances. This was always planned but I didn't get around to it. It improves framerate and those don't need to be drawn when zoomed out (in fact, it looks bad if they are - better this way). I do note that my compute cull function seems to have a subtle logic error somewhere in it: for the most part it's fine but for objects that have multiple instances, if any instance is on the camera all are drawn. So for now that means labels aren't being culled. Low priority but it'll need to be dealt with eventually.

I did some experimentation with async loading for world assets and it mostly worked ok but did give me some Vulkan validation errors when loading finished since I tried to do it with minimal locking, just locking the cartographic layers and skipping them in the render cycle if locked, but - something clearly wasn't entirely right. It didn't cause visible problems, but still. I went back to single-threaded loading for now. I think if I want good async loading of things that have a presence on the renderer I need to look more carefully at the structure of data buffers and/or figure out a better sync point/mechanism for the threads.

I think next I will want to revise the editor brush a bit and add the capacity to paint "one tile", "all tiles in a zone" and "all tiles in [larger scope]" where larger scope could be a state, or a multi-zone region, etc. For now at least all tiles in a zone would be ideal to permit more rapid filling of contents (by the user) and possibly better performance.

Edit: Also, I discovered that I misunderstood the way swapchains work a bit and if I simply check if the window is minimized when drawing before doing ANYTHING Vulkan-related, I don't need to rebuild it. ImGui still needs to have its Render() called, though, and I also allow the Renderer's cartographic subsystem to do any needed mesh merges / object refreshes when Renderer::Draw() is called. Resizing is still on the menu. Of course, most AAA games don't allow free resizing (have to pick a preset in their menu), but IMO being able to just drag and resize a game's window is a mark of professionalism so I do want to support that eventually.

 

[Tavernking]

A greek city at night time. Almost 12 months in development now.

 

[Justinian]

Got a few bucks from taxes, broke down and bought 1 year membership for gamemaker 2. I don't want to use it, I hate the new interface, but the ability to play the game from a browser is too useful of a marketing tool to ignore. I don't want my next game to languish in obscurity like my first one. So I'll have to buckle down and just get used to the fucking thing.

 

[Justinian]

Enma's daughters is now playable from a browser:

https://justinianiii.itch.io/enmas-daughters-demo

Still pretty barebones, and I'm not sure saving works. Actually I should try that next. Would suck if it didn't because I do want to make metaupgrades available in the demo.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

I'm making it so my game assigns the dungeon's layout by reading XML output from Grid Cartographer. I'm still new to parsing text files, though, and accidentally made it so every empty tile gets completely ignored. That, and the fact that I have yet to properly rewrite how the walls are drawn from the player's position, turned the dungeon into an ever-shifting non-Euclidian hellscape:

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

XML is structured. XML parsing is a solved problem. Get a proper XML parsing library instead of going through hell of writing one, especially if you're new.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

XML is structured. XML parsing is a solved problem. Get a proper XML parsing library instead of going through hell of writing one, especially if you're new.

Or Json. Even easier than xml. https://docs.gridcartographer.com/export/json_xml

If you have a language that supports attributes this makes it really easy to do this sort of load/save thingy.

 

[what am i doing]

XML is structured. XML parsing is a solved problem. Get a proper XML parsing library instead of going through hell of writing one, especially if you're new.

I would recommend pugixml, personally.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

JSON is fine if you have control of the data, but LarryTyphoid is reading GC output. So he needs xml. I've used pugixml in a lot of projects, it's good.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

JSON is fine if you have control of the data, but LarryTyphoid is reading GC output. So he needs xml. I've used pugixml in a lot of projects, it's good.

GC outputs JSON as well. Pugixml is....its ok if you are using c++.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

JSON is fine if you have control of the data, but LarryTyphoid is reading GC output. So he needs xml. I've used pugixml in a lot of projects, it's good.

GC can also output JSON, which I generally find easier to work with.

That said, there's nothing wrong with using XML, but I agree that it's better to use a library for that since it can be messy.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Ah thanks, didn't know it does write json. For json in c++ world you have very good https://github.com/nlohmann/json for ease of use and https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson when you really need some serious fast parsing of the stuff (massively painful api though).

 

[beardalaxy]

A greek city at night time. Almost 12 months in development now.
View attachment 38577

Very stylistic. It reminds me a lot of something... but I can't figure out what. Fallout, maybe?

I have done a bunch of stuff in my game. A few side quests and some NPCs mainly. Stuff I can't exactly show off in visual form, but I have been working a lot on them. Just continuing to chip away at it.
Here's something I can show off, though! I have implemented some color filters to help some people distinguish colors.

Unfortunately, with the tools/knowledge I have, I don't know how to saturate/desaturate individual color channels. Instead, it's just a color tint, essentially. It's nice, but not perfect, so I'd still recommend using something like the Windows colorblind filter if you have access to it, but I think it will still be useful for people who might be playing on Linux which doesn't have access to a great colorblind mode.

Tritanomaly is a particularly hard one to get right since I can only manipulate RGB and that kind of colorblindness suffers with Blue/Yellow. It also works a little bit differently than other types of colorblindness, so I'm just doing the best I can here. I added the Color/Contrast Boost modes as well as the Negative mode to cover any edge cases where people may REALLY need it for some reason. Or maybe someone just prefers how it looks with blown out colors or deeper contrast. I can't imagine you'd want to actually play the game in Negative mode, and I might tweak it a bit to be a little bit more pleasant to look at.

Fun fact, most games (kind of) get colorblind filters completely wrong. The idea is to push colors toward the visible spectrum that colorblind people can see, which will help them see the difference in colors easier. This works, but you aren't actually seeing accurate colors, just seeing colors as more distinct. This can lead to some really immersion-breaking moments like in the Call of Duty Modern Warfare remake where flipping on the Deuteranomaly setting turns flames pink and the night vision is so green I'm unable to see anything lol. There are also a lot of games that also just straight up simulate colorblindness due to a misunderstanding where a game engine might have a mode where you can see what a colorblind person would see, so that you can optimize your games around it. A lot of devs think that this is just actually a colorblind mode switch and include it in their games, not realizing that they are just making it worse for us lol.

Even a game like Forza Horizon 5, which won the Game Award for Most Accessible Game in the year it was released (because of that weird, completely unnecessary sign language mode), had a colorblind mode that wasn't helping colorblind people see the actual colors, either being a simulation or trying to push colors into their visible spectrum. Seeing this in video games really aggravates me these days, because I've played games with the Windows filter and know how things are SUPPOSED to look, so when I'm playing a game that's not like that it can be a little annoying.

A lot of people also see that Deuteranomaly, for instance, is green-weak, so they assume we have trouble seeing green. However, it's the opposite. The green cone in the eye is deficient, so the red cone takes on more green, resulting in seeing less red and more green in your vision. Colorblind glasses will strip out green because of this.

The BEST way to implement colorblind settings in your game, in my opinion, is by letting players just customize their own colors for important elements, like the HUD. I love it when you get stuff like Back4Blood that lets you change the color of practically everything gameplay-related because it means I can customize it to my own vision.

In case you want to put colorblind filters in your game, I'd look at the way the Windows colorblind filter affects the image and try to replicate that. In short, though, you can reference this loose guide to get things a little close. I'm sure it could get better with more specific tweaking, but everyone will also have slightly different vision:

• Deuteranomaly: +10% Red, -10% Green.
• Protanomaly: +10% Green, -10% Red.
• Tritanomaly: +10% Green, -10% Blue.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Out now. Decided to surprise the players by releasing it 1 day early.

 

[agris]

Out now. Decided to surprise the players by releasing it 1 day early.

Congrats on the release! I’d like to buy it but my couch machine is still on Win7. Does it truly require Win10?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Out now. Decided to surprise the players by releasing it 1 day early.

Congrats on the release! I’d like to buy it but my couch machine is still on Win7. Does it truly require Win10?

I think I answered you on Steam forums, but I'll repeat my answer here -- since I'm a solo dev and had to switch to Windows 10, I'm usually unable to test if the game works fine on Windows 7 in time for the release.

You can try the jam version as a demo to see if it works, since the commercial version is based on the same engine, but keep in mind that they are two different games at this point.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Out now. Decided to surprise the players by releasing it 1 day early.

congratulations, I just bought it. Best of luck.

 

[Justinian]

Out now. Decided to surprise the players by releasing it 1 day early.

Congrats on the release! I’d like to buy it but my couch machine is still on Win7. Does it truly require Win10?

I think I answered you on Steam forums, but I'll repeat my answer here -- since I'm a solo dev and had to switch to Windows 10, I'm usually unable to test if the game works fine on Windows 7 in time for the release.

You can try the jam version as a demo to see if it works, since the commercial version is based on the same engine, but keep in mind that they are two different games at this point.

Will have to wait until August to buy but good luck.

 

[Ysaye]

Out now. Decided to surprise the players by releasing it 1 day early.

Purchased - congrats on another game finished. If you taking ideas for your next one, perhaps a Heart of Fantasy clone (ie. the original one with a limit on the number of turns) style game is next in order?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Out now. Decided to surprise the players by releasing it 1 day early.

Purchased - congrats on another game finished. If you taking ideas for your next one, perhaps a Heart of Fantasy clone (ie. the original one with a limit on the number of turns) style game is next in order?

It's something that I considered doing when I was sifting through ideas for my first game but decided to go with DGS for a variety of reasons.

Right now I'm interested in finishing Ringlorn Saga Gaiden and making something tiny along the way to grow my art skills.

 

[what am i doing]

While adding basic support for cities I ran into some maddening buffer alignment issues and eventually discovered that glsl has some different struct packing rules from C++; namely, a 32-bit unsigned integer, which takes up 4 bytes, actually causes the addition of 16, and not 4, bytes to the stride of the struct it's part of. I could tell pretty much immediately by the symptoms I was seeing (most objects being positioned incorrectly, which told me the object data buffer wasn't being filled properly), but I thought the problem surely had to be on the CPU side and spent a very long time hunting through my renderer with a fine-toothed comb.
Big shout-out to RenderDoc for helping me discover the real cause; RenderDoc shows the exact stride (CLion only showed me stride for C++ objects; GLSL support is poor). Unfortunately during troubleshooting I had rolled back basically everything I did regarding cities, so I have to redo all that, probably some other day.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

zwanzig_zwoelf I saw your game on the front page of Steam. Did you do any marketing? How did your game sell so well on the first day?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

zwanzig_zwoelf I saw your game on the front page of Steam. Did you do any marketing? How did your game sell so well on the first day?

Nice.

I only shitposted about it on social media and here. It caught the attention of Game*Spark and a few other outlets, and a few old fans hopped on as well.

TBQH I didn't expect any kind of coverage since it's a small, laser-focused experiment by design, so I'm as surprised as you are.

 

[RPK]

zwanzig_zwoelf I saw your game on the front page of Steam. Did you do any marketing? How did your game sell so well on the first day?

this is awesome! congrats zwanzig_zwoelf