Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[asper]

Surf Solar, you HAVE to finish that game. I will support you. Start a Kickstarter!

nice trees btw.

 

[shihonage]

So, I have a new idea for Shelter: A Post-Zombie Game

I'll try to be compact.

_________________

A zombie epidemic breaks out after an accident at a military lab.

Most cities are evacuated and then nuked with non-radioactive weapons to kill the zombies inside.

Survivors scatter into small settlements, fighting off the zombies on their own.

Years pass. Zombies start eating each other and eventually die off from starvation.

While this was happening, a small percentage of zombified population found themselves recovering from the virus.

They set up "Recovery Camps", where they slowly nursed themselves back to health.

Those camps were eventually raided by "human" survivors.

The Recovered, while clearly lucid and not zombies, were treated with hostility and suspicion. "They did this to us! They could turn at any moment!"

They become labeled as "subhumans" and get tattooed with the word "sub" to distinguish them from the "real humans". Enslaved for their "eternal debt" to humanity, for "what their parents have done". Kept under watch because they "could turn".

Decades pass.

You, the Player, are a descendant of the subs, a sub yourself. A slave. In a small, peaceful settlement.

__________

THE GAME STARTS with you at your Master's house. It quickly becomes obvious that your Master has grown to trust you, but he is under pressure of his peers.

You see, there was a distress signal from a nearby settlement. An attack by REAL zombies, not seen in many, many years. Then the radio went silent.

The settlement is stirred by the news. Tensions rise.

They don't want to send "real humans" to investigate, and you've grown to be trusted. Plus, they have your parents nearby, also slaves, living in a claustrophobic hut next to another Master's house.

So, your first quest is to investigate. If you don't return after a certain time, it is hinted strongly that your parents will meet an untimely end.

When you leave the settlement, you can go investigate, or roam elsewhere, but investigating will be one of the main plot points so it will have to be done at some point to advance the main arc forward.

During your investigation, you see evidence that suggests there was no zombie attack. It likely was a setup by an unknown, yet, third party.

You bring this evidence back to your Master, who waits at the gates, but he won't let back into the settlement - for your own safety. The people in there have gone past listening to reason and killed your parents pretty much as soon as you left.

So, you find yourself a slave, unofficially freed, in a world of uneasy tensions between the humans and the subs. In your journeys you will encounter camps of subs who have freed themselves, as well as camps of humans of various alignment.

And, possibly, in the second act, real zombies will show up as well. Pulling a Warcraft 3 on everyone.

That's what I have for now

 

[Surf Solar]

I liked your initial, non-zombie focused world more shihonage.

 

[shihonage]

The one on an Earth-colonized planet?

Or the direct Fallout ripoff from the 2008 video?

 

[Surf Solar]

The one on the colony you posted some months ago.

 

[Surf Solar]

Surf Solar, you HAVE to finish that game. I will support you. Start a Kickstarter!

nice trees btw.

Thanks :D But no, only way I could use these assets I see is making some mod for the Infinity engine. It's too detailed for Fallout/What Remains.
I've tried some stuff with different imported sprites to see what the ratio from sprite to rest of the scenery is, like here:

Buit obviously, Torments camera was more zoomed in and the BG sprites were smaller. Meh, have to make some calibrations, then look if I could make something atleast halfways productive with it.

 

[Destroid]

Those are some very nice graphics Solar.

 

[chewie]

Surf Solar, you HAVE to finish that game. I will support you. Start a Kickstarter!

nice trees btw.

Thanks :D But no, only way I could use these assets I see is making some mod for the Infinity engine. It's too detailed for Fallout/What Remains.
I've tried some stuff with different imported sprites to see what the ratio from sprite to rest of the scenery is, like here:

Buit obviously, Torments camera was more zoomed in and the BG sprites were smaller. Meh, have to make some calibrations, then look if I could make something atleast halfways productive with it.

Those kind of assets would be perfect for an OpenArcanum

Really nice work surf!

 

[RingMaster]

This is my vaporware, though i am starting it up again.

Altfuture - It is a 2d top down browser based online game.

All screenshots and the website are old, but you will get the idea.

The website is http://altfuture.net

Screens from the game follow:

The NPC interaction is here:

http://www.altfuture.com/world/chr_macid_burn.php#

I would like to finish the game, however I need help with writing missions and inventory.

If you would like to help, shoot me a PM

Thanks

 

[Surf Solar]

Since you guys liked those trees, here is some sort of theory craft video from a gfx/atmosphere fag. If someone wants the files (all the trees, camera presets, animation presets etc) just drop me a line. It took me a while to do them.



I am no 100% professionall in the industry on this ofcourse, but this is my humble opinion and how games should be made. :>

In the video, there is some small comparison between ToeE graphics and this etc.

EDIT: As said in the video, I made that plug-in in 3ds max. PM me if you want to get it too, it works for each non static 3d model.

 

[curry]

Looks good

 

[DakaSha]

Well since trees are being posted this is something i made quickly when trying to learn how to use unity a long time ago.
Never was meant to be anything more then an atmospheric scene.

I have no idea why i made a still video though.. i could have at least walked around lol







edit: oh yeah and i did finish (more or less) one project actually it was this:


Its just a quake style console for xna so that you can interact with your game programatically during runtime (using python).
say you want to create an enemy at a certain location or something without stopping the program (or using the debugger if it isnt a debug build) to test something you can open the console and create it using python.

Of course right after finishing it i moved on to another language and never used it :p
At least i did finish something heh

 

[Flatlander]

In the random crap you have made category I shall present thee with what happens when a dev gets too deep in to the hypomanic state after working too long with pixelart: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/584033

Apparently the end product is quite buggy since it doesn't work with my Linux/Chrome combo and there are some random crashes. Too bad, I blame the Haxe.

 

[Destroid]

It's not very good really, and pretty easy.

 

[chewie]

Since you guys liked those trees, here is some sort of theory craft video from a gfx/atmosphere fag.

Yep, good example for 2D vs 3D discussions.

Although you have to remember that a subset of the total amount of verts are not shown (a 3D engine would not have to render the whole range), you can spam verts using this technique like no 3D engine could handle it. Especially for "unimportant" scenery like vegetation - which is the first slider you prolly decrease in you favourite 3D game to make it run smooth on your machine.

As DakaSha demonstrated, modern 3D engine are surely capable of displaying awesome trees as well, but I'd say there is a reason why there is only one tree in the video. A forest in this fashion would hit the framerate hard - and then you have to optimize, cut content, maybe even drop animations / particle effects or use simpler techniques.

There is much more you have to look at in those kinds of discussions, but simply put from a technical pov I prefer 2D over 3D as you don't have to process the 3D assets - which is costy even if the GPU handles the most part of it. And one has also to remember that at the end, there are always 'bitmaps'. Be it on HD (sprites) or in the VRam (sprites + 3D assets).

 

[DakaSha]

Since you guys liked those trees, here is some sort of theory craft video from a gfx/atmosphere fag.

As DakaSha demonstrated, modern 3D engine are surely capable of displaying awesome trees as well, but I'd say there is a reason why there is only one tree in the video. A forest in this fashion would hit the framerate hard - and then you have to optimize, cut content, maybe even drop animations / particle effects or use simpler techniques.

There is one tree because I wanted there to be one tree..
Unity handles optimization (Or semi handles it anyways.. It's been a long time but I do remember being able create hundreds or even thousands of trees in a scene. Obviously they couldnt all be on the screen at once (with full polygon count) but I could have easily filled that scene with trees. )

Having said that I still prefer surfs version because its a cleaner look overall.

 

[chewie]

DakaSha

Jip, thought as much - just imagined a "real game" (spoke about optimizations in the same paragraph). The problem with this is that rendering examples don't reflect the "real situation". As in: fps could be good if you show the trees / forest only, they might also be awesome if you have a little lake with water animations and some fish jumping around - but then you still have no GUI rendered, no AI, no sound effects. The engine is in "idle mode" so to say - no vfs access which might cause delays, no ai busy in the main pump, no dynamic elements - just show the loaded "static" data.

Without an actual game and by disabling fps limiters, you can show awesome videos which hit 1000fps, but once you add more and more code & content, you have to worry about the worst case situations and keep them high enough fps-wise. That's where trees get ugly in 3D-land, so to speak :D

Of course, this is also true for 2D engines - you can't just spam 40 trees like shown in surfs video and say "there will be no impact".

Nothing comes without costs - be it cpu time or memory usage. The trick is - as always - to find the right balance.

 

[Surf Solar]

DakaSha


Of course, this is also true for 2D engines - you can't just spam 40 trees like shown in surfs video and say "there will be no impact".

Nothing comes without costs - be it cpu time or memory usage. The trick is - as always - to find the right balance.

True - although I have to say I made some test maps with 1000x1000 hexes and spammed it with those trees, I didn't notice any lags when I walked around on it. I say fore sure it's costy, but much less than actual 3d objects, which was my whole point. ;> All in all, your posts were a good read and I agree with you!

At the moment I am fiddling around to try the same like in my video above but with particle effects - that for sure would look a lot better than the snow or dust animations look that I create purely of 2d editing. But I gotta say, the results so far look crappy. Have to read more tutorials on that.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I decided to develop a roguelike on my C++ object-orientated programming project. Any davices?

 

[DakaSha]

I'd smugly say don't use C++ but I assume that's out of the question
If it's for school or something I suppose you could look up on how people do 7DRL's. It would prob the perfect way of handling it

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Thanks for the advice. Is there any site that shows 7DRLs in progress?

Why not C++?

 

[OuterSpace]

I decided to develop a roguelike on my C++ object-orientated programming project. Any davices?

rogue basin has some pretty good development articles but only a few of them go in depth. Are you going to have ASCII gaphics or sprites?
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Articles

 

[barker_s]

I decided to develop a roguelike on my C++ object-orientated programming project. Any davices?

Back in 2008 Codexer called Castanova has helped me create my C++ roguelike using SDL library. The project never got far, but I've learned a great deal thanks to him. Now I'm mainly doing my programming in C#, but I might be able to dig up that old project so you can check it out. Check your pm in a while.

So yeah, my advice would be going with SDL, since it's relatively easy to get the basic roguelike display working and start coding the actual game.

 

[DakaSha]

Thanks for the advice. Is there any site that shows 7DRLs in progress?

Why not C++?

Because you use the tool fit for the job and IMO C++ is going way overboard. You are just adding a layer of complexity that is not going to really benefit you in any way. It's going to be harder, take longer and very likely be more buggy (and prob even slower) then if you use something else.

I'm not putting down C++. I don't speak it either. But I do know one should at leats look at other options it for a project like this unless you specifically want to learn it, in which case knock yourself out

There are always 7DRL being made btw. Just look around you'll find things (Rogue basin as mentioned)

 

[Davaris]

Well since trees are being posted this is something i made quickly when trying to learn how to use unity a long time ago.
Never was meant to be anything more then an atmospheric scene.

I have no idea why i made a still video though.. i could have at least walked around lol

Looks good, you should keep at it.

Can you tell me, what is that rendering style I see on Unity? Is it a filter of some kind? It looks like a pixelated painting.