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Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

Twiglard

Poland Stronk
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2014
Messages
7,422
Location
Poland
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
I would appreciate any advice that would make my game look better, particularly if they're quick fixes
All men have Roman centurion officer helmets in the first scene. Your characters are Greek so instead use Greek helmets.

The character models are pretty good but maybe they could use some more embellishment.

I think the bright cyan water actually works well but it could use some tweaking.

In the second scene, the grass's contrast (too low) and saturation (too low or too high) makes it all look bleak compared to characters and walls, with nothing to stand out. Right now it looks only a bit better than Prelude to Darkness.

Third scene, the bright yellow grass actually works.

Fourth scene, rocky wall has ugly obvious tiling. Add a second or third wall tile so there's less seams and repetition. Make the wall stand out from the ground (such as vibrance/saturation).
 
Last edited:
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,849
I would appreciate any advice that would make my game look better, particularly if they're quick fixes


The single biggest thing, to me, is the lack of animations, but that's not a quick fix. As others have said, the water is way too bright / cyan - but I'd also add, the fire looks too "advanced / modern". Everything else in the game looks like a 90s / early 00s isometric sprite based game, which is great, but then you have the fire which looks like a fancy shader effect or some such. I think animated sprites for the fire would be better, for a more consistent overall appearance. I would prioritize overall consistency over making each item look as advanced / modern as possible.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,842
Tavernking I just watched a bit of this video and it reminded me of your game. Jump to around the 11 minute mark to see combat.

It looks like they do have a couple of poses for each character that sort of mimic animations, but it's really just moving the stationary figure and visual + sound effects that creates the impression of combat.

 

Tavernking

Don't believe his lies
Developer
Joined
Sep 1, 2017
Messages
1,247
Location
Australia
Thanks everyone for the huge amount of advice, I've got a lot to consider now! I really don't know how to put into words how grateful I am so I'm just going to lurk this thread and give helpful advice where I can. Cheers!!
 

AllvisSTHLM

Allvis STHLM
Developer
Joined
Jul 27, 2024
Messages
4
Location
Stockholm - Sweden
Hi everyone!
New to the forum and really exited to have found this place.
We are also making a game!
The video is a bit rough around the edges, but it shows off some prototype gameplay and, hopefully the atmosphere we are aiming for
 

Justinian

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Oct 21, 2022
Messages
277
Been extremely avoidant lately (just tired of working on skills) but NextFest deadline is early september and I need to have a demo by then. So I'm gonna pivot a bit and actually make some content.

The first level (Graveyard) will loop around. to make the transition smooth the edges of the area are just rows of tombstones, and the player can't tell when you shift from one end to the other (pickups, projectiles and enemies shift with you). I also need
to have random events around the map (that can be "reset" every shift) to give the player something to do and ways to unlock more stuff.

vTbJWWN.png

Almost looks like a complete game. The Fog tiles I'll probably replace with something more spooky.

Gonna spend this week making objects/enemies and other stuff I'll need for the steam page screenshots. I'll have to do it for at least 3 levels for variety.

One of my goals for the final game is to have meaningful and different gimmicks on each level. In my last game they were structured differently but there really wasn't anything to interact with other than the puzzle each level had. I'd like to expand that
more for this game.
 

Tavar

Cipher
Patron
Joined
Jun 6, 2020
Messages
1,104
Location
Germany
RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In
So, I wanted to give this whole game development thing a try and built a very primitive break out clone:
blockbreaker.PNG

You can download it here. It should work out of the box on all Windows machines. I also wanted to build it for Apple Silicone but cannot be arsed to pay Apple any money. The game was built in Gamemaker. Maybe I can port it to Android so I have something to play on the go without all the usual mobile game AIDS.
 

Tavernking

Don't believe his lies
Developer
Joined
Sep 1, 2017
Messages
1,247
Location
Australia
I would appreciate any advice that would make my game look better, particularly if they're quick fixes
In the second scene, the grass's contrast (too low) and saturation (too low or too high) makes it all look bleak compared to characters and walls, with nothing to stand out. Right now it looks only a bit better than Prelude to Darkness.
I increased the contrast but I think the grass looks best when saturation stays the same. First pic is -20 saturation, second is no change, third is +20 saturation.
-20.png


0.png


20.png
 
Joined
Dec 12, 2013
Messages
4,304
I think the first pic looks best, saturation level fits better with other assets. If you want to keep the grass from the middle pic, increase saturation on other assets.
 

Gandalf

Arbiter
Joined
Sep 1, 2020
Messages
530
Third one would be my favourite if the trees were overall lighter in colour.

-20 looks the best as a whole picture, but it's pretty boring, feels cold too. Reminds me of PoE boring a bit.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,842
After doing quite a bit of research I've decided I'm going to stop learning Unity and switch over to UE5.

Reason being I think the ability to work in Blueprints will be a huge benefit, plus I've found several good courses on Udemy that seem like they will give a strong foundation in using the engine to make RPGs.

https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-cpp-for-ue4-unit-1/
https://www.udemy.com/course/ue5-ultimate-bp-course/
https://www.udemy.com/course/unreal-engine-5-the-ultimate-game-developer-course/
https://www.udemy.com/course/unreal-engine-5-gas-top-down-rpg/

That's not to say I want to fully give up on writing code. I watched all of the lectures in the C++ course and I think I understand it well enough to at least follow the other tutorials and get a sense of what the code is doing. From what I've read most experienced UE devs recommend using a mix of BPs and C++ to build the game. I've seen this video linked a few times as a good exploration of the topic.

 

RobotSquirrel

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Aug 9, 2020
Messages
2,038
Location
Adelaide
Use it for its intended use case, Develop your simple script style implementations using Blueprints. For anything more complex like a game manager run it through C++.
C++ is going to give you the advantage of obviously being able to dictate to the CPU what threads you're on and how to better split up instructions, Blueprints is fairly handsoff with that sort of thing.

Good call leaving Unity though, you won't regret it.
 

Justinian

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Oct 21, 2022
Messages
277
Started working on more enemies.

5b70wEA.png

First one is the skeleton. Skeletons spawn with a random weapon (axe, sword or spear) that give attack and defense boosts. They also have a chance to spawn with a helmet (double health) or a shield (more defense, a little attack).

A lot of survivor clones have many enemies that are basically the same type of enemy with different sprites and I want to avoid that as much as I can (like I did with my last game that nobody played), but I'm gonna make fewer of them. The challenge will come from having to manage more types as the game goes on. I have 6 basic types (Swarmer, Soldier, Skirmisher, Artillery, Tank, Summoner), all of which can spawn as Elite versions that are slightly bigger, tinted a different color, tagged as bosses
(so they cannot be insta-killed by KO abilities) and much stronger than usual. All of these enemy types are common in other Survivor games, except summoner. VS had a pseudosummoner that fired a projectile that was considered an enemy (so you could
destroy them with your attacks), but here it will be more like my last game where they summon regular enemies (that provide no XP). Later level summoners will also provide support buffs and basically be high priority targets (esp if they spawn as elites).
 

Tavernking

Don't believe his lies
Developer
Joined
Sep 1, 2017
Messages
1,247
Location
Australia
Two gamedev quotes I heard recently:
  • "Perfect is the enemy of finished."
  • (On mid-development hell) "It begins to transition from an idea into an actual thing. Any illusions in your head about how good it could be are replaced by actual proof of its mediocrity. Not that your game's bad. It could be rather fun. But it never lives up to your expectations. And if it does, you might have been aiming too low in the first place."
 

Yuber

Educated
Joined
Aug 17, 2023
Messages
148
(like I did with my last game that nobody played)

It's so boring that so little play your own game. I see the same in RPG Maker community, you work long on it and then maybe a few people play it :D
Guess there is just too many new games out there.
 

Habichtswalder

Educated
Joined
Aug 30, 2023
Messages
82
(like I did with my last game that nobody played)

It's so boring that so little play your own game. I see the same in RPG Maker community, you work long on it and then maybe a few people play it :D
Guess there is just too many new games out there.
Sure, the amount of new games is one big reason.
But within the RPG Maker community it is also important to remember that the people over there are developers, not necessarily players. Most of them don't look for something to play.
Therefore I think it could be promising to try and advertise RPGM-games outside the Maker community to gain a player base.
 

Zeusington

Literate
Joined
May 3, 2024
Messages
16
(like I did with my last game that nobody played)

It's so boring that so little play your own game. I see the same in RPG Maker community, you work long on it and then maybe a few people play it :D
Guess there is just too many new games out there.
Sure, the amount of new games is one big reason.
But within the RPG Maker community it is also important to remember that the people over there are developers, not necessarily players. Most of them don't look for something to play.
Therefore I think it could be promising to try and advertise RPGM-games outside the Maker community to gain a player base.
To add on to this, the raw number of games wouldn't be as much of an issue if they spread out their audiences and focused on making games that can hang with their inspirations (or be outright novel, lmao). I always get shit for this, but I actually don't mind the influx of people making games. My beef is with people making sub-par ones *and then trying to sell them* just because they made it and they feel entitled to something for all that work. They should seriously consider the product's place and viability in the market before trying to sell it.
 

Justinian

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Oct 21, 2022
Messages
277
(like I did with my last game that nobody played)

It's so boring that so little play your own game. I see the same in RPG Maker community, you work long on it and then maybe a few people play it :D
Guess there is just too many new games out there.
A big reason is that I just didn't do much to promote it before release. Or during EA. Or after release for that matter. I'd imagine it's even harder for RPG maker games since they all look so similar and the engine is a lot more limited, making many of them play similar too. Once I have a store page and demo for my new game I'm gonna put in a lot more effort than I did last time. Also there are like a thousand VS clones out there, so it's hard to stand out just by existing. It's a very appealing genre for solo developers. I think a lot of devs underestimate the promotion part of it. People laugh at AAA devs for spending half the budget on advertisement but realistically it's what every dev should probably do (spend half the time shilling if you don't have money for ads).
 
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,849
Spent a long time (too long) building the operation editor, but eventually got it done. Actually, most of the time I wasn't working on it at all because it was such an unpleasant, tedious task, I dragged my feet and didn't really do much of anything for a couple months. But it is done. I have also more or less finished the generation editor. The generation editor has three modes: culture, density, and development. Culture is used to determine which five "base" cultures (and optionally, which five "assimilation" cultures) are used when generating populations in an area. Density is used to modify the amount of people present after anything else (such as the tile's physical size) is taken into account. Development is used as a template for which operations will be present, and which professions. These will be combined to generate the populations and operations in a tile.

Next I have to write the actual code to perform this generation logic, but it will mean a break from UI for a while, which is good, because I hate doing UI. (I also think I need to redo/replace the hatching mask used for tiles. The city one's ok, but the tile one is bad.) Once I get that done it will be a major milestone because being able to generate actual population and operation objects will enable me to start tinkering with implementing behaviour - having them buy and sell products, for example. My aim is to get a working economy in place prior to messing around with states and governments and so on - which is a very long ways off.

Density. White is empty, green is 100%, red is 1'000%, blue is 10'000% (subject to change - I do need to do some reading up on medieval population stats to get an idea about the high and low end of pre-industrial population figures - but they do run a rather large gamut of size, with rice-farming populations tending to be much larger than anyone else).
density.jpg


Cultures, in city mode (forces cities to be displayed whether there is one or not, and transforms them to be larger than normal for visibility. This is kind of a placeholder thing because I need to adapt the city editor to say whether there is in fact a city, or something like it, in a given area - and once states start to be implemented, a city's provincial/national capital status). The base/assim paradigm has somewhat exposed a weakness in the current hatching pattern: it doesn't convey cleanly which is base and which is assimilated. I'd like to switch it to a pattern that has, say, five unbroken lines going one direction, and then the assimilation pattern breaks up the lines? Something like that. It needs reworking one way or another.
cultures.jpg


I also redid the zone-edge sea tiles in Illustrator so that sea zones would have smoother borders that looked less irregular / "tile shaped".

Family structures have also been added, these being Stem Nuclear, Absolute Nuclear, Equal Nuclear, Exogamous Communal, Endogamous Communal, Asymmetric Communal, General Anomic, Coherent Harem, and Diffuse Harem. These are mostly just slightly renamed versions of Emmanuel Todd's system, but with the African system renamed to Coherent Harem, and with a Diffuse Harem system, representing late-stage civilization's urban breakdown of the family, added. Family systems are characterized along six axes: equality (based mainly off traditional inheritance), authority (based off whether sons live with their father or move out), community (based on household size), exogamy (based on whether cousin marriage is allowed or not), linearity (this is mostly just a behavioural toggle for Stem Nuclear cultures that makes them extremely resistant to assimilation/integration), and monogamy (based on distribution of women in society). I will at some point use these for governing population behaviour, but for now they'll just be applied to cultures for flavour.
 

Edward Doyle

Novice
Joined
Oct 24, 2018
Messages
12
Good progress this year so far, thought it might be quicker but no complaints. Finalized the first batch of portraits:

all.png



We have put together an indoor location from the demo content but we still needed to layout the current main hub and the adjacent locations and also wanted to further expand the tileset to better fit the various locations and feel diverse

Some of that layout work:

level-design-map-1.png


So we have decided while the area designer finishes some of that, we will just expand our current playground into a small quest and use our scrapped enemies, non-colored sprites to make an itch.io quest.

I got a worn out/destroyed version for most of the props so we went ahead and made them destructible




A look at the expanded playground, enemies are disabled since their behavior still need some improvement. Also, goes without saying it's still too rough and some UI elements are placeholders:




A shortcut that'd give you an access to the
boss quarter:


 
Last edited:
Joined
Oct 26, 2016
Messages
2,098
Twiglard does this work with your engine?

mOlZGVX.png


I have been creating some tiles, testing in Tiled. I am making more complex ones if you are interested. I remember we talked about tiling strategies for isometric. I don't know how you would setup geometry if these work.

Download here
 

Gandalf

Arbiter
Joined
Sep 1, 2020
Messages
530
Good progress this year so far, thought it might be quicker but no complaints. Finalized the first batch of portraits:

all.png



We have put together an indoor location from the demo content but we still needed to layout the current main hub and the adjacent locations and also wanted to further expand the tileset to better fit the various locations and feel diverse

Some of that layout work:

level-design-map-1.png


So we have decided while the area designer finishes some of that, we will just expand our current playground into a small quest and use our scrapped enemies, non-colored sprites to make an itch.io quest.

I got a worn out/destroyed version for most of the props so we went ahead and made them destructible




A look at the expanded playground, enemies are disabled since their behavior still need some improvement. Also, goes without saying it's still too rough and some UI elements are placeholders:




A shortcut that'd give you an access to the
boss quarter:



Cool visuals, reminds me of pc-98 stuff.
 

Edward Doyle

Novice
Joined
Oct 24, 2018
Messages
12
Good progress this year so far, thought it might be quicker but no complaints. Finalized the first batch of portraits:

all.png



We have put together an indoor location from the demo content but we still needed to layout the current main hub and the adjacent locations and also wanted to further expand the tileset to better fit the various locations and feel diverse

Some of that layout work:

level-design-map-1.png


So we have decided while the area designer finishes some of that, we will just expand our current playground into a small quest and use our scrapped enemies, non-colored sprites to make an itch.io quest.

I got a worn out/destroyed version for most of the props so we went ahead and made them destructible




A look at the expanded playground, enemies are disabled since their behavior still need some improvement. Also, goes without saying it's still too rough and some UI elements are placeholders:




A shortcut that'd give you an access to the
boss quarter:



Cool visuals, reminds me of pc-98 stuff.


Thanks! Yes much of the visuals are inspired by the PC-98 stuff especially the UI, the character would be recolored as well at some point to fit the general palette.
 

Justinian

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Oct 21, 2022
Messages
277
Made a rough gameplay trailer for my game:



Still waiting for steam page approval. I'll work on a different (non-dev related) project for a couple of days and then my focus will be on producing a demo + I want to release in Early Access during or right after Next Fest so I'll need to make more content.

Still need to add for Demo:
*Forge mechanics for crafting ultimate attacks
*A handful of passive items that are still missing
*An options menu for volume and shit
*Controller input
*Finish class skills and do the first class leve-up. I will probably not include the more advanced levelups in the demo, both because I don't want to work on them right now and because they are intended to be unlocked later than what the demo will cover anyway.
*Code the boss and proper enemy spawning (right now they all just spawn in waves when you reach a certain level)
*Make more assets (mostly gravestones) for the first level.
*Music and sound effects

For Early Access:
*At least three levels
*At least one extra class (if I can get two in it's even better)
*A bunch more Ultimate attacks and 12 more basic attacks.
*Some higher rarity passive items.

Main thing I'm worried about is metaprogression. I don't want to just add a bunch of buttons to upgrade stats, but I'm also drawing a blank on some sort of progression minigame. I wanted to do a camp building feature where you gain access to new upgrades as you build up your camp (and discover more characters) but it's just a vague idea, and more importantly, I would have to produce assets for a feature that most players will just zip through. I'll give it another couple of weeks to see if I come up with a good idea. If not I'll just call it a day and do something lazy and unintrusive.
 

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