clyde

I'm interested in hearing y'all's thoughts on what makes game-jams stressful. Maybe we can somehow make them no-stress jams!

Don't play it Twig. It's not fun at all and about horses. It's all hype. Nothing musical about it. There aren't stacks either, just horses. ----- In other news, are any of you simultaneously a lawyer and not Twig's lawyer?

I would be interested in participating, especially if it is done with a focus on presenting itself as something anyone can participate in regardless of experience. There are some very skilled and knowledgable people on this forum and that can be really intimidating (but also an incredible resource for beginners).

Gen3 for Life! Who needs that rail-gun?

I got a bunch of coupons if anyone still wants $20 copies. Private message me for coupon-codes if interested.

There are a couple of things that help me. 1. I consciously make my default actions "wash dishes" and "make games". So if i'm just bored and I don't feel like doing anything and I can't decide what to do, I have already made the decision with my policy; I get up and wash dishes. If there are no dishes, then I get up and open Unity and play around. Sometimes I just don't jive with playing around in Unity so I watch one of the Unity live-training sessions and it usually inspires me to try something. This is a great system for me because I end up not making sacrifices for game-dev. If I want to go hiking, I don't say to myself "I should really work on games instead." because I work on games when I'm bored, I've been working on games. I also work on games when I feel like working on games. 2. Personally, I just won't care about this stuff unless it involves other people. I'll be frank with you GraysonEvans; when I look at your Tumblr, I'm like "No one is going to read this." And it's not because of the content or because people don't want to know, it's because you are putting it on a Tumblr page in the desert. Look at the quantity of responses you get here[/ b]. Look at the quality of responses. I'm not saying that a Tumblr page is useless, I'm saying that it's more of a personal diary that no one will open because they don't know it's there. There are a lot of sites with active game-development communities and I've found that if you post there, and comment on other people's stuff, game-development is a lot more fun. MakeGam.es is a great forum. Twitter works great once you've found some like-minded game-devs, Glorious Trainwrecks is tonally necessary (and their monthy 2-hour game-jam really got me over some barriers). Game Jolt gets a ton of traffic and is game-dev focused (in progress games are encouraged). Some people have also recommended TIG. And of course the game-development community here is wonderful. I could go on a bit of a rant about how our culture has poisoned us all with this idea that we are all special little snowflakes, but instead I'll just summarize: you and I are not special. We are social creatures and caring about something you do alone takes energy while caring about something you do with others is typically automatic. Involve other people. 3. Don't just make short games, play short games. When I get done playing Skyrim or even something like Fez of Gone Home , opening up Game Maker or Unity is just overwhelming. When I get done playing Destroy Your Home http://bouduboudu.free.fr/fabien/jv/DestroyYourHome.html Yerevan, Texas http://www.dreamfeel.org/storage/games/yerevan_texas.html or Fashion World http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/6371 I want to make a game and when I open Unity, I put a cube on the screen and think "I'm about a quarter of the way there! Wahoo!" There are tons of these games, many of them are really neat. Playing them has completely changed how I think of games. These are the real deal; multi-million dollar sequels are games, but they are also reified estrangement. Play short, personal games. Once you do, send a twitter message to the creator telling them what you liked about it. When only a few people have played your weird game (or none) it feels amazing to have someone tell you that they liked it. This also has the effect of making game-making feel like a community affair. There's this psychically damaging mentality around hobbyist game-making where everyone is hunkered down in the basement trying to make the next Braid or Minecraft and keeping all their precious to themselves. I'll just go ahead and be the antagonist: you're not going to get rich making short, free games. And if you try to sell them, then only a few people will buy them and you'll lose the majority of the audience who would care about your game the most. Make games because you enjoy it and because it is a community activity that brings you closer to people. Make decisions based off of that premise. This might not apply to you, but it's the most important thing I've had to learn about game-development.

Thanks itsamoose. I think you just talked me through it. Edit: Yup, you talked me thorugh it. I just wrote a Set() method for stepQuantity and called it after instantiating the Notes.cs , but before accessing the PopulateBlocks() method. It works. I'm glad I asked because now it seems obvious. If I ever run into a situation where an array isn't initialized in a Start() method, I can just do do it myself like this. Thanks again.

I'll try that and see if I can get an additional clue. I just don't understand why the Notes.cs isn't initializing that array before MakeGrid.cs accesses it through the PopulateBlocks() method. It has a public reference at the beginning of the MakeGrid.cs and I checked to make sure it was set in the inspector.

This game is very good. When hearing about it, I thought I would be most interested in the black-market/sabatoge stuff. I mean... I haven't touched that stuff yet, but I thought that the rest of the game would be focused around getting to use the black-market. Nope. Turns out that having a dynamic economy that fluctates due to your buying and selling is fascinating in itself. The pacing is interesting; the game encourages you to make drastic investment-decisions when you upgrade your colony. In the tutorial, you upgrade your colony 5 times. What this means is that there are five moments where all your major investment-decisions are made. This is not a bad thing, real-time strategy games stress me out. This is totally a real-time strategy game, but it doesn't stress me out because while I'm waiting for my materials to be produced for an upgrade, I have time to say to myself "Ok, when I upgrade, how am I going to use my claims?" which means "What do I think will be the best ways to invest?" And then when I upgrade, I'm like "BAM BAM BAM BAM" and I have a farming park because the price of food has gotten high and I'm going to exploit the shit out of that with my neighboring-tile multipliers. I have a lot of questions about how stuff works, but I think I should probably finish the tutorials before I start asking them.

Indeed.

I can, but I have a custom script-execution order. This script is supposed to go before the script that accesses it. I'll try to include more information though. This is the error: NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object Notes.PopulateBlocks (UnityEngine.Transform _block, Int32 column, .StepProperties block_stepProperties) (at Assets/Scripts/Sequencer/Notes.cs:41) GridMaker.MakeGrid () (at Assets/Scripts/Sequencer/GridMaker.cs:173) GridMaker.Start () (at Assets/Scripts/Sequencer/GridMaker.cs:71) Here is all of the Notes.cs and What I imagine is the important part of the Gridmaker.cs

This is fucking awesome. The enemy punch animations are perfect, it really feels like they are doing a slinging-motion. the combat system is super enjoyable. Your Spelunky-sensibility is well honed. Everything reacts the way it should. I won't spoil how interactive your mechanics are. I'm using Chrome, but I did not have this problem.

I'm getting an error when I ask for an array.length, but only in the set method. These two snippets are from the same script: This one returns an error. public void PopulateBlocks(Transform _block, int column, StepProperties block_stepProperties) { //Debug.Log (_block); //Debug.Log (column); //Debug.Log (block_stepProperties); //Here starts the problem Debug.Log ("Notes.populate.stepBlocks[]"+stepBlocks.Length); //Debug.Log ("Notes.populate.step_stepProperties[]"+step_stepProperties.Length); //stepBlocks[column]=_block; //step_stepProperties[column]=block_stepProperties; } This one does not void Start() { steps=new int[stepQuantity]; stepBlocks=new Transform[stepQuantity]; step_stepProperties=new StepProperties[stepQuantity]; Debug.Log ("notes.stepBlocks.length"+stepBlocks.Length); } What am I missing?

I bit. If anyone wants to buy a copy for $20, private message me. Edit: 10 minutes in and I can already tell you that Mr. Espionage is a big jerk-face. Edit2: 20 minutes in, I like it. Just watching the little shipments happen and the stocks get emptied and replenished is mesmerizing. Then I saw that I was auto-selling power by default and I was like "$6 seems cheap for power, it's like we are giving it away!" So I hit the stop button on that. This made me see that I could auto-sell any of this shit I've been mining (in the tutorial) so I was like "$65 for aluminum? I have tons of that.", pressed auto-sell and the debt-calculation on the top (that I had kinda assumed would forever go up slowly) just went "Bloop, bloop blooop bloop blopp!" and I was debt free. I have no idea what I'm doing yet, but the construction of factories feels visually rewarding. Also, the "offworld" quality of the branding implies a narrative of scarcity. This creates a circumstance in which I immediately feel successful when I achieve any surplus in any of my goods (even though I don't know what I'm doing because I just started the tutorial).

Sorry for bashing the game so much. I'm going to find the way to enjoy it. I'm having a great time with my wife as she plays the game and I watch. The graphical bugs are hilarious as we joke about how we got the shitty version on the game. These are by far the worst looking beards I have ever seen in a game. One guy looks like he was trying to eat magic-marker in his sleep and then the next guy looked like he cut a beard out of a black trash-bag and is wearing it around town (which is a pretty interesting narrative in its own right). Then she was talking with someone and NPC's would run past in the background at 100x their regular speed. The texture pop-in is so noticeable that I my wife pointed it out (she plays games a good amount and has never noticed graphical issues) and I got to tell her what the name for it is. We are having a good time. I mean, we play this series because we love romancing NPC's and political narratives. I assume that we'll still get that part out of this.

She looks cool.

Thanks for saying this, your suggestion seems like a good one. I need to say though that I think I have some sort of irrational fear about licenses. I'd hate to use something official looking like Creative Commons O and then get in trouble with Unity because the license ended up being applied to something illegally in the project. I hate this type of stuff so much. I just want to make stuff and steal stuff and let other people steal stuff and make stuff and we can all enjoy how awesome we are. Even with Creative Commons 0 I'm concerned that I'll get in trouble for giving it away. Maybe the problem is that I have a fantasy that there's a way to absolve myself from all this bullshit. I should just show my intention and not freak out when I find out I did it wrong and I'm in prison and publically despised.

On the PC do you hold down a button to advance time in tactical-mode? Or do hold down a button to pause time? On the 360 you hold down a button to advance time and I can't imagine why they thought it would be a good idea to switch it like that.

Is there any single-player component in the game currently?

For those of you who play in action-mode, can you give me an idea of what types of decisions you are making? Do you pretty much stick with your character and not think about what the rest of your party is doing? I'm playing as a two-handed weapon character. I should mention that I haven't played much Diablo or Torchlight or MMO's where you use the abilities of a single character and then wait for the cool-down. Do look for back-stab opportunities? I imagine that you look for area-of-effect opportunities. Or do you play it like Golden Axe: Beast Rider where you are dodging attacks and trying to hit multiple enemies with your swings.

I know you can turn friendly-fire on. --- I'm sorry y'all, but if you are considering buying this for the XBox 360 and you want to play in tactical-mode, you are probably not going to have a good time. I'll try to put up a vine or something about what this looks like, but basically when you advance time the screen goes black and time progresses. So you are taking damage and shit and the camera changes perspective and it's just broken. I'm pretty sure the way it used to work was that I would press the left bumper, issue a command (it was paused while I held it down) and then I would just switch to all the members of my party and issue commands, let go of te left-bumper and watch all my commands execute. The tactical-mode here requires you to actively advance time and it just doesn't flow at all. I'm going to have to play it like God of War or something.

I wonder if anyone has made a guide that tells you all the settings to change if you want to play it in tactical-mode like in DA:o. @Griddlelol I'm playing on an xbox 360 and this may be one of the technical compromise that I feared. If I could figure out what to ask you then maybe you could tell me what I'm doing wrong. Right now I'm just going to go through the menu and turn off all the AI and play a bit longer in hopes that I'll get used to it.

I'm thinking about loading up DA:Origins or DA2 to understand what's missing. Maybe I'm just not used to the pacing yet. I think I need to go into the settings and tell everyone to stop using their abilities before I tell them to (and stuff like that). If I can't play it like the older games, then I want to figure it out fast (but be sure about it). I can deal with finding out that this is a way different game than the other two. I just need to go through the process of finding out that my expectations are way off and that there is a new way to enjoy the combat.

I am having a very hard time with the tactical-mode which is the way I played DA:o and DA2. In order to switch between the camera goes black which is disorientating. I also have a really hard time keeping a bird's eye view and just selecting what I want everyone to do. Maybe it's possible to play the old way and I just have to figure out how, but this is really not enjoyable currently. I don't remember having to advance time or struggle with the camera in the old games and if I have to play this way I mighy have to play it as an action game which would remove half of what I love about the series. Maybe I just haven't found the right settings or something.

Negotiating four Origin accounts between my wife and I, the xbox and pc sure did kill the hype. I'm three hours in and I just made my character. My pc origin is tied to my wife's ps3 account. My xbox account is tied to all my ea purchases on xbox, but not to the ones on pc. My wife eventually found the origin account attached to her xbox account so that we could input the stuff we could remember happening. It's a fucking mess. Video games.