clyde

Amateur Game Making Night

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iTween i hear is pretty good, but we went with GoKit based on performance comparisons, and I'm pretty happy with it.

 

On Armello we've been running into some issues with GoKit performance and so are moving to LeanTween... I haven't actually used LT before, but the other programming dude says it pretty good. It probably won't matter unless you're doing heaps of tweens (or need to set up a big chains on a single frame) though.

 

Also, I didn't post in this thread about my next side project after SUCKER, but I made a music voxel game with a local artist called FUTUREVOXIMAGINARIUMDOTEXE which we put up on itch.io. I really wanted to post about it in here as we were working on it, but was dead tired after every work session basically - for some reason we decided to work at a breakneck speed to try to get it done. It was kinda an extended jam I guess.

 

futurevox_3.png?format=740w

 

It's very based around music which I haven't really done before; it was pretty cool to get all this different stuff synced up to the beat. We did pretty much all of the animating-linked-to-music stuff either off the RMS value of the song as it's playing (basically the loudness) or off a BPM timer that we ran along-side the song, with a hand-tweaked starting offset.

 

(I tried to make a gif of the way this works but failed miserably. Will try to get some gifs going of how the game works at some point though.)

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Thanks for the LeanTween recommendation, I'll have to check it out (even though I'm not doing any heavy tweening at all..)

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Man, you work on Armello? I must have missed that. I backed the crap out of that one :)

 

Haha thanks! Yeah I'm doing lead programming and a bit of design on it... it's a pretty cool project!

 

And no probs BigJKO :) When I've played around with it a bit I'll confirm whether it's as fully featured/usable as GoKit.

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I tried to slow it down, but because I'm using rigidbody.AddForce() I ended up having to tune the masses of all the blocks and stuff like that. I guess I ended up making it faster. I typically play with an analog-stick so I rarely notice it being too fast since I can apply small amounts of force. I'm interested in playing with that some more so that you can do as much with the keys.

As far as custom audioclips, that would be awesome. I'm not sure what would be involved, but I'll look into it. Maybe there is an established way for people to put their own audioclips in Unity games. If nothing else, you know the developer so he can just put them in for you. I'd also be fine with sending you the project file if you want to do it yourself. I'm leaving town for the weekend though, so any of that would not happen until next week.

 

Oh I didn't see this before, I'm the worst. I'm pretty sure you could clamp the rigidbody.velocity value to keep from moving too fast.

And that backend gamedev dealing does also sound fun, I'll be lazing around the house on Sunday so I could take you up on the offer then.

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Oh I didn't see this before, I'm the worst. I'm pretty sure you could clamp the rigidbody.velocity value to keep from moving too fast.

This is a great idea. It hadn't occurred to me that I could do that.

 

And that backend gamedev dealing does also sound fun, I'll be lazing around the house on Sunday so I could take you up on the offer then.

Here is the project folder.

https://db.tt/OSI8JYgh

 

Tell me if it doesn't work or you need help understanding how something is organized.

You have permission to do anything you want with it. That goes for anyone who reads this and wants to play around with it.

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This probably belongs in the unity tips thread but o well:

Regarding the whole "letting people add their own sounds thing", the "Streaming Assets" folder may hold the answers you seek.

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I realized the other day that if you wanna get those sweet smoothing animations in Unity, you can use an AnimationCurve to do it, which also then means you can change the curves at run time. Pretty nifty.

 

Super sloppy copy + paste from my project:

 

public AnimationCurve animCurve;

void Update(){

    newPosition = Mathf.Lerp(position, targetPosition, GetMoveFromCurve(currTime, totalTime));

}

float GetMoveFromCurve(float time, float endtime)
{
    return animCurve.Evaluate(time/endtime);
}

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I'd like make the Unity project-file an optional download on Musical stacks's itch.io page. I plan to continue updating it, but I like the idea of allowing people to use the project-file to branch off in their own direction if they want.

I'm thinking that I would just zip the project-file up and place it on the page as a "mod-distribution" or something. I'll go out of my way to make sure it doesn't look like a game-download and I'll be extraordinarily clear that they can use the file for anything they want. Is there anything else I should consider when doing this?

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I'm thinking that I would just zip the project-file up and place it on the page as a "mod-distribution" or something. I'll go out of my way to make sure it doesn't look like a game-download and I'll be extraordinarily clear that they can use the file for anything they want. Is there anything else I should consider when doing this?

 

I have no idea if it's actually necessary, but you might want to pick an existing license rather than just having a comment in your code? I know that if I was downloading the source and intending to modify/distribute it in some way, I'd feel more comfortable about it if there was a specific license rather than just a comment in the code. The two super open, go-hog-wild ones I'm familiar with are Creative Commons 0 and the Do What The Fuck You Want to Public License.

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I have no idea if it's actually necessary, but you might want to pick an existing license rather than just having a comment in your code? I know that if I was downloading the source and intending to modify/distribute it in some way, I'd feel more comfortable about it if there was a specific license rather than just a comment in the code. The two super open, go-hog-wild ones I'm familiar with are Creative Commons 0 and the Do What The Fuck You Want to Public License.

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.

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Excited to be participating in a jam this weekend! I've got an idea that I wanna share/open up for suggestions:

It's basically bird luftrausers where you can fight other birds and catch fish.

It takes place at a lake where weird species of animal have been isolated. You control a species of bird that can only lay one egg but can mate with any bird and thus must survive long enough to find a mate and continue your line. You have specific traits that govern how you perform while flying, scavenging, hunting, and mating, such as wingspan, beak length, color, and size. The goal of the game is to survive a year and make it to spring so you can mate with another bird, producing a unique but evolutionary set of traits. You can control how the species develops by choosing your mate every year.

I really want to play with the kinds of polymorphism afforded by an ECS in gameplay. It's all super vague and kind of weird but I think it's within my skill level...I hope.

I've kind of cheated by setting up a little bit of code I made earlier, stuff like the ECS, the physics system, the ui system. All that needs to be done at this point is the art, a buncha gameplay code, and AI steering behavior stuff. Gonna post here as it progresses.

First project in Haxe/Luxe!

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I had a pretty useful realization this morning. In the projects that I devote significant time to, I get to a place where I feel the need to allow the player to change all types of values. This is actually how I find myself enjoying the games. For example, choosing how many notes and available pitches will be in a sequencer. But menu systems aren't any fun to make and I don't like what they do to my games. 

Another challenge is that my games lack breadth of interaction. You might be able to instantiate objects and move around, but that's typically it. This morning I realized that the two problems should be solving each other. I'm going to try really hard to make it so that players adjust values through gameplay.

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That kind of makes me think of a Valve doc I read all about the L4D AI director, which is of course basically keeping track of a huge number of variables from gameplay, drawing conclusions from them (each player's stress level as a percentage, for instance, based on health, ammo, proximity to rest of team, how many people are left, how long it's been since they've found anything, what weapon they've got, how far through the level they are, number of zombies in FOV, a ton of stuff like that) and changing where the game goes from there. I wish more games had as much going on invisibly in the background, because I feel like it massively subtracts from the experience of a lot of games for me when information like that is exposed in some way, especially through menu systems.

 

For instance, for me, Skyrim would be a much much better game if you just made all attribution of skill points and perks automatic based on how you play (to some extent it already does this) and just never shows you that information, instead of saying "+1 athletics" when you jump 50 times or whatever. So the effect would be, you start playing and you suck at archery, but your skill level in the game (and the variables that affects) change the more you do it, so you feel like you're just organically getting better at archery and ideally probably can't even tell if the game is helping you do it.

 

I guess I'm feeling rambly today

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That is precisely what I wish more games did. I think it would feel like an unpopular choice because people like the feedback of being told they're level X in archery, and also to some people that complicates a game or males it harder when the necessary information for min maxing is obscured. But overall I think games going that way would be better, less informed players have to think and consider more instead of constant feedback that's more about making them feel good than any informing.

I'd like to see how you tackle this Clyde, and now I want to bear it in mind going forward... I guess I could mention I'm starting Rami Ismails game a week challenge. I'll occasionally post intermittent updates/links to my tumblr for it but expect a frequent feed of broken game prototypes.

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My current plan to is write a bunch of scripts that will look for different types of trigger-events in the physical interactions of the gameObjects (things like collisions with each other and collisions with other areas, maybe speed from a hit). I'll also continue to write get/set methods for most of the interesting values. Basically I'm going to try and make it easy to mix and match them until I see combinations that are either super fun or intuitive.

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I wanted to make an HTML5 game, thinking that the Unity-plugin requirement might be too large of a barrier for friends and family who are not computer-savy. That led me to try the demo of ClickTeam Fusion 2.5 which is a visual scripting language game thing. I made it through the first tutorial, but it wasn't my thing because I've become accustomed to text-scripting. Still, there were some things I appreciated about ClickTeam Fusion 2.5 (or atleast the Breakout-clone tutorial). I decided that I need to start managing a permanent library of sounds and sprites for use in multiple games. I also saw great benefits in the my expected scope when working in that engine. Still, I would rather work in Unity, so I tried to design a top-down, collision-based template for use in games similar to those in 50 Short Games.  I got the basics of that operational. Then it came to the text-display system and I was like "Why not just use my own voice work instead?" I wanted it to be flexible though, so I decided that I would chop up .wav files by their individual words so that I could just reuse them (remember how I'm trying to start and maintain a library of sounds?). I thought I should record everything around 110 hrtz so that I could manipulate pitches consistently, but now I think that is probably not a good idea. Anyway, I now have a top-down game template and a spoken-word component as a prefab that I can just put on any object with a trigger-collider. Then I can just drag and drop individual .wav files of words into the spoken-word component's public array in the inspector. This sounds simple, but there is something surreal about dragging words that haven't been heard together onto a gameObject and then hearing them together for the first time. My template feels pretty much complete so that now I can actually start to make something intentional, but I had to share the result because it is oddly endearing and strangely cute.

https://db.tt/ViXV9XWn

 

If anyone would find this template fun to play with, I'll put up the project file.

https://db.tt/gSU7q6f2

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I made a menu for spacething! It works and everything

 

15955798406_3c56f76a9f_b.jpg

 

God damnit, stop making me want to try out UE4! That's gorgeous!

 

EDIT: Quoted your post, because I felt like an ass that my post was on a new page AWAY from your gorgeous menu screen.

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That is Futura. Thanks!

 

The asteroids float past the ship continuously, the ship appears to spin very slowly (star/sun position etc) and the monitor plays the awesome Impromptu logo video on loop.

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I'm getting a lot out of considering what my game-making goal will be for 2015. I've been paring it down and refining it for a few days. Tommorow my wife and I are going to take a walk and discuss our goals for further refinement. I perform better with goals that have a good balance between specificity and flexibility. It's exceedingly dorky how excited I am about stating a clearly defined goal of something I really want to accomplish in 2015.

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That's just a great idea in general, especially if you'll be doing the programming.  I was actually planning on sitting down and doing something similar for my own projects over the next year as opposed to just working on them when I find time as I do today.

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