Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[what am i doing]

What do you think of this iteration?(Still no graphics)

View attachment 40659

Some of it doesn't read all that nicely to me, as a native English speaker. I tried to come up with a shorter version that communicates roughly the same things, but with (hopefully) better wording.

Golel is a dark fantasy, first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler focused on mobility and use of the environment.

As a fierce warrior tormented by dark visions, you venture into places where no other mortal dares. Battle a wide variety of monsters and overcome diverse environments; meet friendly NPCs and seek their aid. Every play through brings a unique set of challenges and rewards.

Kick enemies into traps, drop hazardous objects on them, and outmanoeuvre them through different terrain. Stats alone will not be enough: your tactical abilities will carry the day.

Golel features hundreds of skills, stats, and possible builds. Both skills and equipment will enable unique play styles. A vast, non-linear world lets you choose your own path.

 

[PompiPompi]

What do you think of this iteration?(Still no graphics)

View attachment 40659

Some of it doesn't read all that nicely to me, as a native English speaker. I tried to come up with a shorter version that communicates roughly the same things, but with (hopefully) better wording.

Golel is a dark fantasy, first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler focused on mobility and use of the environment.

As a fierce warrior tormented by dark visions, you venture into places where no other mortal dares. Battle a wide variety of monsters and overcome diverse environments; meet friendly NPCs and seek their aid. Every play through brings a unique set of challenges and rewards.

Kick enemies into traps, drop hazardous objects on them, and outmanoeuvre them through different terrain. Stats alone will not be enough: your tactical abilities will carry the day.

Golel features hundreds of skills, stats, and possible builds. Both skills and equipment will enable unique play styles. A vast, non-linear world lets you choose your own path.

Here is another iteration with help with other antive English speakers.

 

[PompiPompi]

Wut
You don't change a shader of an asset, you use the same shader on many assets.
It's more work without Unity, trust me.

I think whats confusing you is you are thinking ideal case. All assets are just models that share the same pipe line, shader etc.
The reality is things get far more complicated than that.

Remember, Unity is an advertising malware, that also happens to be a game engine.

Unity is abstracting a lot of things that you would need to do anyway when you write your own engine.
Writting native?
Now you need to start dealing with all the libraries only to load different assets.
Want texture compression?
Unity already has all the code to help you choose the right compression on the fly.
You start to need to write specific code for texture compression.

I have written native apps with OpenGL and DX from scratch.
If you want to make a big 3D game.
If you don't use an engine, you will have to write your own engine anyway.
So you don't avoid using an engine.

Actually theres plenty of libraries you can use to build an engine on top of OGL or DX. You don't *have* to write from scratch.

With Unity you are locked into an awful way of doing things. Is Unity saving any time? For a VR demo I can see why you chose it. But in my case not a chance.

I mean... integration is not something to think lightly off...
Yea, Unity saves a LOT of time.
If your game won't sale with a Unity engine, it won't sell without a Unity engine.
Yea, you won't get the best performance, and you might have to compromise a bit. But mostly not really.
Going native with can be useful for two things mainly:
1. Making really good graphics on low end devices, like phones, or native VR.
2. Making a super high end engine, that will use the latest and best features.

I am pretty sure you aren't in the second category.
And the first category will only ROI if you were able to make a good game in the first place.

I have created games natively.
It's good to make you a better programmer.
But unless you already have a big studio with big budget, you should probably use an engine. For the sake of your free time.

 

[RPK]

What do you think of this iteration?(Still no graphics)

View attachment 40659

Some of it doesn't read all that nicely to me, as a native English speaker. I tried to come up with a shorter version that communicates roughly the same things, but with (hopefully) better wording.

Golel is a dark fantasy, first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler focused on mobility and use of the environment.

As a fierce warrior tormented by dark visions, you venture into places where no other mortal dares. Battle a wide variety of monsters and overcome diverse environments; meet friendly NPCs and seek their aid. Every play through brings a unique set of challenges and rewards.

Kick enemies into traps, drop hazardous objects on them, and outmanoeuvre them through different terrain. Stats alone will not be enough: your tactical abilities will carry the day.

Golel features hundreds of skills, stats, and possible builds. Both skills and equipment will enable unique play styles. A vast, non-linear world lets you choose your own path.

Here is another iteration with help with other antive English speakers.

View attachment 40712

this is getting better. a couple things, one just a grammar thing, and one I think could read better.

"tile based" and "non hostile" should both be hyphenated. the grammar rule is that if neither adjective sufficiently describes the noun by itself and both words are required to make the adjective make sense, you use a hyphen. In the first case, neither "tile" nor "based" make sense by itself with "movement", so you hyphenate as "tile-based" to be correct.

I think "you chose to venture into places that no mortal willing goes into" would read better as something like "you willingly chose to venture where no other mortals would dare." it's too passive the way it is now and the repetition of the word "into" is clunky.

 

[Tavernking]

How are you guys balancing your day job with gamedev?

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

How are you guys balancing your day job with gamedev?

I can't really. I have found that very difficult. I tend to work on it when I am out of a job. I generally have had jobs or contracts that allow me to save up enough to quit work take long periods of not working where I can recharge and work on the game.

 

[beardalaxy]

How are you guys balancing your day job with gamedev?

I get to work on my game at my day job. For now. Business is going under at the end of the year. I do event work, and the majority of the time you're just sitting around so I just bring my laptop. I've been doing that since 2019 at two different businesses. Hoping that I will be able to find another one.

Back when I worked retail, which I might be doing for a little bit in between event jobs, I just worked on my game on my days off.

A good thing to do is, no matter how tired you are, just work for at least 30 minutes every day. Forcing myself to do that has helped me a lot when I lack motivation amidst everything else that happens in life.

 

[PompiPompi]

How does this short description reads?

 

[PompiPompi]

GOLEL store page is up!
Please Wishlist!

 

[Jaesun]

GOLEL store page is up!
Please Wishlist!

Put a space after each .

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

GOLEL store page is up!
Please Wishlist!

Don't shit on your doorstep. Don't waste your time selling to fellow developers, promote it to potential customers.

 

[PompiPompi]

GOLEL store page is up!
Please Wishlist!

Put a space after each .

Can't really. It's valve own auto formatting.

 

[RPK]

How are you guys balancing your day job with gamedev?

2-3 hours before bed. my wife is an early-to-bed person, so that gives me a lot of free time at night, luckily. She also has a solo hobby that she's happy to indulge while I work away, so I'm lucky in that regard as well.

I always try to not have 0% day. Always get at least one little thing done, because those days where you do nothing have a tendency to pile up if you let them, and suddenly people are asking you "hey whatever happened to that game you were working on?"

 

[MalcolmR]

How are you guys balancing your day job with gamedev?

For me it's easy. I quit my day job to go into game dev full time. It was probably a terrible decision, but there's no turning back at this point. If I still had a day job, I'd seriously consider reducing the scope of my game or outsourcing a lot of the work.

 

[beardalaxy]

I've made another good bit of progress on my total tileset conversion process. This will give you guys a much better look at what I've been up to. Left is the original, right is the updated one. Of course, it's been upscaled with bilinear filtering to make it impossible to copy unless you want shit sprites lol. Since I'm using paid assets, I don't want to step on anyone's toes just in case.

Just a couple quick things to note:

1) The dead tree and palm tree sprites still need remakes. I have been trying to find an artist who can do them, but the only one I've found so far is charging a little bit too much. I might have to just bite the bullet and go for it if I can't find these trees I need in the next few days. If you know of someone that might be willing to take on the task feel free to shoot me a message!

2) The tent has been drastically changed. Due to this, I will need to swap out all of the tents in the actual maps. The checkerboard pattern is to help remind me to do that. There aren't many tents in the game, so I saw this as a worthy enough use of my time versus trying to find some other way to make it work.

Also a reminder that this is quite a wild change in art style, so it isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. The whole purpose of this is to get rid of the DEFAULT ENGINE ASSETS. I think the default assets look pretty good actually, but I don't want people to immediately discredit this game I've worked on for so long just because I use the default assets. I hope you can understand!

 

[Tavernking]

The first developer I hire to help me extend my engine: "Why is there a comment that just says peepee"

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

The first developer I hire to help me extend my engine: "Why is there a comment that just says peepee"
View attachment 40817

Is this a $5/hr developer from India that goes by the name "Bob" by any chance?

 

[PompiPompi]

 

[beardalaxy]

The first developer I hire to help me extend my engine: "Why is there a comment that just says peepee"
View attachment 40817

Typical developer things xD sometimes the intrusive thoughts win.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, but it looks like you're making progress so keep chugging on!

I'm still working on tileset stuff. The more sheets I make, the easier it gets to do the rest of them. There are a good amount of duplicate tiles, so in the time since I last posted I've already done an entire sheet and I'm over halfway through another one.
For this current sheet, I actually made these little tables from scratch! They may not look like much, but I wouldn't really consider myself an artist so I'm pretty proud of them. Especially the tablecloth and the crystal ball. I kind of just threw together something I thought would work and it was perfect!

The thing I'm dreading are mountain cliff/wall tiles. The ones in the main pack I'm using have a completely different style from the original assets. They're more Pokemon-like where you should do them in layers rather than using them as if they were structural walls. I have another pack that uses the tiles I'm looking for, but the grass tiles from the main pack are incompatible with them. The grass tiles merge with the water tiles and path tiles, so you can see my dilemma a little bit. I'll probably end up having to manually merge the two and that's not going to be very fun.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

The thing I'm dreading are mountain cliff/wall tiles. The ones in the main pack I'm using have a completely different style from the original assets. They're more Pokemon-like where you should do them in layers rather than using them as if they were structural walls. I have another pack that uses the tiles I'm looking for, but the grass tiles from the main pack are incompatible with them. The grass tiles merge with the water tiles and path tiles, so you can see my dilemma a little bit. I'll probably end up having to manually merge the two and that's not going to be very fun.

Its funny isnt it, those "dread" parts.

I always dread having to do anything UI related.

I quite enjoy drawing art though, I find that the most relaxing. I much prefer that to programming.

 

[J_C]

GOLEL store page is up!
Please Wishlist!

Put a space after each .

Can't really. It's valve own auto formatting.

Every other game has a space after each . so I doubt that you can't format that text. It looks bad for the eyes if you keep it that way.

 

[MalcolmR]

Its funny isnt it, those "dread" parts.

I always dread having to do anything UI related.

I suspect that UI is the most underestimated task in game development. People just assume you add a bunch of panels and buttons and its done, but it really takes hundreds of hours of experimentation and problem solving, most of which will never consciously be noticed by anyone. Nothing is more frustrating than spending the whole day experimenting with a new UI idea only to realize that it looks worse than before. I now understand why bigger games have dedicated UI artists and even UI teams.

On the other hand, for me at least, programming is the most satisfying because it's easy to predict how long a task will take and there's rarely a time when you hit a brick wall and have no idea how to make something happen. It's pretty much guaranteed that I'll be able to get at least some of my to-do list done in a day.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Its funny isnt it, those "dread" parts.

I always dread having to do anything UI related.

I suspect that UI is the most underestimated task in game development. People just assume you add a bunch of panels and buttons and its done, but it really takes hundreds of hours of experimentation and problem solving, most of which will never consciously be noticed by anyone. Nothing is more frustrating than spending the whole day experimenting with a new UI idea only to realize that it looks worse than before. I now understand why bigger games have dedicated UI artists and even UI teams.

On the other hand, for me at least, programming is the most satisfying because it's easy to predict how long a task will take and there's rarely a time when you hit a brick wall and have no idea how to make something happen. It's pretty much guaranteed that I'll be able to get at least some of my to-do list done in a day.

UI is such a thankless task. Zero glamour, yet everyone "expects" a UI that works.

I don't like the programming so much in the sense that, if I have to do it then that means the project isn't done. I want to focus on the higher level thoughts of the actual game, not building the engine. Also I tend find a lot of code is simply boilerplate, with the exception of writing some shaders the code is largely boiler plate, object copying, transforms, handling events.

I enjoy the actual graphics programming section however, that's still fun.

 

[Edward Doyle]

Probably better to post here for frequent updates rather than a thread.
The art style is finally finalized and enough content for a demo is almost done. Currently reworking the stealth system and will fine tune the combat as the content development goes on.

The progress of the tileset + UI:

Apparently the art is very inspired by PC98 games, and managed to integrate Fallout-inspired Skilldex in the UI:

But yeah the project is an action RPG that will heavly lean into some CRPG elements.

 

[beardalaxy]

Probably better to post here for frequent updates rather than a thread.
The art style is finally finalized and enough content for a demo is almost done. Currently reworking the stealth system and will fine tune the combat as the content development goes on.

The progress of the tileset + UI:

Apparently the art is very inspired by PC98 games, and managed to integrate Fallout-inspired Skilldex in the UI:

But yeah the project is an action RPG that will heavly lean into some CRPG elements.

I REALLY like the look of this. You've done a good job. Is all the art custom made?