Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[baboogy]

Testing out loading of map files, along with saved model/texture data from my map editor into the actual engine. Fullbright and no fog so I can pick out quirks faster while walking around and testing. I really would have liked to go for a "true" 2D engine for this, but sadly have no artistic capabilities to speak of, and am not about to hire an artist to make a bunch of tilesets. So I've settled on 3D for the world geometry since modeling basic walls, doors, ladders, grates, etc. is something that's easily approachable even to a hobbyist, will still end up having to find good textures to put over them but that seems a far easier task than 2D appearing as 3D spritework. I suppose that's why many other blobbers I see being released by small developers are in 3D as well, even if they're not using anything fancy that would otherwise justify it.

The map editor is more or less complete (or as complete as it needs to be for personal use) so moving on to the game engine/logic now. Been reading the book recommended to be further up in the thread.

 

[Justinian]

Making an interface in Gamemaker is so painful, even though it should be a basic feature.

If I want more than one page of options/stats, the only way I can use the room editor to do it is to place everything outside the room, with checkboard backgrounds the size of the room as a background. But wait, they won't show up outside the room if I set it as the background, so I have to make an actual giant object with the graphic to use as a background. not even sure if it's plausible without slowing down the program, my experience with any game development is that it doesn't like 10k by 10k pixel sprites, and misclicks that move the entire background are common.

alternatively I can arrange everything in paint, get pixel coordinates and set the variables at object creation, which is time consuming and annoying.

guess it's time to youtube tutorials and hope someone found a better way


edit: oh wait looks like rooms have multiple layers, i was just thinking it would be great if they implemented that, then checked to see if they had, and they did. crisis averted, i might actually start getting some non-design work done at this rate.

 

[JoacoN]

How do I into game dev? I'm trying to learn Godot, but I am simple and dumb and skipped CS.

Godot is a pretty simple engine to learn, I've been using it since 2021 and because of it's python like coding language and simple nodes system you can get the hang of it with just watching 1 or 2 basic engine layout videos and reading the official documents.
Personally I prefer 3.5 because it's much simpler than 4.0, and even if it has some hard limitations it can also be really fun to try and work to optimise your game the most possible within it's primitive state.
You can also check Garbaj on youtube if you want to grab some github projects, he has nice explanations on how to do stuff like basic FPS movement, even then most of what he shows is just some code from docs combined, which makes it pretty shitty the fact he added an MIT license to his FPS movement repositories

 

[JoacoN]

First person exploration game I've been working since early 2022, it's just mostly a small condensed map with many NPCs to talk to and small quests, made out of my sick love for so extremely colorful and bright art styles, and probably consequence of my deteriorating mental state since 2020

 

[JoacoN]

First person exploration game I've been working since early 2022, it's just mostly a small condensed map with many NPCs to talk to and small quests, made out of my sick love for so extremely colorful and bright art styles, and probably consequence of my deteriorating mental state since 2020

Just realised Google Drive isn't loading, so now im sending them through imgur

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Because I hate myself, I decided to add a major minigame to Septaroad Voyager. You can now duel NPCs in the game, played as a collectible card game.



Or rather, now you can open a menu where eventually you'll be able to duel NPCs.

I want all of the characters who join the party to introduce some fun new mechanic. I definitely don't want everyone's abilities to be this complicated. I'm already planning on taking the treasure-hunt mechanic and making that one character's ability. Maybe I can come up with something fun and simple for smithing, enchanting, cooking, alchemy, and lockpicking for some of the others.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I'm looking to commission programmers and artists to make a tech demo for an urban fantasy rpg. Something loosely inspired by Bloodlines, with a monster mash of a secret world and plentiful retro aesthetics. Is this a good place to ask?

EDIT: If there’s anybody who is already working on urban fantasy or wants to, then I can provide funding for a tech demo. I don’t have prior experience in game design, so I cannot provide assistance.

EDIT: My career took a different path, so I don't have art or programming skills, but I still wanted to break into game design as a hobbyist. So far it's been impossible to get my foot in the door without prior experience. If anyone needs funding, then I'd be willing to pay that in exchange for the experience and social capital.

 

[Twiglard]

I'm mostly done with raycasting. First it collects all the objects that could collide with the ray, then uses the canonical raycasting algorithm[1][2].

Since I'm using an R-tree with AABB's, the process looks like this when visualized:

images

So we can visualize how it actually collides.

images

Edit: the original version sucked. This one's better. Took till 5am to debug it and it turned out that the broken part was a flipped plus/minus sign in a part of code I didn't even suspect. Typical programming experience.

 

[Twiglard]

Here's my sixth screencast with all progress since #5 that was a while ago. If you've been following my progress in this thread then it won't contain any new information, however.

 

[baboogy]

Had some time to do a fair bit of progress since I last posted. Rudimentary UI is taking shape, most of the map/movement environmental interactions are more or less done (spinner, teleporters, one way / two way illusory walls and the like), started working on creatures and AI. Once they're a bit more advanced I'll start working on the combat.

In the end, I decided on doing blobs for enemies instead of random turn based encounters, so the combat will be more roguelike blob versus blob focused. Party members can act individually (think casting a spell at a different blob from the one you are engaged in melee with, or choosing to attack one blob behind you with one group of fighters, and the blob in front of you with another), but that forgoes their action for group combat or actions. I allow unique compositions of any enemy type in a blob, so they are not limited to say, 3x3 bandits, you could have a row of dogs, bandits, and their warlord all moving and acting within the same tile. I think that will be a fair bit more interesting than just random encounters that pause the screen, since you can visually gauge the strength of the enemy before engaging with them, use ranged attacks, spells and the like to your advantage, or try to physically run and escape or find a better position if you find yourself being overwhelmed. But it also means poor positioning can find you in a far tougher situation than a random encounter would. For now all enemy creatures can use illusory walls same as the player can, but I plan to limit it to the most intelligent types.

Here's a brief video of moving around and getting chased by 3 blobs of bandits.
https://files.catbox.moe/i5dlzy.webm

 

[baboogy]

I allow unique compositions of any enemy type in a blob, so they are not limited to say, 3x3 bandits, you could have a row of dogs, bandits, and their warlord all moving and acting within the same tile.

Since I'm not sure how to edit a post, I realized I forgot to add this in that one, adding it in a new reply.

 

[Pirate Ronin]

I'm looking to commission programmers and artists to make a tech demo for an urban fantasy rpg. Something loosely inspired by Bloodlines, with a monster mash of a secret world and plentiful retro aesthetics. Is this a good place to ask?

EDIT: If there’s anybody who is already working on urban fantasy or wants to, then I can provide funding for a tech demo. I don’t have prior experience in game design, so I cannot provide assistance.

DM me.

 

[barker_s]

I implemented a simple algorithm that divides a hex map into regions.
64x64 hexes:

128x128 hexes:

I was aiming for 16-24 hexes per region, but I'm unable to control that number precisely with just the current approach. Besides, I kinda dig the irregularity. If I ever need to make them more even (for balancing purposes, perhaps), I'll make a post-processing step to shuffle some hexes around.

 

[puur prutswerk]

Currently implementing the Rust-like farming and electricity systems from Defuse studios into their already Rust-like Survival Game kit v2 for a game I am working on called Dinosoil.

Doing something for society doesn't mean doing things for money, though.

The only measure of society's wants & needs is this thing called money. If society says "thanks dude" but doesn't actually want to pay you for what you did, it means you did something so utterly useless that nobody even values it 1 cent worth. You wasted everyone's time. Like now. Welcome to my ignore.

No, money is valueless, but raising children or cleaning the house, cooking and washing are fucking useful to all of us. Please stop being retarded in this regard.

 

[GoblinGrotto]

Been messing around creating a level editor for hex grids. Maybe I'll actually try and turn it into a game.

 

[Hobknobling]

Been messing around creating a level editor for hex grids. Maybe I'll actually try and turn it into a game.

I would mirror some of those red tree sprites to cheaply create more variance. Is that your art?

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Been messing around creating a level editor for hex grids. Maybe I'll actually try and turn it into a game.

What are you using for UI?

 

[GoblinGrotto]

I would mirror some of those red tree sprites to cheaply create more variance.

Oh yeah, good idea. I should add that feature to the editor

Is that your art?

Yeah, most of it from various dead projects. Just recolored them to share the same palette.

What are you using for UI?

It's all my own stuff. It works alright. Lacks some quality of life stuff, like auto layout and the text input is really bare bones at the moment.

 

[Viata]

Loved the UI, mate.

 

[std::namespace]

Been messing around creating a level editor for hex grids. Maybe I'll actually try and turn it into a game.

cute
how far can you scale it out? how many hexes at 60fps
how do you do the scrollbar?

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

No, money is valueless, but raising children or cleaning the house, cooking and washing are fucking useful to all of us. Please stop being retarded in this regard.

Money is a medium of exchange, and derives its value from its use in trade. Qua money it has exchange value but not use value; if nobody was producing things with use value (or nobody was willing to trade things with use value for money) then money would lose its function as a medium of exchange and thus its value.

 

[baboogy]

I don't know dick about copyright law, especially surrounding demos. But I'm erring on the safe side and assuming that even free demos being released probably shouldn't be using art or assets from copyrighted sources. Just to cover my ass, since I want to put out a demo as soon as I decide it's more or less playable so I can get some feedback on what's fun or not and not develop in my own echo chamber. So I've decided to give my brain a break from working on the engine and make some placeholder programmer art to replace every art asset I had been using up to this point.

I'm actually having way more fun with this than I thought I would. Not an artistically inclined person but I'll have to admit there's definitely something relaxing about throwing some TV show on in the background and doodling away in a pixel art editor.

Question for people here more serious about game development, especially for those working on their games alone- I've heard it said before that out of every game developed by a studio, programmer, whatever, only about 20% of projects make it out of the prototype stage, most are scrapped due to feeling "unfun" relatively early on in development. Do you all tend to playtest your games entirely yourselves? Or do you frequently put out tests to your friends, acquaintances, to try to get some feedback along the way?

 

[Viata]

But I'm erring on the safe side and assuming that even free demos being released probably shouldn't be using art or assets from copyrighted sources.

Really depends on the dev and your location. Are you living in China? Then do whatever you want. Is it a Japanese game? You better be living in Japan and releasing it as doujinshi. Nintendo game? It was nice to know you. Anything else? Pray the dev is dead, the publisher is gone or they don't care enough to complain.

 

[Bester]

I've heard it said before that out of every game developed by a studio, programmer, whatever, only about 20% of projects make it out of the prototype stage, most are scrapped due to feeling "unfun"

I think that's true for hyper casual mobile games that are created en masse. Like throwing a spaghetti plate at the wall and see what sticks.

More serious games have no reason to be unfun. E.g. you're making your own fallout. What's there to be unfun? And even if it is, then just fix it.

Do you all tend to playtest your games entirely yourselves? Or do you frequently put out tests to your friends, acquaintances, to try to get some feedback along the way?

I let other people play my games. On the two occasions I tried, one game they found boring as fuck, but kept complimenting. But I could tell it was more like encouragement and not sincerity. The reason they found it unfun imo is that they couldn't see the bigger picture of how this game was going to develop later on. This also raised the question of how to get sincere feedback - often you can't get it from friends who don't understand that you actually need real feedback, not a pat on the back. Telling it to them changes nothing, they just can't do it.
The other game they didn't understand how to play. They didn't see the point at all. Except one guy who said it was amazing like the second invention of bread, but I'm not sure even he understood what the game was going for.
I never took their feedback into account other than realizing my game needs a tutorial.
Another curious case, I have a friend who says that anything I do or even think of doing is shit, and he'll really believe it and make arguments. At least you can talk to him if you can't see the downside of your ideas. But most of the time his critique is just pure pessimism and nonsense.
In sum, 95% of the feedback is worthless. Don't have high expectations.

 

[Viata]

Looking for people that wants to make easy money. We create a kickstarter page and use the ai tool Sora to create gameplay videos for us. If done well, we can do a better That Which Sleeps schema.