Golden Calf

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Posts posted by Golden Calf

  5. Posted

    Hey all, I'm looking to snag a few more people interested in working on a game about trading ships around the 15th century or so.

     

    The basic idea is that it will be a top-down 2D game on procedurally-generated maps where you need to venture out into the fog of war to discover trade routes and protect your shipping lanes in order to build up a trade empire. You will invest in navigation technology, better ships for longer, faster journeys, weaponry for fending off pirates, and more (or possibly less, given the 2 week timeline!) so that the peasants can shave cents off their textile budget.

     

    Currently, we have 2 programmers and 1 audio person. We could really use someone with art skills. We could probably also take on another programmer and designer without stepping on each others toes too badly, if anybody is interested. This is going to be a learning experienced for everyone on the team so far, so if this sounds interesting but you don't know what you can contribute, send me a message anyway, either on here on the forums or to markrdally at gmail. I'll update this post if/when the team is full.

     

    Even if we don't get that artist, I expect this project is gonna be pretty rad:

    boat-clip-art-avCJMm-clipart.gif

     

    Note: We may pick a slightly snazzier name.

    Note also: It's a real shame that 89 is not four numerals that add up to nine. Alas, alas...

  7. Posted

    How many "regular" puzzles am I still missing? Are more unlocked by solving the environmental puzzles? I might came back for the environmental puzzles later, but I did not find them as interesting as the regular ones.

     

    Apparently the max is 523+135+6

  8. Posted

    I'm at 321 +12 and I still think this game is fantastic, but the honeymoon period of complete infatuation is over. At this point, two facts that I already knew about but did not think would bother me are starting to wear on me anyway: (1) there are a ton of puzzles ahead of me yet, and I doubt if I have the intelligence or patience to solve all of them, (2) there isn't (according to all of you, and the Internet at large) a satisfying end point that the game builds towards.

    It sucks because I truly didn't think I'd care about the lack of reward or climax... But without it, I'm afraid the rest of the game will be a slow petering out of my patience until I arbitrarily decide I'm done. And with that in the back of mind the game is suddenly much less engrossing.

    That said, the hours I've already put in are some of the most satisfying I've had in a game in a while. So it still gets my endorsement, big time.

     

    That's how I felt a few pages ago too. For what it's worth, I actually found the end (and the credits sequence that I found immediately after) weirdly moving, though it's hard to articulate why.

     

    I immediately jumped back in, looking to get more of those + puzzles, and ended up finding a hidden area with more boards. I was ecstatic and quickly blew past my old total. I'm at 467+111+1 and I STILL feel I'm genuinely enjoying solving stuff. I feel less urgency than before I beat it, but I can definitely see myself hopping in for an hour or two after work to finish a few more puzzles each night until I've gotten them all.

  9. Posted

    Is there a point of no return? If so, is it obvious?

    I've gotten all the lasers, but still have a lot of other stuff to unlock. Can you continue to explore after completing the game?

     

    I just finished the game. Yes there is a point of no return, but when I went back into the game there was a save in the load menu right before the break happens.

  10. Posted

    • related to previous, any kind of puzzle that makes the screen blank when you fail, making you go back and solve the previous one that you already just solved. What the fuck is the purpose of that and why use it inconsistently for only some puzzles?

     

    I think this was done to keep (or at least discourage) people from brute forcing some. The puzzles where the path looks like a tree have I think 16 possible paths max, so it would be easy to just blow through them if it didn't keep interrupting you after a wrong answer. Same thing with the wheel ones - I think the starting ones there have 30 possible solutions.

  11. Posted

    But I really don't like that I encounter so many puzzles that I simply don't know if I "know" how to solve them yet or not.

     

    Ya I have a loop I go on each time I play to ones I think I'm supposed to be able to solve but haven't yet. I think the fact that the game is nonlinear has made it possible for me not to look anything up yet, since I can just add a frustrating puzzle to my loop to check next time, then move on. However, now that the number of unsolved major areas is (as far as I can tell) nearing 0, this is becoming difficult.

     

    For the tetromino puzzles, if you approach the color swamp from the other direction (the mainland I guess) there's 14 panels that act as the tutorial for that mechanic.

  12. Posted

    Does anyone know what the puzzle totals are for a 100% run?

     

    I'm at 371+85 and starting to feel a little burnt out, wondering how close I am to the end. The low-hanging fruit seems to have mostly been gobbled up.

     

    Also, can anyone give me a hint / point me in the right direction for the puzzles that look like a wheel of karma? I don't want it spoiled outright, but I brute-forced the first one at the sand temple and STILL have no clue what the idea is behind those boards...

  15. Posted

    I have 179 hours on Dark Souls, and I just figured this out. Equipment in slots you're not currently wielding counts towards equipment load. If you're currently two-handing your slot 1 sword, then your encumberance counts your slot 1 sword, slot 2 sword, slot 1 shield and slot 2 shield.

     

    Am I the only one this slow? Was the system obvious to everyone else?

     

    for me it was, though I pretty consistently tried to be fastrolling, so I was paying attention to it a lot.

  16. Posted

    I'm trying to make a procedurally generated terrain also, although closer to sim city. I was going to be working in unity, but  I'm more than open to looking at OpenGL. I'd like to follow along with your progress, if you have any decent tutorials and stuff that you are following, please share!

     

    So far I've found this to be a great resource for OpenGL. They do a really good job of explaining what's going on as they build up features piecemeal.

     

    Also, for engine stuff in general Handmade Hero has been a great resource and inspiration. Though this might be more low-level than you're interested in.

  17. Posted

    Inspired by boredom, Handmade Hero, and an idea for a game, I've put on my programming pants and got to work.

     

    I'll probably end up using the project more as a way to learn OpenGL and other engine stuff, because I'm pretty sure my design ideas are too ambitious, but I'm alright with that. To that end, I've decided to code as much of the engine as I can from scratch in C++.

     

    My first major goal is to make a procedurally-generated world with terrain similar to the original Roller Coaster Tycoon. And after several hours of reading and coding, I'm pretty blown away by my progress:

     

    sib18aj.png

     

    I can smell the money from here!

  18. Posted

    How do you ask for a job without asking for a job?

     

    I graduated in May with a CS degree and am starting to look for jobs. Turns out my brother's girlfriend's friend's boyfriend works at a company and location where I REALLY want to work, and I got his email through that chain.

     

    How are you supposed to use a contact like this? I completely don't understand networking. I don't want to just ask him to get me an interview, nor do I think that would work anyhow. And it's not like I'm an old friend hoping to chat. 

     

    Anyway, any advice would be great.

  19. Posted

    Calf. If you rerun with euro coins what happens? We have 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50c and 1 and 2 euro if you so wish.

     

    Fortunately, I was able to drastically speed up the program (at the cost of quite a bit of memory - 64 bits per cent of desired total). My results with those denominations are:

      €10 -           321335886

     €100 -    1133873304647601

    €1000 - 2575420646487095281

     

    Unfortunately, however, at €10000 the result overflows an unsigned 64-bit integer and becomes uninterpretable. The values grow much more quickly with the increased number of denominations to choose from. Also, I'm not able to discern any pattern in those results anyway.

     

     

    If you noodle on this a bit more, you should submit it to the On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

     

    Cool, I'll check that out. I may modify the program to use larger integers, to see how much further the original pattern continues, but I haven't done that before so I don't know how long it would take.

     

    Also, you can get the desired result by finding the Maclaurin series for 1/((1-x)(1-x^5)(1-x^10)(1-x^25)), then finding the coefficient for the term with the power of desired cents. E.g. for $10, you find the coefficient of the x^1000 term. However, my math skills are so pathetically rusty at this point that I doubt any further investigation in this direction will be fruitful.

  20. Posted

    If the program I wrote is correct (I think it is), the number of ways to make change, using only pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters is as follows:

     

        $10 -             142511

       $100 -          134235101

      $1000 -       133423351001

     $10000 -    133342333510001

    $100000 - 133334233335100001

     

    I have never seen this numerical behavior before (the expanding sections of 3, 3, and 0), and thought it was interesting. The largest result took several minutes to run, so I don't know how long it continues. I don't know if this has been described before, or if it has any significance, but I thought it was cool.

  21. Posted

    Another point re: Cuphead's visual style worth considering is that there's a rather ugly history associated with that style of animation. I don't have a horse in that race but it's a perspective I think is interesting.

     

    Am I insane or is that article is overreaching in the extreme? It reads like guilt by free-association...

     

    The jazzy score with the almost tribal undertones calls to mind not only the savage portrayal of men of the African diaspora, but also the savage sexualization of its women.

     

    What are "almost tribal undertones"? Brass instruments? And "calls to mind" are such weasel words here. I genuinely see no way to get from the trailer music to the second part of that sentence without motivated reasoning.

     

    This seems to line up well with all of the temptations that Cuphead and Mugman find themselves faced with gambling, speakeasies, liquor, and sirens, all things reminiscent of African American culture and the Harlem Renaissance.

     

    This is baffling to me. Are gambling and liquor uniquely reminiscent of African American culture and the Harlem Renaissance? And sirens? The creatures from Greek mythology? The implication here seems to be (I think) that the designers are drawing upon African American stereotypes to add to some sense of the characters' peril. But the author can't seem to pin down any actual evidence of that:

     

    And while the siren that we see at the end of the trailer is not African American, she is there to serve as a obstruction to reaching their goal.

    I kept waiting for the next boss to be a thick-lipped, black-faced, spittle-dripping caricature of an African American man (probably holding aloft a terrified, screaming, blonde, Caucasian woman just to show what a threat he actually was).

    (Note: no such boss ever materializes).

     

    The one bit of actual textual evidence mentioned, the change in character design for the Devil from the 2014 to 2015 trailers, appears to me to be factually incorrect, or at least unsupported. In the

    , it seems to me that the Devil character is the one that appears at 0:11, and the bat character from 0:15 is something different. It looks to me like the Devil character from the
    is only a slight modification of the 2014 version, with fur added. So it looks like the author just imagined the character design change scenario.

     

    The conclusion of the piece is that

    The game threatens to draw upon racist caricatures to inform the narrative and give players a series of racism infused bosses and obstructions to justice to properly hate.

     

    Sure. It is 100% possible that this could happen. And if it does, I'll happily join in to condemn the stupid artistic choices. But I kinda feel like you're obligated to dig up some evidence that's a little less flimsy than what was presented in the article before declaring that Cuphead categorically "isn't the place" to use the art style.

  22. Posted

    Am I the only one mostly disinterested in Cuphead? It accurately captures the uninspired character designs and stilted animation of animation in the late 1910s and 1920s while eschewing the progress made in the, but why? There's a reason everyone abandoned that ugly movement. I suppose they could have had nicer characters like the cuteness of Felix but they didn't. I guess Sonic the Hedgehog stole his design already. I don't know, never enjoyed a Fleischer cartoon I guess.

     

    Like even if they wanted to use the bland rounded 1920s aesthetic, they could have used the current principles developed in 1930s and 1940s and it would have looked so much better, since almost no one in the audience is going to tell the difference anyway. Just looking at that animation feels bad even though it's nearly 100% accurate, except it probably shouldn't be in color. I wish they had gone the Shovel Knight route while keeping the general aesthetic accurate, it's built upon to be more palatable past the inherent limitations.

     

    Oh well, I guess there's some pointless negativity to this thread.

     

     

    Cuphead is very much imitating the movement of the Flesicher short, and quite well. But the problem with the movement there is there's no anticipation or follow through in anyone's movements and no acceleration or deceleration for the most part. Characters often just stop in the middle of movements for a few frames, probably because they were being drawn exclusively from pose to pose without much overlapping action, like the ears of the dog character in the short always stopping at the exact time he stops moving. I would guess it was just finicky to keep drawing and testing all of that stuff as equipment sounded like the biggest hassle in the 20s. This one lands right on 1930 which for the rest of the  decade, the whole industry was transitioning to smoother more natural movement through lots of experimentation such as getting appropriate speeds right, like slow and flowing for more beautiful cartoons and quick and violent for gag cartoons. 1920s stuff just kind of floated around for the most part.

     

    [...]

     

    I also watched a lot of the assets in the newer Cuphead trailer and the characters move much more in line with modern animation principles than the complete throwback that was shown in the trailer from last year.

     

    There's a reason the film industry moved beyond traditional black & white cameras and stopped having their actors smoke so much on screen, but the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies at least in part because of how its loving adoption of old style and technique suggested such a strong artistic vision. I think you'd have reason for dismay if it looked like a significant number of studios were going to be adopting the same style any time soon, but based on how much work the game has apparently taken, I don't think you have much to worry about there. 

     

    Regarding your actual criticisms of anticipation/follow-through/acceleration, I have to say that to someone more or less completely ignorant of animation techniques (i.e. me, and I self-servingly assume many others), your objections seem almost entirely like inside baseball, especially in a game where cup people fire finger guns at sentient vegetables. And given how so many games seem to me to have virtually no artistic intent, and instead slot into a small number of familiar styles, this game comes as such an immense breath of fresh air that its uniqueness for me outweighs a hundred fold any technical criticisms of the animation. Pretty much the only thing that could get me down on the game at this point is if it ends up feeling really clunky or something.

     

    For me, the game just screams originality and style: the intertitles, the finger guns, the original jazz, the drone bees with ties and briefcases, its economy with exposition (as compared to something like the FF7 remake trailer, for example). I've watched the trailer easily 20 times and find more to like about it every time.

    In this case, I think utter ignorance (of the history of animation) truly is bliss.

  25. Posted

    I'd say vagueness and loquaciousness: it uses very big words to say very, very little.

     

    But that's only part of it. It's a mood setter, but what mood is it setting, exactly? You don't fondly remember a foreboding sky; the only real statement it's making is that there's a something coming back but we're explicitly told that we're not supposed to have an emotion about that; describing a memory as burning in the heart is just weird.

     

    It is a word salad.

     

    Ya I pretty much agree with that. It's 100% unearned seriousness. They are the words of someone deeply moved by some series of events, and they're supposed to feel foreboding. But I have literally no idea what they're talking about.

    Don't tell me your story is interesting, tell me your story and I'll decide for myself if it's interesting. It feels like they're saying: "you better already be on board with whatever it is we're going to be doing, because we sure as hell aren't going to make any effort to try to get you interested." 

     

    The intro to Dark Souls is that kind of cheesy garbage (though not quite to this level), but I like most of the character dialogue. It fits the game somehow.

     

    Yep, I agree there. I only noticed this sort of thing in a few places, never enough to ruin the experience for me.