Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Mastermind]

For the last few months I've been trying to learn some more advanced chiptune techniques and this site has been a great help. This dude, Alberto Jose Gonzalez, is one of the best chip musicians of all time and it's unfortunate that he didn't get the exposure he deserves, probably because most of the games he worked on were lower budget licensed games. Check out the soundtracks for Metal Masters, the Turok games and especially the Smurfs, which is unbelievable. The nice thing about the site is that you can disable channels, so I can isolate a single layer and really figure out what he's doing. The dude has some unbelievably clever and subtle tricks, so it's a really nice tool.

So anyway, this weekend I participated in the Global Game Jam and decided it would be a good opportunity to test out some of the techniques I've learned. The game we made is still very basic and buggy, but we may have plans for it. . . . . !! All the songs I made were rush jobs meant to test out some of these tricks, but I liked one in particular and I'm currently reworking it. I think it has the potential to be pretty good. Did some stuff I've never done before, like duty cycling and using one of the channels for both bass and percussion.

On the Barkley front, I will be finishing the scripting for a quest where you identify a crime suspect shortly, and will move onto scripting a prison system soon after. Pretty excited to work on it, I have some good ideas.

What software are you making it in(the music)?

 

[eric__s]

For the contest I used Fruity Loops to save time. For any later releases I'm going to port them to a tracker.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

For the contest I used Fruity Loops to save time. For any later releases I'm going to port them to a tracker.

Do you plan to do it by exporting a midi file, then turning your instruments into samples?

 

[eric__s]

For the contest I used Fruity Loops to save time. For any later releases I'm going to port them to a tracker.

Do you plan to do it by exporting a midi file, then turning your instruments into samples?

No, I'll just remake it completely. I prototype almost everything in Fruity Loops first.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Another butthurt post about Unity: terrains with bump mapping might not work with some Intel GPUs, while bumped specular shaders work fine.
A possible workaround is to try to export the terrain as a mesh, split it into parts in Blender, load it back and render as a mesh, then avoid the overwhelming amount of draw calls by using fog and limited draw distance.

Though I should mention the fog in the lore after that, since that explains a number of things (e.g. people who let you to travel between the towns faster and safer for money).

 

[tiagocc0]

Since a lot of you guys have dev experience (whether ammy or professional), does this sound even remotely possible or am I just pipe dreaming? I feel like this is a fairly unique concept that some people might go for, and I hope that being based on old-school designs and production values would reduce the workload to a manageable level. But I just don’t have enough experience to know if it’s really doable without a large team and a ton of money (neither of which I have, of course).

From what I can tell from experience is that if you really want it done, do what can be done, work on your project and expose it as you go.
Soon those interested in it will come and they will be the best you will ever find.
Now this might work or not just like anything else on life, in the worst possible scenario that no one appears you will have at least trained your skills and in this case who knows if some other team from other projects might as well come to you so you can join them.

 

[FuriousGamer87]

Here's a progress report for the past several days.
I finished the refactoring of my code so now coding anything is fairly faster and will be less prone to mistakes.
In addition, I managed to draw up the code architecture of all objects in my engine. This will ensure I can always easily track and understand which array do what, what object engage what and what variables changed what. Nice stuff.
Of course, all of that is boring shit to other people than me so let change tack.

As previously said, I managed to finish Father Brooker, the spirit user of Jesus L. Guns.
For the demo, he will be your primary healer and buffer.

I also managed to finished up the entirety of the AoO/instant mechanics so it mirror 4e DnD mechanics.
Thomas, as a fighter, can stop enemy movement if he manage to connect with his attack due to Combat Superiority Combat Senses and can interrupt any enemy that attacks other allies with his own attack when the enemy is challenged by him.

Going to finish the rest of Brooker final techniques before moving on towards the last of player's demo characters, William the Troll-Slayer, exalted pyromancer.

Here some 30 fps gifs to show progress

Spoiler

 

[Copper]

Alright, I finished the initial mock up for the stats screen to show the details of each character in the battle.
Does it look good?

Please give me feedback, thanks in advance.

A bit late, probably, but: I don't have a problem with the info box having empty space - it's quite refreshing to have some white space, to be honest. It could do with being a bit smaller, (if you think people will be checking it a lot - if it's a once or twice thing, as is is fine. Maybe you could use different sizes of fonts though so there's more distinction between headers and info text? You have a lot of white space at the bottom / middle - you could use that for a dynamic area with a list of conditions down the side, updates on mouse over to save on clicks / shows the full text for each condition - how many do you see being applied to one char at a time?

 

[FuriousGamer87]

Alright, I finished the initial mock up for the stats screen to show the details of each character in the battle.
Does it look good?

Please give me feedback, thanks in advance.

A bit late, probably, but: I don't have a problem with the info box having empty space - it's quite refreshing to have some white space, to be honest. It could do with being a bit smaller, (if you think people will be checking it a lot - if it's a once or twice thing, as is is fine. Maybe you could use different sizes of fonts though so there's more distinction between headers and info text? You have a lot of white space at the bottom / middle - you could use that for a dynamic area with a list of conditions down the side, updates on mouse over to save on clicks / shows the full text for each condition - how many do you see being applied to one char at a time?

Nice feedback.
For fonts, I don't have much room to maneuver there, thanks to my visual choice and screen estate, the fonts you see are pretty much the very few pixel fonts that look readable and nice at the same time.
Currently there is no decision to support touch and mouse controls yet as I personally find SRPG are best play either with gamepads or keyboards for speed, comfort and convenient.
As for status condition, there is no limit to how many a character can take, thanks to my coding.
Though, I expect no less than 10 effects affecting a character at end game, with even more if they are novaing.

 

[Copper]

Yeah, it's probably not worth making your own header font.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Very early shot of my current project. Don't look unless you're ready to face the ugly and unfinished graphics, not to mention fucked up proportions. Not to mention some textures I borowed from Google results to use as placeholders until I fire up wz.

Spoiler

Basically, your party lands on a shore with little to no food supplies, and needs to find a way through the forest, while having a chance to get raped by a group of travellers.

 

[FuriousGamer87]

Just finished the last of Father Brooker's techniques, Spirit Beam and Hope Remains.
On the way, I also completed the area attack and special technique setup mechanics.
Gifs below demonstrate both.

Spoiler

After William is done, the initial demo will be completed and will be available for download. As said before, I will start my own thread and continue posting the development from there onwards.

 

[Niektory]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this but I have a tactical RPG concept I’ve been working on and I wanted to try to get an idea of how feasible it would be as an indie project.

I think it's possible, but you'd need a dedicated and reasonably skilled team and most likely more time.

From what I can tell from experience is that if you really want it done, do what can be done, work on your project and expose it as you go.
Soon those interested in it will come and they will be the best you will ever find.
Now this might work or not just like anything else on life, in the worst possible scenario that no one appears you will have at least trained your skills and in this case who knows if some other team from other projects might as well come to you so you can join them.

Good advice.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I just love how Unity Technologies gives away some useful scripts. I had a big bitch making the standard third person controller to work as intended for quite some time, and after downloading a MMO camera example, I saved myself a few days of work. I'll have to modify it to suit my taste, then I'm ready to go.

(At the same time I don't like to use Asset Store much - sometimes a dumbass hack can buy a template of a game, then buy a model/texture pack, throw in random levels and they're ready to go.)

Another piece of news: some of my old contacts popped up and asked whether they should help, so I've got a co-worker now. His duties are to consult me on the coding matter (and code himself, if necessary), so that should accelerate things a little bit. I hope I'll manage to release a prototype during this year, probably late spring/late summer. At the same time, some bad news: some promising contracts were cancelled prematurely due to the fact that people can't read past the headline of CVs. So, instead of me, some inexperienced dork will get my job. Yukk.

 

[FuriousGamer87]

Alright, just finished William.
All the content for the initial demo is pretty much done right now.
I probably need a few more days to finish configuring the installer pack, create a demo splash screen and fill up the battle speeches table/array so "Eat this!" isn't the only dialogue you will see.

Here's the game's last progress gifs for this thread. Enjoy.

Spoiler

 

[Pope Amole II]

Uuugh. Spent the better part of the day (figuratively speaking - the actual better part had nothing to do with the game development but still was pretty cool) doing a screenshot tutorials for the "Caelum"'s upcoming beta. A necessary thing to do but also not as fun as the pure game design & balancing. I'm also not that good in image redacting (actually horrible) so the result is a terrible hackjob, but it's readable (if plain), it isn't annoying and so it should suffice, I hope.

It's good to design pretentious, gimmicky, one button games, I guess. Sure, they are pure trash, there's nothing to design, only the zealots see value in them and you have to be a drama queen to promote them, but at least you don't get bothered with the tutorials.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Found more issues with Unity terrain system and Intel GPUs. Apparently, I'll have to avoid using stuff like grass and detail meshes, since they don't render on the older GPU (and terrain doesn't display the normalmap). Not to mention that standard grass looks like crap. That means I'll have to model this kind of stuff and find a way to make it work as intended.

Also, I feel that I'll have to force the co-worker to do all the programming, since a few days without coding made it hard to read my own stuff (or maybe it's the lack of sleep today). I hope I'll manage to get in a better state tomorrow and get back to it, or that would mean wasting the entire month down the shitter.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

One of the first 'finished' ingame tracks. Time to summon a few good guys to deconstruct it piece by piece.

Jaesun JarlFrank Surf Solar Krraloth eric_s Excommunicator

Glitch in the beginning is caused by looping residue. Can't be heard in the game itself, since it fades in when level loads.

 

[Jaesun]

I like that. What setting/scene is this for?

 

[CryptRat]

I like it.

 

[Zep Zepo]

I like it. I could do with the drone sound being a little lower in the mix though.

Zep--

 

[Surf Solar]

One of the first 'finished' ingame tracks. Time to summon a few good guys to deconstruct it piece by piece.

Jaesun JarlFrank Surf Solar Krraloth eric_s Excommunicator

Glitch in the beginning is caused by looping residue. Can't be heard in the game itself, since it fades in when level loads.

Soundcloud seems to glitch out for me on my crappy internet. Could you provide a direct downloadlink instead please? What I can see in the waveforms above already though, that the mood/tune seems not to be uniform throughout - ofcourse I have to listen to it first but if it's supposed to be backgroundmusic for a videogame, I wouldn't make it too dynamic especially in quieter scenes.

 

[eric__s]

I like the melody and atmosphere. The sine wave synth (I think that's what it is?) and the main metallic/string pad at the start are both heavy on mids and bass, the sounds overlap and conflict so I would re-equalize them. In my experience, it's not a great idea to have bass-heavy arpeggios, I would reduce the bass in that sine wave thing pretty drastically. I'd also reduce the bass in the main pad, you generally only want one instrument with significant bass because it gets muddy otherwise. Think about adding delay or gating to the drums to give them more impact, they feel weak right now.

 

[OlivettiFever]

I've been working for a while on an RPG (well, eventually an RPG, currently just an engine) using Phaser (JS). Slowly nearing the minimum required functionality, but this is all from the ground-up, so it's been kind of slow going. (And will be subject to rewriting as I continue to surprise myself at how bad a coder I am.)

Plan is to keep the engine open-source and develop a commercial game using it / alongside it. But that's a ways in the future. Current features include:

- Tetris-style inventory system
- dialogue system with Handlebars templating (for variables and such)
- dialogue editor (based on Lemma's Dialogger)
- foundations for actor, quest and scene classes
- Tiled map support
- jailed sandbox scripting (in JS)

A little example of a script.

// Let's assume this is running as the start (first-time load) script of a scene

var quest = iron.quest.get('testQuest');
    quest.start();

// Get the current context (the scene), the player and a character.

var scene = iron.context,
    player = iron.player;
    character = scene.getActor('testCharacter');

// Using the character, start a conversation with the player. Once it's done,
// give the player a medpack and go to the next stage.

character
  .sayTo(player, 'testConversation')
  .then(function() {
    player.addItem(medpack);
    quest.setStage('002');
  });

Screenshot of the game right after loading. I'm in the process of re-implementing movement and pathfinding with the Tiled map (was using a different collision map format earlier), but currently Darth Sion just stands around on a map of somebody else's tiles.

I've dragged the load/build time down by about 40% to ~200ms with some pretty aggressive refactoring. 200ms isn't spectacular considering the quality and quantity of assets it's currently pulling, but again, I'm working to optimize that as much as possible.

Here's an older screenshot of the dialogue editor. It's since been updated to use a manhattan router, so it's much cleaner and doesn't have the weird anchoring issues.

As for the RPG itself, it's sort of a sci-fi-Divine-Comedy story.

In the not-so-distant future, Earth is devastated in a massive orbital bombardment. It becomes quickly apparent that the planet is not going to recover soon enough to sustain what remains of the human race, so the player and some companions are sent off to a shitty little planet that a group of colonists had left for on a colony ship a century earlier.

They encounter the remains of the colonies, which have all failed for reasons that mysteriously parallel the player's companions' character flaws. As they try to find the location of a final colony, an encounter with the aliens who nearly succeeded in destroying humanity looms, and the pertinent question becomes not so much if humanity will survive but if it should.

I'm a writer by education, a programmer by trade and work on a pen-and-paper RPG as a hobby. I'm much happier writing dialogue trees than I am creating levels or designing endless gauntlets of combat encounters, so I'm planning for this to be a short (6-8 hours) but very densely-written game, where the replay value isn't so much in the combat or exploration but the choices you make in dialogue and how that affects how things turn out in the end.

You start off with a shit-ton of ammo and get a huge, high-quality armory to choose from at the beginning of the game proper, but with the planet's harsh environment and the lack equipment, your guns will only get more broken-down, ammunition will only get scarcer, and the situation will only get more and more desperate.

Anyway, that's the hope. We'll see. I've had the idea kicking around for a few years, but this is the first time my coding skills have been anywhere near good enough to pull something off.

I'll keep you guys posted.

 

[JarlFrank]

One of the first 'finished' ingame tracks. Time to summon a few good guys to deconstruct it piece by piece.

Jaesun JarlFrank Surf Solar Krraloth eric_s Excommunicator

Glitch in the beginning is caused by looping residue. Can't be heard in the game itself, since it fades in when level loads.

I like it, the drone sound could be a little less dominant though, especially in the beginning, as is drowns out the rest. Sounds like a good theme for a swamp area or a dark crypt.